ROBIN BUCKLEY - biography  /  homelife

Robin's family tree began with a young Italian beauty called Franca de Felise, who immigrated to Clinton, Indiana in the late 19th century with her three brothers, all searching for a better life than the rural poverty they had grown up in and been orphaned by in Southern Italy. She went on to dazzle and marry an American carpenter, Thomas Buckley, for love a few years after arriving and the pair settled in a small town called Hawkins, where they had three children.

The eldest, Christian, grew up and made it his life mission to expand his father's business, branching out to Indianapolis where he met and fell for a young secretary in a passionate romance. However, when it came to the matter of marriage, her fiancé's insistence on being close to his mother in Hawkins following his father's death from ill health, as well as a looming pregnancy, meant that, for the young Susan Quincey, any high-flying career as a PA to a wealthy businessman in Manhattan or L.A was derailed. Almost overnight, she became a stay-at-home housewife, primarily responsible for looking after their new daughter Robin, born in March 1968.

Christian abandoned any plans to expand the family business so that he could remain close to his mother, and the family's finances took a hit. With his father gone, his focus was entirely on keeping the carpentry business afloat in Hawkins, which meant making certain sacrifices in order to keep his family fed. He could not be described as entirely absent from Robin's life (his mother had instilled the importance of family into him from a young age), but he would work long days and weekends throughout her childhood and the times he was around became very special to her. Despite these lengthy absences, Robin was always far closer to her father than she was to her mother.

Susan Buckley would never outwardly admit that she resented her daughter for robbing her of a successful career and life outside of the trappings of the mid-west, but the feeling would permeate nonetheless into the way Robin was treated. While at high school in Indianapolis, Susan had been top of her class, popular, and a cheerleader ---- completely normal, in other words. That made any initial signs that Robin was slow to develop as a toddler difficult to deal with: the story that she took six months longer to learn to walk than all of the other babies became one that was repeated over and over in Susan's social circle, and all of Robin's accomplishments (or lack thereof) as a child were constantly compared to her peers.

Robin's struggles with her coordination and social skills, as well as her loner attitude at elementary school, were issues that Susan believed could be solved by enrolling her daughter in extracurricular activities. Robin was given the choice of a sport and she picked the soccer team, which she continued to be a part of until her sophomore year of high school, and she was enrolled in marching band, where she learned the trumpet. She continued in marching band throughout her school career, giving her the comfortable label of band nerd that she embraced as her allotted place in the Hawkins High food chain. To deviate in any way from that label would be dangerous.

Robin's parents' marriage was not loveless, but it remained strained throughout her upbringing, with neither side willing to concede to divorce. Christian had been brought up to prioritise family as the most important thing in the whole world, and he would often be the one to concede and try to make things work between husband and wife, while Susan was too afraid of the reputational harm leaving her husband might cause. Instead, she sought to live vicariously through her daughter's achievements, which put extra strain on the relationship between mother and daughter as Robin never showed the desire nor aptitude (at least in her mind) for the kind of high-flying career that her mother had always wanted for herself.

Italian was spoken frequently whenever her uncles or nonna visited, and knowing that her family originated from Europe inspired Robin to take a particular interest in the learning of languages as a teenager, opting to teach herself French and Spanish with the aid of language tapes and dictionaries since the school system didn't offer the subjects as electives. As for her actual school subjects, the pressure from her mom ensured that Robin maintained a good enough GPA and grades across the board, although deep down she despised the rigid structure of the school system.

Expressing herself became a tightrope walk between keeping her mom happy and flying under the radar at school: where she couldn't physically escape from this town and its monotonous chokehold on all who lived here, movies and books took her to distant lands where things might be different. A disastrous attempt to audition for the school play made Robin resolve to stay in the background, helping out with set design behind the scenes. And then there was the matter of boyfriends, a topic of conversation so spectacularly uninteresting that Robin had to wonder whether she was simply wired differently to all of the other teenagers at Hawkins High.

As soon as she reached her sophomore year, Robin got her first job at the movie theatre in town, allowing her to somewhat alleviate her dad's financial concerns and begin raising the funds for what was her biggest rebellion to date: Operation Croissant. Her plan to run away to Europe didn't quite work out the way she planned, but she still plans to leave Hawkins one day --- even if it means enduring a whole summer working at Scoops Ahoy alongside Steve Harrington.