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Emily Liebert’s You Knew Me When

Once you’ve left, can you ever, really go home again? Emily Liebert attempts to answer these questions and others in her debut novel, You Knew Me When, a story about best friends, loves, and what happens when life gets in the way.

Katherine left home 12 years ago to pursue a career in the beauty industry. It had been a tough decision for her, leaving her best friend Laney and her boyfriend Grant behind, but it had been a once in a lifetime opportunity that she couldn’t pass up. All these years later, she is a top executive for one of the biggest cosmetic companies in the world, but she never heard from Laney or Grant again. Now, at the passing of an old friend and mother figure, Katherine is forced to go back to the ones she left behind and confront the issues of years past. Will their old bond be able to break through the wall that was built up between them, or is it simply just too late?

Are there some relationships that are strong enough to get passed years of hurt and regret? Can the bond of former best friends be tied back together once it’s been cut? They are questions that we’ve all wondered about at one point or another in our lives and ones that come up again and again in You Knew Me When. Our former best friends, people that we were once inseparable from, people that we now look back on with a mix of fondness and longing. Kind of like the one who got away but sans the romantic entanglement. What if you took a leap in a direction that your best friend couldn’t understand and ended up losing them in the process? Would you bury the longing in your heart and continue moving forward, or would you try everything in your power to get that friendship back?

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Emily Giffin’s Something Blue

In honor of the recent release of Emily Giffin’s seventh novel, The One & Only, of which I am eager to delve into, I took a step back to the beginning of her writing career and reread her second novel, Something Blue, the sequel to Something Borrowed (will she ever bring back those characters again?), which brings back the beautiful, but self-centered Darcy as she travels to London to seek the comfort of her friend Ethan and start a new life away from New York, away from her ex-fiancé, away from her former best friend, and really, away from everyone who didn’t agree with the way she was choosing to live her life. With her impending motherhood, will Darcy be able to change her life for the better, or will she stay stuck in her ways?

What I love about Giffin is that not only is she great at getting the chick-lit story right, but she’s also a good writer which you don’t see a lot in that genre. Even though her stories have a light air to them, they also possess great strength and always make me take a step back and examine certain things about myself, decisions that I’ve made or haven’t made. All of her characters grow in one way or another. Take Darcy for instance. In the first novel we see her in she is extremely self-centered. She’s that way too in the beginning of Something Blue, but eventually learns that life can’t always be that way, and that if she were to stay on the path that she was going, she would never actually be happy. It’s a hard lesson for anyone to learn, but a valuable one. I leave you with a quote from the novel.

“Love and friendship. They are what make us who we are, and what can change us, if we let them.”

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Pieces of Ourselves

I was talking with Melissa this morning and she told me about a dream that she had last night, a vision, of a specific moment with an old love, one who she has never been able to fully forget. Her description was so vivid that I could imagine myself being there, so vivid that, in the moment, she felt as though she was there again. When she opened her eyes, she felt an intense ache in her heart, a longing that she hadn’t felt in a while. I told her that I knew exactly what she was talking about and how she felt because the same thing happened to me a few days earlier. She asked me, “How does it feel so real?? How come we can’t remember happy moments like that…”

I thought about her question for a moment, then answered with this: It feels so real because it was, because we still love/miss that person so much. Because the memories that bring us to tears have a more profound effect on us than ones that make us smile.

As much as we live for those moments of happiness, they don’t affect us nearly as much as the devastating ones when remembered. Happiness is what we strive for; it’s the ideal, yet, it is pain, we are told, that gives us strength and makes us grow. But really, why is this? Could it just be that we can remember loss more than love because that is what we’ve grown up hearing? Couldn’t we grow just as much through love as through loss? Honestly, I think it is more a matter of changing your perspective, because of course we can and we do. But those memories that Melissa had, that I’ve had, that we all have had, they will always haunt us not only because of the people that we were with then, but even more so because of the person that we were at that moment…a piece of ourselves that we can never get back.

