the last time we say goodbye book summary

Several years ago I had a friend whose husband suddenly died, and a few days after the funeral she and I were sitting out on her front lawn watching her kids play, and she turned to me and said, “I’m a horrible person,” and I said, “Why do you say that?!” and she said, “Because I don’t feel anything. THIS IS NORMAL, but people don’t talk about it much, and dealing with the numbness can actually be a bigger problem than the grief. So you go through periods where you shut down-you feel nothing. I honestly think numbness is your body simply trying to keep you alive-if you lived in a state of raging, unmitigated grief for very long, your body couldn’t physically handle it. I’d also like to say something about numbness, which is so often grief’s bigger, uglier, cousin. I find so much comfort in that, but I’ve also seen, over the years, how everyone grieves in a slightly different way. We all must go through losing the people we love, which means that we are also never truly alone in it. But now, more than fifteen years later, I’ve seen how grief ultimately comes knocking on everybody’s door.

I was fairly young when my brother died, and at the time it felt like I was completely alone in that experience and that none of the twenty-year-olds around me could understand what I felt. Is there anything you’d say to readers about dealing with loss? Then the writing got easier, but it never really got less emotional. But after a few weeks of basically writing in circles, my main character, Lex, arrived on the page, and she wasn’t me she was completely her own person with her own voice and her own view of the things, and as I came to know her through writing her, her lost brother formed into someone different from my lost brother. My own brother died when I was twenty years old, and when I first started drafting The Last Time We Say Goodbye it was nearly impossible for me to write because I was having a hard time separating my own story from the story I was trying to tell.

It was very emotional, since it was a story so close to my heart. The Last Time We Say Goodbye was an emotional read (understatement of the year). In this chat with Cynthia, she talks about why YA should tackle the difficult issues, her TBR pile and the Unearthly novella just waiting to be written. To give you some idea, BTCers, I got teary in The Fault in Our Stars, but sobbed in TLTWSG.

Cynthia Hand’s new novel The Last Time We Say Goodbye will make you feel.

The last time we say goodbye book summary