How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

Parents shouldn’t die before their kids get old, but they do. Parents shouldn’t beat their kids, and break their backs, or lock them in dog cages, or let them live in cardboard boxes by the 7-Eleven, but they do. I don’t know how to live now, knowing what I do, but I have to keep going.

You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. Because what other choice is there, really? You have to make friends with the dark.

No one story can encompass all the experiences and minute details of foster care and juvenile detention. Or even grief. In this book, I’ve tried to tell a story about lost kids. Kids who have found themselves without parents, or family, for a variety of reasons: death, addiction, neglect, abuse.