A Love Letter to Whiskey

“I could tell he didn’t want to talk about the future anymore, and in a way I didn’t blame him. Up until that point in our lives, high school had been our biggest and best experience. It was hard to imagine a future where the things that mattered to us then would only be a distant memory.”

This quote comes while B and Jamie are first opening up to one another and discussing their plans for college and afterward. It emphasizes B and Jamie’s youth and naivety early in their relationship, as well as the fact that they have their whole lives ahead of them. Yet even as they begin to develop other concerns, their relationship still matters.

“I shook my head, dropping my eyes to the housing packet again while my stomach did backflips. Jamie Shaw went to the same college as me. I didn’t know whether to feel lucky or cursed, and the ache in my chest wasn’t helping me decide. I’d avoided him since that night on the beach, letting him go, letting the idea of him go. He was Jenna’s, and then he was gone—end of story.”

B’s realization that she and Jamie will be attending the same college for the next three years shows her reluctance to admit her feelings for Jamie, whom she still views as someone who would be bad for her. Jamie’s presence adds a lot of complication to B’s life, as she can no longer classify him as either “Jenna’s” or “gone.”

“What I loved most about Ethan was how much he believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. He challenged me to ask myself what I wanted out of my life, and no one had really made me think about it before I met him. He didn’t just see the girl in his car tonight, he saw the woman she would become in ten years. I was a vision to him, and he was a comfort to me.”

B’s description of Ethan highlights a characteristic that she lacks that relates to the theme of The Importance of Accountability. Not only is she uncertain of where she is going, but she also doesn’t have the confidence to think that her decisions are worthwhile. This leads to major struggles in her relationship with Jamie, as she constantly thinks that he is better off without her.

“I always loved that, the first sight of him, the first hit. It was a little jarring, like a slight burn, but the aftertaste was smooth, welcoming, like an old friend calling me home.”

An extended whiskey metaphor marks B’s first sight of Jamie in a year. Here, she uses imagery that focuses on the sensory characteristics of the drink to suggest both the pleasure and the pain of the relationship. B also describes whiskey (and Jamie) as something that reminds her of home—something she does throughout the novel.

“‘I read romance because it’s fun to fall in love. And with romance books, I get to do it over and over. I get to be different types of lovers, I get to feel the heartbreak of love and the successes. Love is the most powerful and real emotion we feel, and I think it’s sort of magical that we can experience some of the greatest loves of all time through books.’ 

‘Except they’re not real.’”

B and Jamie’s exchange about romance novels highlights B’s romantic tendencies and foreshadows the love she and Jamie experience in the novel. Conversely, Jamie’s skepticism foreshadows the hardships they will have to deal with in their relationship; in noting that the love stories B is drawn to aren’t real, he subtly alludes to her struggles with Learning to Accept Love in real life.

“Could we be friends? Could we hang out together like we did in high school now that we had kissed, now that we had crossed that faint line that had always been drawn between us? I wasn’t sure, though the bigger part of me thought I probably didn’t want to know the answer.”

B asks herself this question after Jamie asks to be friends when they kiss for the first time. Her reluctance to answer—or even to know the answer—shows that she does not want to accept the reality of the situation. She fears that their feelings for one another make friendship impossible, but she also believes that she cannot be in a romantic relationship with Jamie, both because she is already in a relationship and because she does not think that he will be good for her.

“I still remembered that day, the feel of it, the pain. It was as if I was a ball of yarn, and that was the day I’d become completely unraveled, my string frayed and worn. Over the past three years, I’d slowly pulled myself together, forming the same ball of yarn I’d been before yet one that was wound differently. I was almost okay again. Almost.”

B thinks this about the day that she sees Jamie for the first time in three years. She emphasizes just how much she has changed in her grieving process—and without Jamie—yet when she sees Jamie, B’s feelings for him immediately return with full force and change the course of her life. The yarn simile, like the whiskey symbolism, frames Jamie’s presence as inevitably disruptive or harmful.

“Years had passed, there were still words left unsaid, but all that mattered right then and there was that we were together. I felt it, I knew he did, too. It was a night meant for us, and I had no intentions of wasting it.”

This quote shows how B feels about reuniting with Jamie after pushing him away for so long; it also reveals her assumption that Jamie feels the same. Despite their tumultuous past, the two decide to take advantage of the one night they have together. However, ignoring their past and their future together will prove disastrous to their relationship.

“Eventually, the calls and texts became fewer and fewer, and I guess I kind of knew that would happen. It was my fault, really—I was the one who asked for the distance, the one who kept it in place, and even though I missed him the more he pulled away, I filled the space he left with more work instead of working to keep him as the occupant.”

