If He Had Been with Me
If He Had Been with Me
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Laura Nowlin on If He Had Been with Me
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A dream at the end of a very dark yearThe book was written in a single night’s burst, after nearly a year during which Nowlin had been unable to write at all. She had been hospitalized for clinical depression and was still in outpatient recovery when the dream came. She got up, wrote the first chapter, and went back to bed.
I dreamed that I was a girl whose friend had died. She knew that if he had just been with her, he would still be alive. I woke up shaken and depressed still, but also inspired. I got up, wrote the first chapter of IHHBWM and went back to bed. The next morning, I looked over what I had written and realized it was the best thing I had ever written. Writing that book gave me purpose again.
The dream did not arrive in a vacuum. Long before the depression, Nowlin had lost someone her own age, and that loss had left a particular question lodged in her: what happens when you run out of time to say what you feel.
I did have someone close to me who died young when I was in high school, so the issue of being true to your heart/emotions before it’s too late has always been important to me.
Readers have pressed her on whether the book is autobiographical, looking for a real Finny or a real Autumn. Her answer refuses both the denial and the confession.
If you took my life, and all the people in it, and put it in a blender, the mixed up result would be this book... There isn’t a one to one correlation to any person in my life, but much of the feelings and events have bits and pieces from reality.
The distinction matters for how the book reads. Its emotional specificity is not journalism about her own life; it is the residue of a life processed through fiction.
How she wrote it
A narrator who doesn’t see what the author always knewFinny, the boy at the center of the book’s central loss, presented a craft problem most writers would envy and then regret. Nowlin drew him from people she genuinely admired, including her husband, and went in expecting readers to reject him as too good to be true.
I’ve been lucky enough to know some truly deep down good people, (my husband among them) who I had thought if I wrote them into a story the reader would say ‘That’s not realistic, nobody is that good of a person.’ As I was writing this book I was surprised by how good I was able to make Finny while keeping him stay realistic to most readers.
The novel is narrated entirely by Autumn, whose blind spots are not failures of the writing but features of the design. When readers ask for a companion novel from Finny’s point of view, Nowlin’s response points back to the architecture already in place.
I always knew all of the things that Finny reveals to Autumn on that last night, and if you keep those things in mind as you reread, you’ll see lots of hints about Finny’s true feelings that Autumn doesn’t pick up on.
A reread of the novel is, by this logic, a different book from a first read: the same scenes, but with Finny’s withheld interior now visible in the gaps Autumn misses.
The book is set in Ferguson, Missouri, where Nowlin grew up. In July 2020 she added a public note to the novel’s Goodreads record, one that extended the characters’ lives past the page and into a specific political history.
Finny and Autumn would have attended protests in their hometown of Ferguson, MO... This is cannon [sic]; Finny would never have feelings for a girl would not say that BLACK LIVES MATTER.
Writing the book was not only a structural exercise. It was the mechanism by which she moved feelings out of herself and onto the page, a process she describes as constitutive of how she works generally.
I’m a very emotional person. I hang on to feelings for a long time too. It’s healing for me to be able to put all of these emotions down in writing, then I don’t have to carry them anymore.
The personal thread
Processing the past by writing it downBy 2016, Nowlin could name, in retrospect, what the act of writing her first novel had actually been. The distance of a few years made the purpose legible in a way it may not have been while she was doing it.
When I wrote my first novel, I was processing my past; mapping out what made me the person that I am. I was trying to tell the readers what I had learned, how hard those lessons had been.
Sharing the book with readers carried its own fear, separate from the fear of writing it. In a 2018 interview primarily about her second novel, she looked back at what releasing the first one had cost her.
My first novel, If He had Been with Me is a pretty standard coming-of-age love story, and sharing that book with the world was scary.
asexualagenda.wordpress.com, “Author Interview: Laura Nowlin | The Asexual Agenda”The fear is consistent with what the synthesis reveals about the book’s origins: something written in the aftermath of hospitalization, built from blended pieces of real people and real grief, is not easy to hand to strangers.
What she wants us to sit with
The glimmer you have to wait forThe conviction that friendship is the necessary foundation for romantic love appears in her work across both novels she had published by 2018. She stated it not as a theme she had assigned her characters but as something she holds personally.
I firmly believe friendship is the most important element of any romantic relationship.
asexualagenda.wordpress.com, “Author Interview: Laura Nowlin | The Asexual Agenda”Autumn and Finny’s story turns on the things left unsaid until it is too late. When Nowlin addressed readers directly in a 2013 interview, she did not soften what she expects life to eventually deliver, but she did insist on what comes after.
Someday, something horrible is going to happen to you, something that should have been easily preventable, something unfair and stupid and irreversible. When that happens you will think that nothing will ever be good again. But you have to hang on, because God — or some people might be more comfortable thinking of it as ‘Life’ or ‘the Universe’ and that’s fine by me — will eventually give you a glimmer of hope. Wait for that glimmer.
The book does not resolve into comfort, but this is what Nowlin wants readers to carry out of the wreckage of its ending: not that loss is surmountable, but that there is still something worth waiting for.