The Girl in the Red Coat Article

(this article was written in 2021)

The Girl in the Red Coat by Rachel Louise Finn is a collection of poems written during the peak of adolescence, with commentary from the present.

The Girl in the Red Coat began as a cathartic love project for a younger version of myself. The book itself is a collection of poetry that I wrote between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, along with pages from my present-day self sprinkled throughout, reflecting and looking back on that girl and her life through the eyes of the grown up version of myself.

For many years, I had lost my voice. My creativity was dulled and practically gone. I thought it had died inside me forever and as time passed, I would mourn that part of myself, that girl. The Girl in the Red Coat who just wanted to write and who had all this creative energy. The years hadn’t been entirely good to her and she was sluggish from traumas which had taken away her voice.

I had tried many, many, many different types of therapy to help with the things I had gone through in life and nothing worked. Not until I was finally correctly diagnosed, listened to, and given different therapies like EMDR, that helped me reach deep down into myself to the root of my issues, and peel away the layers. I reconnected with many different parts of myself, one being The Girl in the Red Coat.

It was a spontaneous project. One day, I dug out my old poetry books and just decided that I wanted to get this done. It was really only for me, just to get the story out. I wanted to tell that girl’s story because it was what she deserved. What I deserved. The vicious bullying I had endured in my youth was just one of the many things that had pulled me apart and it was time for me to tell my truth. So I did. When I was working on it, I didn’t think about a target audience, I was just thinking about that girl I used to be and what she needed. To be heard.

Publishing the book started as a personal project for my own catharsis, so I would be able to hold it in my hands and see it, but ultimately it was a story that I felt was important that was shared, too. Not just for The Girl in the Red Coat herself, but for anybody who may be in the same place as her. The book, thanks to my present self adding pages and notes throughout, is a window into the future as much as it is a window into the past. I think that it shows, in the end, that no matter how hopeless you are feeling at one point in time, that things do change as the years pass by. That one day you could be the girl in the red coat, beaten down and broken, and then the next you could be something different, something better, something less painful.

I survived The Girl in the Red Coat, even when she didn’t think it was possible. If anybody were to take anything away from this book, it’s that if I can do that, so can you.