Usually, when I sit down to write these small insights into the process of creating my latest novel, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to talk about. Not this time. I’ve had a document created for over a month, with just one sentence written on it, taunting me with its unfinishedness. I know you’re dying to know the sentence that’s been tormenting me, so let me bestow the “magic” upon you…

“Crash Into You might be the hardest book I’ve written.”

That doesn’t really seem like something that can hold up an entire project, right? But it has. My apologies if you were expecting something more exciting, but that sentence is the truth.

I’ve thought a lot about why it’s been so hard to get started on this blog post, and the best I’ve come up with is probably because of that sentence. Writing the novel was really hard, so writing about the novel is also hard. But this realisation also feels illogical to me, because I’ve written a book that has a main character struggling with PTSD, and I’ve written a book with a main character who has some deep childhood trauma and betrayal. And I was able to bang out blog posts about writing those books just fine. But blog-posting for this book, with a main character experiencing profound grief? My brain’s been stuck on “No can do, buckeroo.”

I suppose it’s confession time. The reason it’s been six years since my last angsty, punch-the-author-in-the-gut-while-writing book was released is because, honestly, I just haven’t had the mental bandwidth to put myself through the wringer to create another book that was going to affect my mental health while I lived this experience with my character.

Writing novels with heavy or angsty themes—especially as an empathetic writer who loves writing first-person point of view and gets deep into my character’s heads with all their emotions, good and not so good—are always incredibly challenging for me. This is why Crash Into You is only my third “heavy” book in seventeen published novels. I started writing this one in 2016 while working on my debut, Ask, Tell, while I had a frenzy of ideas I just had to write. But once I had some bones down, I abandoned the manuscript pretty much every time I opened it. Until last year, when I finally went “Yep, I can do this now.”

I think Crash Into You may be the novel I’m the most proud of and if you’ve read the jacket copy, then you’ll have an idea of what it’s about (and may have twigged that it’s different from my usual novels, in that it’s not a contemporary romance). It started as that genre, until I realised I had to go all in on either grief or romance. I chose grief (with a little side dose of a romantic element because I am me, after all).

But then I had to write about grief. Which was a conundrum because I’ve been fortunate that in my forty-cough years I’ve never experienced the death of someone close to me. I was unsure about how to be accurate, but not so accurate that I left people feeling like I’d steamrolled their emotions so flat that they could never been repaired.

The main question I kept asking myself was: How do I portray my main character, Beth, as she navigates the death of her twin sister, Andy, in a way that feels authentic, but also isn’t so heavy that people don’t want to stay with her?

And my answer to myself was always the same: Let people witness the messiness and uncertainty and pain of her grief, but also let them witness the beauty and love and joy in her relationship with the person Beth loves more than anyone.

Maybe I’m an optimist, or maybe I’m naïve or silly, but I have to believe that when I inevitably lose someone I love deeply, that like Beth—it’s going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s going to take time and a whole lot of awfulness to move through that, but I’ll be “okay” in the end.

There’s a scene in the television show WandaVision about grief that contains a line that lives permanently in my head: “But what is grief, if not love persevering?” I couldn’t find a place to use that quote in this novel that didn’t feel shoehorned in by explaining the origin of it, but it perfectly sums up how I feel about the book.

Crash Into You is a book about grief, but mostly—I think it’s a book about love.