The Southern Festival of Books Speech for A World Without You

Part 4

These are the memories I did not want to tap into when I wrote A World Without You. I wanted my hero to be a hero. I wanted him to find magic in the way he saw the world. I wanted him to have adventures. I wanted him to have the happy ending my brother could not have.

All my editor's notes were about pulling Bo away from the magic. She wanted me to add in the sister's point of view more, so that Phoebe could tell the reader how sick Bo was. She wanted the main plot of the story not to be "Can Bo save his girlfriend who is trapped in the past," but instead, "Can Bo save himself?"

And of course, while I'm reading through all these edits, I have one hand on my belly, because my first child is growing there within me.

I don't think I could have written A World Without You at any point in my life but this one. The book is about Phoebe and Bo as teenager, but little pieces of who I was now, an adult who had lived almost a decade longer than my older brother, crept inside.

For example, I couldn't help but add this scene from page 229, where Bo's psychologist is talking with his sister, Phoebe:

***

"I'm not like Bo," I say immediately. "I don't have his same problem."

Dr. Franklin hesitates. 

"Do I?" I ask. "Is it genetic or something? Is there a chance that I'll--"

"No, no, I didn't mean to imply that," Dr. Franklin says quickly. "I mean, there is a prevalence for this sort of thing to happen in families, but not necessarily. I've worked with your mother, and we can't confirm that any of your relatives have had similar issues to Bo's."

"But it's possible."

"It's...possible," he concedes. 

I shift in my seat. I've never had any of the same symptoms as Bo, so maybe I'm safe. Or maybe his same set of gifts and curses lies inside me, even now, curled like a snake in winter, ready to rise. If not me, perhaps my children will be like Bo, slinking from mood to mood, time to time, leaving me behind just as Bo has done.

***

A very paranoid part of me worried that I was writing about my brother now because subconsciously I knew my unborn child had the same mental problems. I don't know if that's true, although I hope it's not. My brother didn't have any symptoms at all until pubescence, so I have years to wait and hope and pray that my son has escaped his fate.

There's one other scene that is linked to my child that made its way into the book. It's one of the last scenes I wrote, one that I added after all the other edits were done, and after my son was born. My husband was born with a genetic heart defect that we were fairly certain would affect our child, and in fact my baby was less than a day old before he was diagnosed with a VSD, more commonly known as a hole in the heart. It's a condition I try not to panic over, because it's both very common and very treatable—in some cases, as the child grows, the hole closes on its own.

But even though the logical part of my mind knew that my son's heart issue wasn't nearly as serious as it sounds, there's something pitiful about seeing a tiny baby strapped to a heart monitor, with an ultrasound wand pressing into his chest.

The scene I wrote because of this was a cathartic scene for me. It was a way to remind myself of goodness. (This is the entirety of Chapter 48)

***

I was two when Phoebe was born. I don't remember it at all, but I do remember the doctor visits. 

Phoebe was born with a hole in her heart. That sounds like a huge deal, but it wasn't really. Turns out it's pretty routine. But when Phoebe turned three, the doctors decided the hole wasn't going to heal on its own, and she needed surgery. Before that, however, they did an EKG, and I got to watch.

Phoebe lay down on a hospital bed, and Mom clutched her hand like she was saying her last goodbyes even though everyone else, including Phoebe, was pretty chill about it all. Phoebe watched the cartoon the technician put on her for, but I watched the monitor. The technician rubbed a wand over Phoebe's chest, and a black-and-white picture of her heart showed up on the screen, contracting and expanding with every beat. 

"What's that?" I asked, pointing.

The technician showed me the arteries and the different chambers of Phoebe's heart.

"And this is what's causing all the trouble," the technician said. "This is where the hole is."

"It looks like a bird," I said, and the technician laughed. 

With every heartbeat, the wings of the bird flapped. This was blood flowing over the loose tissue, but to me it was like one of those drawings little kids make of birds in the sky, the ones that look like elongated letter m's. I watched, mesmerized, as the bird's wings moved up and down, up and down. 

They got her into surgery, and she was only in the hospital for a day, and then she milked my parents for ice cream for dinner until she was sick of ice cream, and that was that.

But sometimes I look at Phoebe and I think about how she had a bird inside her heart. On the outside, she's just like everyone else, but I like to think that maybe she carries within herself something magical and free.

***

While this scene actually makes me quite happy, it was also one of the quickest, easiest scenes to write. Perhaps because it was actually about my baby, not my brother or myself.

In the end, I added about 75 pages extra of scenes told from the sister's point of view, roughly 25% of the book.

And each scene was excruciating to write.