The First Time I Saw Him
The First Time I Saw Him
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Laura Dave on The First Time I Saw Him
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The ending she had always been writing towardThe sequel began as a private experiment, not a commitment. Before telling her editor or agent anything, she wrote 100 pages alone to find out whether the story was real. What she discovered in those pages was that the ending of the first book had never actually been the ending of the full story.
When I found my way to the ending of The Last Thing He Told Me, I really knew that that’s where that story ended: That it was really this primal story of someone becoming a mother... the original ending that I wrote is really the ending of book two. So, I think all along I was writing toward two books.
Reader pressure alone does not usually produce a novel, but the specific nature of the questions Dave was getting changed her thinking. The people asking weren’t treating Hannah Hall and Owen Michaels as fictional characters.
Much to my surprise, I had a fully formed answer. So I sat down and wrote a hundred pages of the sequel, sharing them with no one until I was certain that I knew where I wanted the story to go.
Once she committed to the book, one thematic question organized everything else. Redemption, forgiveness, second chances: these weren’t separate concerns but a single question she kept circling until she found the sharpest version of it.
The first question I was interested in was a question around redemption and what redemption looks like, what it means to forgive and what it means to have a second chance. It was all centered around that central idea of: what is forgiveness, what is redemption, what is salvation? That all led me to the central thought of the book: What are we willing to do for a second chance?
That final question became the engine of the plot. Every choice Hannah makes in the book, and every choice the antagonists made decades earlier, runs through it.
How she wrote it
A prequel hiding inside the sequelThe structural surprise arrived not in planning but in the writing itself. Dave expected to be moving the story forward from where the first book left off. Instead, the manuscript kept pulling her in the opposite direction.
What surprised me most, as I dug deeper into the writing, was that the sequel was also a prequel. I found myself moving forty-three years into the past.
The final section of the book was supposed to take place on Fisher Island, a small private island off the coast of Miami. Dave researched it extensively and then flew her family there to confirm the choice. The trip ended the plan within minutes of arrival. She pivoted to Èze, a medieval hilltop town near Monaco, and the research turned up a detail that settled everything.
When I started doing the research, I found out that the town motto was ‘In death, I am reborn.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I need to get on a different plane.’
The structural model for the whole voyage was classical. Dave wanted the sequel to have the shape of a homecoming, not just a chase, and she found her blueprint in a text she considers the genre’s founding example.
I was very inspired by the Odyssey — which is probably my favorite sequel of all time — and I wanted there to be a real voyage home to each other.
Every novel Dave writes is scored to a single song played on repeat. For the first book it was Bruce Springsteen. The switch to Taylor Swift’s “cardigan” for the sequel was not arbitrary: the two songs map onto the two different emotional questions the books are asking, and she used that contrast to define what the sequel needed to do that the first book hadn’t.
For The Last Thing He Told Me, that song was ‘If I Should Fall Behind’ by Bruce Springsteen. For the sequel it was ‘cardigan’ by Taylor Swift... ‘If I Should Fall Behind’ leans into the promises we make at the beginning of a relationship, ‘cardigan’ asks what happens when some of those promises break: How do we come back to each other on the other side of loss and heartbreak and hope?
By the time she was writing the sequel, season two of the Apple TV+ adaptation was also in development, and Jennifer Garner’s physical presence as Hannah Hall had worked its way into the prose in specific, concrete ways. The blending of adaptation and manuscript was not a liability she managed; it was a resource she used.
One of the reasons that Hannah runs at the beginning of book two — like, quite literally runs down the street — is that Jen’s such a good runner. So, I could imagine that.
What she wants us to sit with
The hero who learns to count on herselfDave set herself a structural obligation that went beyond satisfying loyal readers: the book had to work from a cold start. Someone who had never read the first novel needed to be fully inside the story by the end of the opening pages.
I felt like I had two responsibilities. One, that it would be a seamless experience if you read them back-to-back. Two, that you could pick up book number two and read that, having not read the first and still be totally engaged.
Her approach to the villains follows a principle she applies across her thrillers. Frank, Nicholas, and Quinn are antagonists, but she resists writing them as a separate category of person. The interest, for her, is in the shared territory between characters who end up on opposite sides.
I’m not interested in revenge or vengeance... I’m interested in the things that make us more similar than different, even if some of us might look like — Frank, Nicholas, a bunch of people on this book, the antagonist, Quinn — they got themselves to bad places.
On what sequels owe the people who loved the first book, she has a specific and demanding answer. The obligation isn’t only to resolve what was left open but to surface questions the reader didn’t know they were carrying.
Sequels, I believe, have a responsibility to answer questions readers may not have even known they needed answered.
Hannah Hall’s arc across both books is ultimately an argument about self-reliance. In a video interview, Dave invoked Gloria Steinem on the importance of watching a woman become the hero of her own life, and connected that idea directly to what she was building with Hannah.
[paraphrased from audio] Dave invoked Gloria Steinem on the importance of watching a woman become the hero of her own life, and described her aim as creating characters like Hannah who become the hero of their own life because they learn they need to count on themselves more than anyone else to help them.
Hannah’s self-reliance is not a moral lesson the novel delivers from the outside. It emerges from the situation she is placed in: people she trusted lied to her, and the only person consistently present is herself.