This Book Made Me Think of You
This Book Made Me Think of You
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Libby Page on This Book Made Me Think of You
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The books of people she’d lostThe desire to write a bookshop novel had been with her for years, but it took a specific loss, then a second one, to give it a shape. Both family members she lost were avid readers, and that detail is what moved the project from a long-held wish to a book with something urgent at its center.
I’ve always wanted to write a book set in a bookstore, because, as a bookworm, I am obsessed with bookish books. Then, when I went through the experience of losing two family members in close succession—both of whom were avid readers—I was inspired to think about how books can connect us to people we love even after they are gone, and how a bookstore might play an important role in making that happen.
The habit of reading the favourite books of the people she’d lost, as a way of feeling close to them, is what produced the novel’s central mechanism. She wasn’t theorizing about grief; she was describing what she actually did.
The book was inspired by my own experience of turning to books during a period of grief. After losing two close family members in close succession I found that one of the things that brought the most comfort was to escape into reading. I read children’s books and romance for comfort and escapism, non-fiction books about grief to try to find wisdom from others who had trodden this path before me, and the favourite books of the people I’d lost in order to feel closer to them.
Page could read during her own grief. Her protagonist, Tilly Nightingale, cannot. That gap between the author’s experience and the character’s is where the story’s tension lives: the novel asks what happens when the one thing that might save you is the thing you’ve lost access to.
I was lucky that reading came easily to me during that time, but it made me think about a character who really needs the support of books but has lost her love of reading, which is where Tilly Nightingale came from.
How she wrote it
Assembling a puzzle, month by monthThe twelve-books-over-twelve-months structure, the novel’s spine, forced a writer who describes herself as naturally intuitive into a planning process she’d never used before. She kept a physical pin board with the months of the year across the top, book choices underneath, and a mood board for each month, a visual map she worked from before she wrote a sentence.
I am naturally more of an intuitive writer than a planner, but because of the structure of this book—12 books over 12 months—I was required to do much more planning. It felt like assembling a puzzle!
The puzzle metaphor is exact: each book choice had to fit what Tilly needed emotionally at that stage of grief, what Joe’s character would plausibly select, the season it fell in, and the destination it might send her to. Move one piece and others shifted.
The governing rule for choosing Tilly’s twelve books was accessibility, not prestige. Each title had to earn its place on the strength of what it communicated before the reader opened it, because Joe’s list was meant to function as practical support rather than a literary syllabus.
I liked the idea of him thinking of the books as a kind of toolkit for living... I didn’t want each book to be some literary classic that readers would have to have read in order to understand the meaning behind the book choice. So the titles of the books had to work really hard. I wanted readers to immediately ‘get’ the book and why Joe chose it just from the title alone.
During a research trip to New York, she sat down to write in a bookshop that later appears in the novel and was overtaken by grief mid-session. She was planning to return to that same shop for the US launch, which she described as coming full circle. The scene is one example of what the process cost her at close range.
Writing a book about grief whilst grieving myself was not an easy thing to do, and there were moments when I wasn’t sure I could manage it. But it was also surprisingly healing too.
The advice she gives to other writers is the same principle she applied to herself throughout the drafting, and she names the price it carried with it.
Write from the heart. It can be challenging at times—I made myself cry multiple times when writing This Book Made Me Think of You—but it is also so rewarding.
The personal thread
Grief as the cost of lovePage found, in her own grief, a framework that eventually became the emotional argument of the novel. She describes it not as a coping strategy she adopted but as something she came to understand was already true.
One of the things I found most helpful in my grief journey and something that really comes across in the book is this idea of grief being like the price of love. And that, in a way, it is love. It’s how love continues after someone is gone. [paraphrased from audio]
This is the idea that shapes Tilly’s arc in the novel. The work Page gives her character is not recovery in the sense of moving past Joe, but the harder task of building a life around grief without trying to dissolve it.
Writing across multiple novels about loss has given Page a clear view of what grief resists. The observation below comes from her thinking about what Tilly learns, but it reflects a position Page arrived at before Tilly existed.
Grief comes in many forms. In some ways it is so individual—no one else can know what it’s like to have lost your person and your connection to them—but there are also so many things that are universal about grief too.
What she wants us to sit with
Books as a safe place, not an escape from painThe novel features more than eighty real books by name, a list Page assembled deliberately. Her aim was not to overwhelm readers with recommendations but to hand back to anyone in a reading slump the specific feeling that made them a reader in the first place.
I wanted this book to be a true celebration of books. Something that reminds you of the joy of reading and hopefully sets a path for you to continue on to your next book.
Page’s earlier novels were sometimes described as comfort reading, and she has always pushed back gently on the idea that comfort fiction avoids difficulty. Her view is that fiction earns its warmth by going where pain actually is.
A book is a safe place to process pain. But I also genuinely do believe that there is so much goodness and beauty in people and in the world, so it feels true to me to reflect all of that loveliness on the page too.
She moved to Somerset and found her local independent bookshop early on. That experience, of a physical shop as a place of welcome rather than commerce, is what she wanted the novel’s setting, Book Lane, to carry for Tilly. She says it plainly: the love letter has a specific addressee.
I think of This Book Made Me Think of You as my love letter to bookstores, and especially to indies... My local indie bookstore always feels like a safe harbor, something I wanted to get across with the bookstore in This Book Made Me Think of You.
The novel’s final argument about grief is one she arrived at through her own experience and then gave to Tilly to work out across twelve months and twelve books. There is no prescription in it, which is the point.
There isn’t a manual for grief, and everyone heals in their own way—something that Tilly learns in the book.