IF HE WERE WITH ME by Laura Nowlin — some commentary

I am putting down my current read with great difficulty, but I decided it was time to write something and I kind of want the book to slow down anyway, as I'm not quite ready for it to be over.

This morning I was reading IF HE WERE WITH ME by Laura Nowlin while drinking my coffee. I read it while on the bike at the gym, then in a coffee shop I didn't even get any coffee at, and then again at home. I was reading it yesterday at a bus stop and then at a train station and again at the dinner table. My husband gently pulled me back to the present moment—he doesn't like us to be distracted when we eat together, and I mostly feel the same, except when my book is really good—by asking me what the book was about, and I was surprised that to find was a difficult question to answer. "Its about a teenage teenage girl...with teenage girl problems," I said finally. This is honestly how I usually respond when people ask me what my book is about. I've always felt uncomfortable describing it to people who didn't know what they were getting themselves into, and I think most non-writers know it's a vulnerable thing to share your writing, but they probably don't know that it feels equally horrible just sharing an idea.

I've been thinking a lot about the one-sentence pitch lately, since I'm going to the Philadelphia Writers' Workshop in a little more than two months. For a book I've been writing for over ten years, you'd think I would have nailed down my elevator pitch a long time ago, but I've always been afraid to tackle it. I was afraid I would try and fail realize it was impossible because my book wasn't good enough, that it somehow had too much and not enough going on at the same time. Well, l finally made my first attempt yesterday, and after three drafts I at least had something I didn't hate. It was exciting to reach this milestone I've been avoiding, even if I almost certainly need several more drafts.

I was surprised to have such difficulting in quickly summarizing IF HE WERE WITH ME because I always assumed that books that were So Good that they Got Published would have such a clear and easy premise that any reader could easily rattle off what was probably the author's elevator pitch. And here's this book that has me so sucked in and is so inspirational to me as a writer, and I don't really know how to say what it's about succintly. It's clearly leading up to a very dramatic moment, but we know so little about that from the opening chapter that I don't know what to say about it. It's about a girl having big feelings, with friends, family, and love interests involved. So goes contemporary YA. Anyway, it gives me some hope with my story that I've always found equally difficult to sum up in a few lines. And it's also the first contemporary YA I've been really into in a while. Working with teenagers for the last 7 years, I started to lose interest in reading it (though not writing it), as I felt I had plenty of teenage problems playing out right in front of me all the time and I was rather tired of it. So this also gives me hope for coming back to my beloved genre as a reader.

My student who let me borrow this book said the ending made her very frustrated. "I understand why it ended that way," she said, "but I just—agh!״ Now I've got to get back to reading so I can tell her my thoughts tomorrow. I hope I feel at least a little better than "agh!"

2.19.2024