Talk to Me Before You like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
Louisa Clark is twenty-six, cheerfully aimless, and loses her job at the local café on the same day. Desperate for work, she takes a position as companion and caregiver to Will Traynor, a thirty-five-year-old former high-powered banker who was injured in a motorcycle accident two years earlier and is now quadriplegic. Will is brilliant, sarcastic, and comprehensively uninterested in being cheered up. Louisa is persistent, awkward, and genuinely good. The collision of these two people in a converted coach house in rural England is the engine of the novel.
What follows is a love story with a moral argument built into its ending that the novel refuses to soften. Will has told his parents he will agree to a six-month waiting period before proceeding with an assisted death in Switzerland. The six months is the novel's timeframe. Moyes uses it to explore what autonomous personhood means when a body no longer does what a person needs it to do — and to refuse the easy answer that love makes such questions irrelevant. Louisa comes to love Will; Will clearly loves Louisa; the book ends the way it ends, and the response to that ending is the book's real test.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel's most controversial choice — letting Will proceed with his decision — is also its most defensible one. Moyes refuses to let love override autonomy, which is unusual in popular romance fiction.
- 2.
Lou Clark is one of popular fiction's better heroines: genuinely funny, specifically working-class, perceptive without being implausibly wise. Her voice carries the novel.
- 3.
Will's sarcasm is the book's other great pleasure — he is genuinely witty in a way that earns the reader's respect before he earns sympathy.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jojo Moyes is a British novelist and journalist whose career shifted dramatically with the publication of Me Before You in 2012. She has written more than twenty novels, including the Me Before You sequels After You and Still Me, as well as The Giver of Stars and The One Plus One. She has twice appeared simultaneously on the New York Times bestseller list. Before writing full-time, she was a staff writer and interviewer at The Independent. She lives in rural Essex.