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Amy Hatvany’s Safe With Me

In Amy Hatvany’s new novel, Safe With Me, published in March by Washington Square Press, she weaves a tale of abuse, loss and unconditional love through three distinct alternating narrations of two women and one teenager, who are connected long before they meet.

It had been nearly a year since Hannah Scott lost her daughter as she was biking out of their driveway and hit by a car. Since then, she threw herself into her work, opening up a second hair salon and moving into an apartment above it, trying to pick up the pieces when all the while she’s still devastated by it. It’s not until a new friend walks into her life (and her salon) with a connection to her daughter that she is finally able to face the situation and start healing.

Olivia Bell has lived her life in fear for a long time, fearful of her husband’s sometimes abusive tendencies, and fearful of her daughter Maddie’s struggling health, which, after an organ transplant a year earlier is finally improving enough that she can return to school. It is when Olivia picks Maddie up on her first day back in tears that she decides to make her daughter feel better…by taking her to the grand opening of a new hair salon in town. Little do they know that their trip to Hannah’s salon will change their lives forever.

At the heart of this novel lies the concept of the power of emotions and how strongly they can affect us, sometimes without us even knowing it. Hatvany makes us take a look at our own lives and relationships, past the ideals, past the rose-colored glasses, and allows us to see them for what they really are (were).

“We try on personalities like second skins, learning to present only the best versions of ourselves to the world, fearful of what might happen if we reveal just how imperfect and vulnerable we really are. But it’s these imperfections…these struggles, that truly connect us.”

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful & Damned

First published by Scribner in 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned is a story about love, hope and dreams, and what happens when relationships unravel, hope fades, and dreams come true only after you’ve hit your breaking point and therefore can no longer appreciate them. Thought to be based in part on Fitzgerald’s life with Zelda, the novel follows the lives of Anthony Patch and his wife, the beautiful Gloria Gilbert – socialites that inevitably fall from grace because they’re too focused on seeking out the pleasures of life without any of the responsibilities.

In a book review for the New York Times by Louise Maunsell Field in 1922, she writes that, “its slow-moving narrative is the record of lives utterly worthless utterly futile. Not one of the book’s main characters…ever rises to the level of decent humanity.” In many ways, Field was not wrong. When we first meet the novel’s main protagonist, Anthony Patch, he is self-absorbed and living in a small apartment with a servant who comes in in the morning to clean and make Anthony breakfast. He has no profession, choosing to avoid the work-force altogether, but lives under the façade that he is trying to write the next American novel. He spends much of his time socializing with friends and women, accepting an allowance from his grandfather, the wealthy Adam Patch, while waiting for him to die so that he can inherit his fortune.

Anthony’s life doesn’t change that much after he meets and marries Gloria Gilbert because Gloria is the same way as him, wanting to spend her life as leisurely and full of excitement as possible. Much of the novel’s focus is on the parties that Gloria and Anthony host at their apartment in the city and “little gray house” upstate. These parties comprised of endless streams of people drinking excessively for days at a time. We watch Gloria and Anthony go deeper and deeper into debt, selling off bonds like water and downsizing places of residence numerous times. When Adam Patch dies and they learn that they were left with nothing in the will, a length legal battle ensures, but it is not until Anthony is dragged to the brink of insanity that there is a resolution. Their life of leisure and wealth resumes, but it does so at the cost of everything else.

In a way, The Beautiful and Damned can be looked at as a tale of morality. How, having all the money in the world doesn’t matter if you lose your own soul to get it, and how a life of leisure doesn’t necessarily bring about happiness or excitement. What really matters in life is the quality of it and the people who you choose to surround yourself with…a lesson that Gloria and Anthony never learned. This may not have been Fitzgerald’s most exciting book (it was a bit mundane), but his brilliant writing is there.

“After a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you – it’s a wall that an active you runs up against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable skepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned