The irony that my debut novel, Happily Never Afterlife, is a romcom is not lost on me. It’s the type of book I never wanted to write. Ever. In fact, I refused to write the assigned romantic comedy short story for a competition I paid money to participate in. I never wanted to write about love. Now it’s the subject of my first book. Life’s a cruel bitch sometimes.
To be honest, my life has not been the best picture of what love should look like. I am envious of the people who find it so early in their lives. Like my parents. They met in high school and celebrated 40 years of marriage in February. I feel like they are some of the lucky few who got it right the first time around. But the rest of us stuck here watching the years tick by with nothing to show for it but heartbreak after heartbreak? We’re a bit jaded and jealous. We find ourselves asking, “What’s so wrong with me?” At least I have asked myself that for years. Why is this something so easy for others and impossible for me?
After two years of marriage, my ex-husband and I divorced. We had seven years together, but the relationship needed to end. Divorce saved my life, and I don’t take that for granted. Navigating the world post-divorce has impacted my perceptions of love – and not for the better. It’s hard to start over from scratch, to rebuild a life when you thought you had that happily ever after that you always dreamed of. I blame Disney for putting these unrealistic expectations in our heads of what love should look like. Love only looks like that in fiction.
So in 2024 when I wrote my first draft of Happily Never Afterlife, no one was more surprised than me. Everyone who’s close to me in my life will also tell you that they never expected me to write a love story. Yet here we are. Who’d have thunk it.
By the time 2024 rolled around, I had been divorced for three years. I tried dating in 2021, but it always ended disastrously, so I gave up on the endeavor. The years went by, and I no longer believed in love. For other people? Sure. They had the romantic love I fear I would always be searching for. But me? No, that love just is not meant for me. Some people are blessed with a loving partnership. I just was not one of them.
So I began writing the book I never wanted to write. A story about love. Written by a woman who didn’t believe in it. A cynic firmly established in the belief that she will die alone because she is fundamentally unlovable as a person. That’s the person who sat down and began writing the story of Mae Carmine, an elderly woman who finds her entire existence flipped upside down when she dies. Learning to navigate the love she holds for her husband and the person she was when she was alive, and coming to terms with the reality that maybe not everything in her life was as it seemed.
I had finished my second draft of the book when I met someone who was very important to me. He made me feel like for the first time in my life that I was deserving of being loved for who I was. For a very brief moment in time, I was deeply in love with someone who felt like my soulmate. Like I had finally found the one thing I had always wanted. At last! Love was attainable! There was a beautiful soul out there who loved me, saw me, believed in me. It was like everything I had poured onto these pages had manifested and he magically came into my orbit. I was on top of the world. I was, as Jane Austin might say, “incandescently happy.”
Until the rug was pulled out from under me, and that love I cherished so deeply was gone in the blink of an eye. Unexpected and without warning.
Love no longer existed. Again.
I lost sleep. I lost weight. I lost my ability to eat. I lost my will to take care of myself. I lost the woman I had grown into while in that relationship. A year of my life felt like it went down the drain. I lost the one thing that truly mattered to me, and I held onto the false hope that one day it would come back to me.
I knew it wouldn’t. A choice was made, and the reality was that I was never “the one.” I wasn’t worth fighting for. I would never be worth fighting for. I was discarded, and there would be no reconciliation, even though it’s what I spent months desperately praying for to any god out there in the heavens and hells that would listen.
Here I was, unable to get myself out of bed. Stuck with an unfinished novel about love just staring me in the face, taunting me. For months, I was angry at this novel. My friends talked me off the ledge more than once when I said I was going to delete the files. I was going to burn it. Delete it. Erase all traces of it from existence. No one wants to read a love story written by a heartbroken and defeated writer. Right?
I spent a few months leaving the draft alone. I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t read about the love story I had written. It just made me angry. I was already crying for hours every day in those early months of the aftermath. I couldn’t handle reading – what I believed at the time was a stupid love story.
But then something kind of amazing happened when I finally opened up that draft.
I wasn’t reading the same story I had written a year prior. That story was written by a woman who had never experienced love. She damn sure knew how to write about what love wasn’t. She knew from her marriage how to write the antagonist. But the woman reading the draft with fresh eyes? Well, she had just experienced a love that consumed her. She experienced safety and tenderness for the first time. She knew what was now capable in a love story. And she now knew the gruesome pain of a heartbreak that would never fully heal.
And that woman – the one who loved and lost – she knew how to write about love.
With fresh eyes, I read what my characters were trying to tell me. I broke down sobbing as I read passages I had forgotten I wrote. They seemed to be exactly what I needed to hear. That’s when I knew what direction I needed to go with this novel to make it worth being read by an audience one day.
Hope. The story needed hope. Just like I needed hope.
This was no longer just a silly musing about a grumpy old woman trying to find her husband in the Afterlife. This became so much deeper – maybe too deep for a romcom. It became a story about second chances and realizing that it’s never too late to find love. It’s a story about self-discovery and acceptance. It’s about how complicated love can be and how our love can often blind us to the truth. It’s about how, despite being full of grief and character flaws, love can still be found.
I set out to finish the next few rounds of drafts in the novel now that I understood the message I needed to share. I had tasted love, and it was sweeter than any forbidden fruit Eve could have fathomed. I lost it – and in doing so – risked losing myself too. But I had, for a small glimmer of time, had love. And if my characters could find love, then maybe I could hold onto the hope that I would find it again one day, too.
To be honest, most days I still don’t believe love is something that is meant for me. That running narrative in my head telling me that I will never be good enough, never be worth fighting for, never worth loving. It still tugs at me, and I feel jaded and disillusioned by love most of the time.
But when I worked on this novel, that’s when I felt free to explore the love stories I always dreamed of. I could control the narrative on the page. I could play pretend like I did when I was a little girl playing with my dolls. I could orchestrate my Barbie and Ken dolls to fall in love and live happily ever after. Now, I was doing it on the page. I could take some delight in watching my characters play out the things I had always wanted in a relationship of my own. It provided an outlet and an escape from the reality I was telling myself. Within the safety of my own worlds, I could play out the fantasy of being loved, cherished, fought for. I could pretend like this kind of love was something I was worthy of.
It became healing to watch this story unfold and to keep alive the hope that maybe it’s not too late. Maybe there are second chances. Maybe love can be found again. And maybe this time around, that love will actually be real and true.
That’s when it shifted. I no longer had the thought of putting this manuscript in a dumpster and setting it on fire. This novel wasn’t trash because a woman who didn’t believe in love wrote it. This novel was good because it was written by a woman who didn’t believe in love, who then found love and then lost it again. It was written by a woman who experienced the full range of emotions from the highest peak of love to the deepest low of heartbreak. A woman who now sees what could be possible and how she could take these painful lessons and turn them into something beautiful.
So yes, Happily Never Afterlife was written by a jaded cynic and edited by a closeted hopeless romantic with hope in her heart. There were many tears shed in the process as I relieved the pain of my own failures, but I kept typing, kept writing. I broke. I fell apart. I questioned whether what I was doing was even worth it. I wanted to give up so many times. Today, as I hold the book in my hands, I feel very thankful that I didn’t call it quits.
I never wanted to write a romcom or a story that had a happy ending. That’s not how my life has played out so far. I wanted to stick to my creepy, dark, ambiguous tone I’ve used in most of my short stories. That’s where I found safety. I could write about the dark. I’ve lived in it for years with the traumas held within my past. But to endeavor to write a story that focuses on the light? That was out of my comfort zone. And it’s one of the best damn things I have ever done in my life.
I don’t know what the future holds for me. Maybe there is someone out there who’s been waiting their whole life to love someone like me. Or maybe there’s not, and I die alone. But the point is that, somewhere deep down, the ember of hope is flickering and desperate to catch fire in my soul. And if it takes me writing down the book I never wanted to write to find that kernel of hope again, then so be it.
