The Southern Festival of Books Speech for A World Without You

Part 6

Soon after that, I started to really understand that things were bad. As a kid and even as a teenager, my parents tried to protect me from reality. This is also something that's important to point out—the parents in the book are not at all like my parents. The parents in the book were cold, they didn't understand what to do with their child and they almost seem not to care. My parents I don't think understood what to do, but they cared, deeply, and they tried.

After my brother's funeral, one of his friends screamed at my parents that it was their fault my brother had died. My mother was at a point beyond weeping, numb to the pain, and my father rushed us to the car. His friends only ever saw my brother as a partier, as someone who dealt and took drugs. I don't think they knew anything about his mental illness. They believed my brother when he said our parents were cruel to them; they did not see that cruelty was simply bringing my brother to a therapist and a psychologist in an attempt to help and get him off drugs. Their reality was skewed, and they believed what they wanted to believe, and so they screamed at us as we left the funeral home.

Anyway, all of that is to say that my parents are not the parents in the book. But some of the actions that my parents took were drawn from real life.

One such scene is when Phoebe tells her brother about the scariest part of growing up with him.

***

"That was the most scare I ever was," I say in a quiet voice. "The night before they took you to that school for the first time. You had a fight with Dad. Do you remember?"

Bo nods, but he looks confused. 

"Mom came into my bedroom while you were arguing. I was reading in bed, and I had my music cranked up really loud. I haven't been able to listen to that song since then. 'The Remedy,'" I add. "By Jason Mraz." I want him to say something, anything, but he doesn't. "Anyway, Mom came in, and she just locked my door from the inside and then left again." 

"Why were you so scared?" Bo asks. 

"I was scared because a mother shouldn't have to lock one child in a room to protect her from the other."

***

(From pages 285-284)

These were the kind of memories I didn't want to relive while writing the book. These were the memories I didn't want my parents to relive, because I knew they would read the book. They read every book I write. My father worked in the lumber industry, and he read my first book—which has a pink cover and a boy and a girl kissing on it—at the lumber yard. They read everything I write, and for the first time, I was writing about us. When I gave an early copy of the book to my parents, I stressed over and over again that it was fiction, but I know they know the parts that aren't.

All the while I'm working on these edits, going deeper and deeper into my own past, my own heart, I have to push my lap desk further and further away because my baby is growing inside of me. I turned the book in on a Friday; I gave birth the following Monday.

It was a surreal time of writing about death and growing new life at the same time.

One of the reasons we had waited so long to try for a baby—before we knew there were complications—was because of my fear that my baby would end up like my brother. It was a deep fear that was hard to put into words, but it was there. But it was during this time, while I was writing this novel and growing my baby inside of me, that I finally came to peace with what had happened. And I felt peace about what may happen.

In a lot of ways, my brother had become a character in my life. As time moved on, I almost fictionalized him in my head. He was an actor in the play of my memories. Writing A World Without You made him real to me again. It was by seeing the world through a truly fictional character's eyes that I finally think I came close to seeing the world through my brother's eyes.