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What it argues
Lucy meets Gabe on the morning of September 11, 2001, when they are both students at Columbia, watching the towers fall. They fall in love, spend years together, and then he leaves for the Middle East as a photojournalist to document conflict. She stays. He goes back, and back again. She meets someone steadier, builds a life, has children. He returns intermittently, and the connection between them remains incandescent and unresolved across a decade and a half.
The novel is structured as Lucy's long address to Gabe — written in second person, looking back — which gives it an elegiac, confessional tone from the first page. Santopolo is working in the tradition of romantic tragedy: the question is never whether Lucy and Gabe could have had a different life, but what the life they almost had costs her for years afterward. The September 11 opening is not decorative; the novel argues that they were forged by a moment of catastrophe, which made their bond feel more absolute than it might have been otherwise.
What it gets right
- 1.
First love imprints differently than later love — the person you are when you fall in love for the first time is not fully formed, which is what makes it so difficult to let go of.
- 2.
The novel makes a careful case that the life you build with a steadier person is not a lesser life, even if it lacks the charge of the one you didn't build.
- 3.
September 11 functions in the novel as a kind of origin wound — the event that made Lucy and Gabe feel fated, which may have been a distortion as much as a revelation.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jill Santopolo is an American author and the editorial director of Philomel Books, a children's imprint. She is the author of The Light We Lost and its companion novel More Than Words, as well as several middle-grade and young adult series. The Light We Lost, published in 2017, was her debut novel for adults and became a bestseller, selected for prominent book clubs and translated into more than forty languages. She holds degrees from Columbia and Johns Hopkins and lives in New York City.