B has started her internship in Pittsburgh after telling Jamie that she didn’t want to put a label on her relationship. The passage marks a rare moment of B taking accountability for how their relationship has changed. Nevertheless, B tries to ignore the changes in their relationship, burying herself in work as a distraction despite knowing that Jamie is waiting for her and thus revealing her ongoing struggles with committed relationships.

“But now, you’re telling me it’s still not there—it’s still not the right time. You couldn’t be with me when you were broken, and now that you’re standing on your own, you still can’t be with me. So if I can’t have you at your worst, and I can’t have you at your best, then when do I get you, B? When does the timing line up for you to stop fighting what we have between us and just let me in?”

Jamie tells B this after she reveals that she got a job and will be staying in Pittsburgh. After she pushed him away for three years while she was grieving, Jamie has had enough of waiting and addresses a key problem in their relationship: B’s tendency to blame their struggles on The Influence of Timing rather than on her own decisions and fears.

“There was something both freeing and absolutely suffocating about working hard and being rewarded. On the one hand, I was proud of myself. I’d figured out what I wanted in life, what I was good at, and I was making the right moves to set up a solid foundation for my career. Nothing made me happier than staying late at the office or coming in on a weekend if I saw the payout on the other end.”

This quote shows how B both thrives and suffers just after she ends things with Jamie. She uses work as a distraction, and though she derives pride from it, she feels stifled depending on work alone. Her place at Rye (a kind of whiskey) Publishing shows how she trades one “addiction” for another.

“He knows you’re not going to marry him and move back home right away. He knows you’re not ready to have kids. It doesn’t matter. He wants you, B. And even though you’re trying to prove you don’t feel the same for some stupid reason, we both know you do. Stop acting like not wanting him makes you strong. There’s more courage in admitting you love someone and fighting for them than letting them go because it hurts less.”

Jenna tells this to B after B’s breakup with Jamie, echoing some of the points that Jamie made in their last phone call. She explains what B cannot see: that she doesn’t have to choose between work and Jamie. Her remark about the courage that love requires highlights that B’s own fears and insecurities are what are causing problems in the relationship.

“I realized that I loved him, I realized that he loved me, but that wasn’t enough. Because what I didn’t realize was that Jamie bruised my heart that first day we met, when he literally ran into me, and every time I’d seen him since then, it had been like jabbing that bruise with granite fingers. A self-inflicted wound. I liked the way it hurt with him, the way it stung, the way it wasn’t perfect—and so did he. But I was done hurting myself. I was done hurting him, too.”

Returning to Florida and discovering that Jamie is engaged solidifies B’s sense that Jamie only brings harm to her life. She takes some accountability when she calls their relationship a “self-inflicted wound,” deciding that she must forget about Jamie because all they do is hurt one another. However, her basic struggle to accept love remains unchanged.

“To some, whiskey is a crutch. It’s a drug, it leads to addiction, it dulls the senses and damages the mind. To others, whiskey is medicine. A shot of bourbon can chase away what ails you, whether it be a sore throat or a broken heart. That night, I realized that maybe I was Jamie’s whiskey, too—and maybe we existed in both realities. Maybe we were bad for each other, but maybe we were good, too. As much as I hurt Jamie, as much as he hurt me, we were there for each other always—without hesitation, without expectation. We were each other’s drug as much as we were each other’s medicine. And in reality, they weren’t really that different at all.”

This is the first time that B considers that Jamie could be good for her, and she for him. Her elaboration on the whiskey symbolism reveals a newly nuanced view of their relationship; she can see the complexities of their dynamic but also why they keep wanting to be together, beyond mere “addiction.” This reframing eventually helps B accept her feelings for Jamie.

“I’d waited too long for Whiskey, and I refused to let him hold that power over me any longer. And you know what? It actually worked. For the first time in my life, and with more pain and time than I’d hoped or even thought I could survive, I finally let him go. […] I was clean. I’d moved on. I was happy. I was free.”

B decides to let Jamie go once and for all after he doesn’t return her calls after the wedding. In cutting Jamie off, B concludes that her “addiction” to him has been holding her back, highlighting her continued binary thinking about their relationship. By focusing on the “power” he held over her, B shifts the responsibility for her choices onto something beyond her control.

“In fact, I was so confident in my ability to not think about Jamie that I’d decided to drink for the first time in over a year. Part of my twelve-step program was giving up literal drinking, too. Every time I drank, I thought of Jamie. I wanted to call him or dwell on his memory. So, I gave up alcohol altogether—the literal and figurative versions, both.”

This quote highlights the symbolic intertwining of “the literal and figurative versions” of whiskey, alcohol, and addiction. B’s conviction that she needs to give up literal alcohol to give up Jamie emphasizes just how much she has bought into this parallel. Her use of a 12-step program, conventionally associated with alcohol addiction, to recover from her feelings for Jamie underscores this point.

