(spoilers)
If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin, 2013
You GUYS!!!!
When I finished this book I texted my ex and I think that says enough for this review.
I’m just joshin’ ya, there’s more to the review.
But I KNOW Laura Nowlin killed it during her 10th grade English lesson on pathos because for a YA romance, set largely in high school, to make a 24 year old cry, If He Had Been With Me has control over our emotions like our hands do over driving.
SPEAKING OF! The story starts with a car crash that brings upon the fate of our male main character, Finny.
This death-to-start was brutal, my g*d, but nonetheless a proper decision in craft for keeping readers’ emotions heightened throughout the novel’s entirety. Our knowledge of what’s to come allows us no room for reprieve, making all the events rend our hearts more than they would as events in isolation. After Finny’s death on the first page, the rest of the novel follows the perspective of our female main character, Autumn, as she recalls who she and Finny were together up until his death.
Autumn and Finny are childhood best friends and next-door-neighbors, raised as, in some sense of the word, cousins (weird), by their mothers who are also long-term best friends. The two are inseparable from birth until middle school but by the time they’re in eighth grade, they’re BLUDGEONED by the biggest miscommunication trope known to man, and, as is the miscommunication trope tendency, they use neither words nor inferences to clear things up – both of which are very accessible to them – they just stop being friends.
(If you’re not a fan of a good ol’ miscommunication trope, yea this one probably isn’t for you).
When high school begins, Autumn and Finny each have respective new friend groups—rivals of each other—so the distance between them has no longer just brought upon the end of their friendship; now it’s brought drama and tension between them, too. A lot of it. We can imagine this makes family dinners and holidays a bit awkward (though we don’t have to imagine it! Nowlin paints the unpleasant picture on more than one occasion).
Both Autumn and Funny begin their own romantic relationships quickly after starting high school—Finny with Sylvie (a girl who, rightfully so, is threatened by Autumn), and Autumn with Jamie (a boy she grows close with in her friend group).
If you ask me, Autumn and Jamie’s relationship is a well-depicted prototype for a high school romance, as is Finny and Sylvie’s. Both do appear to be real relationships with lust and silliness and, always, the uncharted pathways to forming a “self,” which I find is often a function of falling in love young. These separate relationships live symbiotically (isn’t it f*cked) with Autumn and Finn’s growing attraction to each other without being totally diminished themselves. While in her sweet-enough relationship with Jamie, Autumn grapples with why she very much dislikes Sylvie and HATES Sylvie’s relationship with Finny, which tends to be constantly in her face.
As high school progresses, Autumn and Finny mature, and the rivalry between their friend groups subside. The tension between them naturally lessens, and their friendship naturally grows. It becomes clear to Autumn that the love she’s feeling for Finny is incomparably above the love she feels for Jamie—of a different nature altogether. She finds herself paying attention to his comings and goings at home, everything about him is suddenly kind and beautiful, and his movement around her excites her more than Jamie. She reminds herself, however, that Finny is in love with Sylvie, and would never be able to see her in that light since they are such close family friends.
When senior year comes around, Autumn’s life begins changing drastically; her parents are divorcing, there’s drama amongst her friend group, and Jamie ends up breaking up with her to be with her good friend Sasha, another girl in their friend group. Autumn becomes depressed after the breakup (not about missing Jamie; it’s about adjusting to the recent turns her life has taken—thoughtfully done by Nowlin to show how change often begets bouts of sadness which aren’t easily explained) and during this dark time it’s Finny who pulls her out of it.
We’re nearing the end of the novel now, and in a fit of passion the pair finally admits the feelings they’d been holding back all these years. It’s this same night in which Finny cheats on Sylvie (in one of the only intimate scenes) and resolves to break things off with her the following day.
The following day comes, and in an unnarrated scene, Finny breaks up with Sylvie during a rainy car ride. Finny, aka our collective first love, loses his life.
(If you need to take a breath break here, it’s okay, I am too).
Have no fear, though, kids. As sad as this is (I will repeat, I was SOBBING), there is a somewhat happy ending! Well, first Autumn makes an attempt at suicide, and then there’s a somewhat happy ending.
Autumn learns she is pregnant while in the hospital, recovering after her suicide attempt, and with that news she decides she wants to keep holding on, as she has a new life inside her that is partly Finny.
The summit of If He Had Been With Me is the way it covers everything we go through in high school. We get the high school stereotype of longing for someone, and letting thoughts of that someone dictate your entire mind; we get the unfortunate reality of how difficult it is to understand love while in your youth; how easily miscommunications are created in high school; how lost and alone we sometimes feel in friendships as well as romantic relationships; and how, oftentimes, there’s one person who saves you from all of it (or, at least it feels that way) but despite how much that seems to matter, it doesn’t matter enough when placed against the things that are out of our control. For many of us, it’s the reality of moving on to the real world; for Autumn, it’s death. We all lose that person sooner or later.
Goodness, goodness, goodness. The prototype for a childhood-friends-to-lovers YA novel so sweet and nostalgic.
This book is dangerous if you have a Finny yourself!
4/5 (but my initial Goodreads rating was 5/5 because, again, when I finished this book, my immediate response was HEAVY.) It would be a 5/5 if the writing style were more artfully crafted)
Trigger warnings for underage drugs and drinking, some sexual content, and topics of suicide.
Quotes:
I want to reach up and brush his blond hair away from his forehead so that I can see his eyes better. His face flushes pink and—before I can remember that I shouldn’t feel this—I am thinking he is beautiful.
I fight with Jamie because he doesn’t understand anything I say. I hate him for not truly knowing me deep down inside, and at the end of our dates, I cling to his coat and beg him to never leave me. He says he never will.
His profile is so handsome in the dashboard light. I want so much to lean over and lay my head on his shoulder. When we were kids, I could have.
I had somehow forgotten that the world was larger than just us.
His eyebrows raise slightly, and I wonder what it was in the sky that surprised him, but I cannot look away. Is it possible that the last six years were real, and not a dream as they feel to me now? I think that if I concentrated, I could make those memories vanish. I could close my eyes and believe that we have never been apart. I could invent a new past to remember.
