The Southern Festival of Books Speech for A World Without You

Part 3

Throughout the edits, my editor kept asking about the sister in the book. Where is she, how does she feel? At that point, there was only one scene where the sister was present, and it was a short scene told from Bo's point of view.

And it wasn't enough.

But the thing is...I didn't want to write the sister's point of view. The sister's point of view was not seen through the filter of Bo's mental illness being a power. Because the heart of that first draft was just that. It was about how Bo thought his illness was a super power. Not in a symbolic way, in a literal way.

And Phoebe, Bo's sister, could see the truth.

And I did not want to face the truth.

Part of my reason for latching onto this particular idea for a novel was that I wanted to give my brother a happy ending. He did not have a happy ending in real life. In real life, he died of heart failure, a complication caused by years of self-medicating his mental illness using illegal street and prescription drugs.

I was in college when my brother died. College was my refuge. I chose the university I attended in part because it was 200 miles away from my home. In college, I didn't have to be the perfect daughter, the one would could never, ever screw up because her parents couldn't handle two children who were difficult. In college, I could meet new people without them already knowing that I was the sister to that weird boy—because the people who didn't know my brother had a mental illness knew that he was strange, different.

They often wrote it off as my brother being an artist, because he was. He would draw things that were almost photo-realistic on scraps of paper with the chewed up nubs of pencils. When bored, he would doodle endless Escher-like designs that his teachers would enter in contests—and he would win them. He was one of those rare people born with an artistic talent.

In truth, I resented my brother for his art. It came easily to him. He didn't even have to try. He never needed an eraser. I couldn't draw, but even as a child, I wanted to be a writer. But it didn't come easily to me. Nothing ever came easily to me. I wrote stories and poems and teachers patted me on the head, but I didn't win contests. I didn't awe people. I was writing A+ short stories, sure, but my brother was drawing things that people who'd gone to college for art couldn't do, and he did it easily.

By the time I was a junior at NC State University, I'd already written three novels, and they had all been soundly rejected. I had gone past the point of thinking I could prove myself to be a child prodigy—I was no longer a teenager. I had also gone past the point of thinking, "Oh, well, last time I didn't really try." Because by that point, I was really trying, very hard to be a published author. And I was getting rejections left and right.

It was at this point when my mother called to tell me that my brother had died. He was at home. He had been evening out, stabilizing. We all—my parents and I—we all had sort of hoped that he was finally getting better.

Instead, his heart gave out.

My mother had been the one to find his body.