How I Live Now

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to war, violent death, disordered eating, self-harm, and incest.

Daisy is the protagonist and narrator of How I Live Now. Her father originally named her Elizabeth, but she claims that she was “more Daisy than Elizabeth from the word go” (1). She is 15, and Rosoff combines simplistic diction and syntax with nonstandard punctuation and capitalization in order to convey the “teenage” aspects of Daisy’s narrative voice and worldview. Whenever Daisy is nervous or encounters something unfamiliar, she defaults to a typically teenage, nonchalant indifference, drawing on her “years of Emergency Deadpan Practice” (96). Once Daisy arrives in England, however, Aunt Penn describes her as “Vivid” (15), which Daisy finds odd, but complimentary. Daisy’s thinness is noted many times throughout the book, underscoring her ongoing struggles with disordered eating.

Daisy’s relationship with food was originally disrupted because she believed that her stepmother, Davina, was poisoning her. Then, Daisy “discovered [she] liked the feeling of being hungry and the fact that it drove everyone stark raving mad and cost [her] father a fortune in shrinks” (43-44).