Rating: ****
Tags: Emotional Problems of Teenagers, Performing Arts, Love & Romance, Emotions & Feelings, Emotional Problems, Juvenile Fiction, New York (N.Y.), Social Issues, Fiction, United States, Interpersonal relations, Musicians, Music, General, Rock Music, Violoncello, People & Places, Genres & Styles, Interpersonal Relations in Adolescence, Death & Dying, Lang:en
Summary
Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2011:
In the three years since the tragic accident Mia barely
survived in
If I Stay, she and high school ex-boyfriend Adam
have lived separate lives on opposite coasts. But then Adam,
now the dissatisfied front man of popular LA-based band
Collateral Damage, stops over in New York City for one night
before kicking off the European leg of his tour. It happens
to be the same evening that Mia, now well on her way to
becoming a renowned cellist, is performing at Carnegie Hall.
Adam buys a ticket, planning to slip in and out, but Mia
spots him and for the first time in years they’re
face-to-face with each other and their shared past. Over the
course of one evening, as Adam and Mia traverse the
city’s streets, they relive the four days Mia spent in
the intensive care unit as well as her departure to Juilliard
and from the life she knew. Emotionally raw and incredibly
moving, Gayle Forman again showcases her considerable talent
for drawing complex characters who face impossible decisions
and then bear the consequences. Equally as compelling as
If I Stay,
Where She Went is powerful, heartbreaking, and
everything fans of Mia, Adam, and Forman could hope for.
--Jessica Schein
Lauren Oliver and Gayle Forman: Author
One-on-One
Lauren Oliver is the author of
Delirium and
Before I Fall. A graduate of the University of
Chicago and the MFA program at New York University, Lauren is
a full-time writer and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Recently
she sat down with Gayle Forman to discuss their work. Read
the resulting interview below, or turn the tables to see what
happened when Gayle interviewed Lauren.
From Lauren Oliver: I’ve had a writer’s
crush on Gayle Forman ever since I read an early copy of
If I Stay. It’s a shattering and ultimately
life-affirming book, and I was completely transported by the
lyricism of Gayle’s prose. Like the music it often
references, her writing seems to float gracefully over and
around its themes of life and choice and love—always
love. We’ve been trying to grab coffee in our
neighborhood for over a year (and have even run into each
other on the street outside the local grocery store).
Finally, on the eve of the publication of
Where She Went (April 5, 2011), the gorgeous
follow-up to
If I Stay, we found time to grab lunch and gab.
Lauren: Had you always intended to write a
sequel to
If I Stay?
Gayle: No. I had no intention of writing a
sequel, in fact. But in the way that characters sometimes
behave, Adam and Mia had different ideas. I’d started
on a totally different book, actually, but they kept banging
on the drum in my head. And I felt I had left them in a
difficult place. At the end of
If I Stay, I knew they both they had a rough couple
of years ahead of them.
Lauren: How hard was it to switch POV and
enter Adam’s mind? To write from a boy’s
perspective?
Gayle: It wasn’t very hard, actually.
I knew the characters so well. I knew him so well. It was
actually strange to know a character so well without actually
having seen through his eyes. But in some ways, I could
understand Adam even more than I could understand Mia when I
started writing her. Mia was so different from me. One thing
that was hard: Adam was so angry at Mia, and so I was angry
at Mia, and that was disconcerting.
Lauren: Is there transference of emotions
when you write? Do you feel you become your characters in
some way?
Gayle: Totally. I let my sister read a draft
of
Where She Went and she said, “I forgive you
for being such a brat.” Because I’d been totally
channeling that anger.
If I Stay actually was kind of a beautiful place to
be, because Mia was surrounded by so much love.
Where She Went was a lot harder, even though nobody
dies.
Lauren: So Mia is quite different from you,
then?
Gayle: Completely. When I first started
writing her, and even though she inhabited me, I was like,
where are you coming from? I feel like when I talk,
I sound like a teenage valley girl. She seems so wise to me,
like such an old soul. I certainly can see elements of me,
but she definitely feels quite different and other. But I
loved her and felt very protective of her and I knew her very
well.
Lauren: How did you know that so much time
would have to elapse between books?
Gayle: I just knew that it had to be several
years later. The same that I knew that it couldn’t be
from Mia’s perspective. If we were in Mia’s head
again it would be another exploration of her grief. And it
had to be several years later for Adam and Mia to be ready
for change.
Lauren: What’s your writing
process?
Gayle: My process is sort of similar to
yours. I don’t start by writing the ending of the
books, but I know what the ending will be. Although with
If I Stay, I didn’t know what Mia’s
choice would be, though I knew the book would end by her
choosing. I totally get ideas in the shower too! I’m a firm
believer that the muse visits when you are
working—sitting at the computer—but the moments
when things have clicked have so often been in the shower.
And then I’ll be sitting at my computer in a towel, and
my apartment is freezing. We don’t have one of those
hot New York apartments. I should really invest in a
bathrobe.
Lauren: But you don’t outline?
Gayle: I do not outline. I love exploring
the twists and turns to get me to that ending, the unexpected
places.
Lauren: I really love what you said about
the muse visiting when you are working. So you’re
pretty much always working on a book?
Gayle: Yes. Momentum breeds momentum and
inertia breeds inertia. Even if something’s not
working, I’ll keep working, just to have something to
work on, if that makes sense. And sometimes one failed
project leads to another project that works. But you
can’t get to 60 mph from a full stop. It never happens
that something springs to life from nothing.
Lauren: Music is so important in both
If I Stay and
Where She Went. So it begs the question: do you
listen to music when you write?
Gayle: When I wrote
If I Stay, I listened to music the whole
time…There was this one song,
Falling Slowly, which I listened to every time I
began writing. It was a Pavlovian thing. I’d listen to
it, it would make me cry, and then I would start working. I
wrote
Where She Went in dead silence until about 3/4 of
the way through. The switch coincided with a point at which
Adam stops being estranged from music. He borrows an
ipod and after that moment, I started listening to music
again while I was writing.
Lauren: What are the themes that interest
you as a writer?
Gayle: Love, I think, in all of its
dimensions. The cost of unconditional love…what happens
in the absence of love. Love is what we all live and breathe
for.
Lauren: What was the proportion of fiction
versus real life in
If I Stay? What about
Where She Went? I know that
If I Stay was actually based off a real-life
event.
Gayle: In
If I Stay some of the characters were based on
people I knew and the premise was based on a real-life event.
Where She Went passed fully into the realm of
fiction. There’s a certain transcendence in the
aftermath of tragedy…you find something deeper in
yourself. But eventually all that passes, and you have to
simply get on with it. That was the germ of reality in
Where She Went. The gritty reality of grieving and
getting on with life.
Lauren: What’s the best and worst part
about publishing a follow-up novel to a super successful
book?
Gayle: I worry about letting people down, of
course. But mostly, I put the pressure on myself. I want
every book to be better than the one before.
Lauren: What about the best?
Gayle: I’m just so glad that we write
YA because we have such a broad and vocal readership. It's been three years since the devastating accident . . .
three years since Mia walked out of Adam's life forever. Now living on opposite coasts, Mia is Juilliard's rising
star and Adam is LA tabloid fodder, thanks to his new rock
star status and celebrity girlfriend. When Adam gets stuck in
New York by himself, chance brings the couple together again,
for one last night. As they explore the city that has become
Mia's home, Adam and Mia revisit the past and open their
hearts to the future - and each other. Told from Adam's point of view in the spare, lyrical prose
that defined
If I Stay,
Where She Went explores the devastation of grief,
the promise of new hope, and the flame of rekindled
romance.Amazon.com Review
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