“‘What was I supposed to do, Jamie?’ […] 

‘You were supposed to wait.’ 

‘For two years?’ 

‘Yes!’ Jamie stepped closer then and I flinched back. That reaction seemed to stun him, and he paused. ‘For as long as I needed.’”

This exchange between B and Jamie comes just after Jamie confronts her with the wedding invitation. Though B is stunned that he expected her to wait for him without reassurance and through years of silence, this is exactly what Jamie did both in college and while she was starting out in Pittsburgh. This quote shows the uneven nature of the relationship, in which Jamie has made sacrifices that never even occurred to B.

“You know, they say that Bill Wilson asked for whiskey as his dying wish. The man was dying, at the end of the line, and he wanted the one vice he’d been fighting all his life. Even the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous wanted whiskey on his deathbed.”

B thinks this when Jamie visits her as she is packing up to move in with her fiancé. The anecdote reveals that though she feels like she has conquered her “addiction,” she still wants the one thing she has always craved. B has bigger issues to focus on at this moment, yet her thoughts always turn to Jamie.

“‘And now, I risked everything I have to be with you last night, because I literally can’t say no to you.’ I shook violently then. ‘I cheated on a man who didn’t deserve it, on a man who wants to spend his life with me, on a man I love, all because of my inability to let you go.’ I cried, tears streaming freely, hot and scarring down my cheeks. ‘Your love is poisoning me, Jamie!’”

B tells Jamie this the morning after they sleep together while packing up her apartment. The full force of how B’s relationship with Jamie impacts others becomes clear to her. Her remark that Jamie’s “love is poisoning [her]” emphasizes just how much she believes that their relationship itself—not the choices they have made surrounding it—is harmful.

“I had become so numb since my wedding day, so completely void of emotion. Jenna was worried about me, she wanted me to go talk to someone, and my mom was slowly shifting over to her side, too. I guessed I couldn’t really blame them, not when I had self-destructed yet again, ending my marriage after less than five months. The truth was after Jamie left, I’d never been the same. I’d never recovered. I couldn’t love Brad because I only had room to love Jamie, and I couldn’t love Jamie because it hurt to do so. It was a mess, and I didn’t know how to clean it, so I just walked away from it.”

The numbness that B describes shows just how much Jamie was a part of her life; leaving him for good has fundamentally changed her. It also shows that B is beginning to acknowledge how she “self-destructs” when times get hard in her life.

“‘It’s just, look at the path of destruction we’ve laid. He cheated, I cheated…twice.’ I cringed with the admission. ‘We’ve hurt others around us, and we’ve never really been together. It’s always been about not being able to have each other. What if it’s just about wanting what we can’t have? What if that’s all part of the allure? It just feels wrong, and in the eyes of most sane people, it is. We’re built on lust and bad decisions.’”

In talking to Jenna, B addresses a fear that she alludes to subtly throughout the novel: that she and Jamie only want what they can’t have, caring more about the drama of their relationship than each other. B’s admission reveals her insecurity; she feels undeserving of any happiness with Jamie in part because of what she has done to others but also because she has always felt tainted by the circumstances of her conception.

“‘No, you and Jamie never had it easy. And yes, you hurt a lot of people along the way. But at the end of the day, it’s your life, B. You have to live with it, no one else. So you can’t think about the people around you, how you’ve hurt them or what they think of you. It’s up to you to be happy because no one else is going to do it for you.’ She smiled then, blue eyes bright in my dim bathroom. ‘Whatever you choose, make sure it makes you happy.’”

This is Jenna’s response to the above quote. Often the voice of reason in the novel, Jenna tells B what she has been doubting all along: that she deserves love and happiness regardless of her past. While B earlier described this as “selfish,” Jenna notes that she is allowed to be selfish about her own love life, once again highlighting the insecurity that drives much of B’s behavior.

“I know I’ve put you, as a reader, through a lot. Maybe through too much. I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me right now, because the truth is there are more than a few times in my life where I made the wrong decision. I am flawed, and though I know it was hard to read, I’m not sorry for telling the truth. I’m not ashamed of my path. In a way, I think it’s about figuring out who we are through the mistakes we make. I know who I am. And I know who I need. So, Whiskey, if you’re reading this, I hope now you understand. We’ve always blamed timing, but the timing has always been right—we just never listened. Up until this point, I’ve never fought hard enough. But if you give me the chance, I’ll fight every single day of our lives together. I’ll go to battle for you, and I’ll win the war in the end.”

This is not the first time in the novel that B directly addresses the reader, but it is the first time she acknowledges that Jamie is the in-text reader. Here, she finally takes accountability for her choices and admits that blaming timing was wrong. Just as Jamie has told B that he will put effort into their relationship, B makes the same promise to make their relationship a priority.