Mystery |
Young Adult Literature |
Young Adult Fiction |
Summary
Summary
Cody and Meg were inseparable...
Until they weren't.
When her best friend, Meg, drinks a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner alone in a motel room, Cody is understandably shocked and devastated. She and Meg shared everything--so how was there no warning? But when Cody travels to Meg's college town to pack up the belongings left behind, she discovers that there's a lot that Meg never told her. About her old roommates, the sort of people Cody never would have met in her dead-end small town in Washington. About Ben McAllister, the boy with a guitar and a sneer, and some secrets of his own. And about an encrypted computer file that Cody can't open--until she does, and suddenly everything Cody thought she knew about her best friend's death gets thrown into question.
" I Was Here is a pitch-perfect blend of mystery, tragedy, and romance. Gayle Forman has given us an unflinchingly honest portrait of the bravery that it takes to live after devastating loss."
-- Stephen Chbosky , author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Author Notes
Gayle Forman is an award-winning, young adult author, who was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1970. Forman began her career as a journalist, writing for Seventeen magazine. Her work has since appeared in publications such as Details, Jane, The Nation, Elle, Cosmopolitan and The New York Times Magazine.
In 2002, she took a trip around the world. The experience helped to form her first book, a travelogue entitled, You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World, which was published in 2004.
Her first YA fiction was her novel, Sisters in Sanity, which was published in 2007 and based on one of her articles for Seventeen. Her other YA titles include: If I Stay and its companion, Where She Went; Just One Day, and its sequels, Just One Year and Just One Night. In 2015 she made The New York Times Best Seller List with her titles I Was Hereand Where She Went.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As she did in If I Stay, Forman offers an introspective examination of the line between life and death, and the courage it takes to persist. College freshman Meg's suicide shocks no one more than her best friend Cody. To make Meg's death even more unsettling, the last six months of her emails are missing from her computer. Certain that an outsider-a correspondent of Meg's-pushed her to take her own life, Cody embarks on a quest to identify the culprit. Her journey proves both enlightening and dangerous as she traces the steps Meg took during her last weeks of life. As the pieces of a disturbing puzzle start to fit together, Cody takes an enormous risk to come to terms with Meg's final decision and her own guilt. Beyond exploring Cody's grief, this psychologically incisive book delves into her complex relationships with Tricia, her single mother; Meg's more conventional family; and, most profoundly, the boy who stole and wounded Meg's heart shortly before her death. Ages 14-up. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Cody and her best friend Meg had plans to move to Seattle after high school, where they would eat in dives, listen to up-and-coming bands, and live lives very different from their current small-town existences. But when Meg instead goes away to college, leaving Cody behind, their friendship begins to strain. Then Cody receives an email from Meg stating that she has made the decision to take her own life. What follows is Codys painful journey to understand her friends final decision. Formans well-paced tearjerker paints a compelling picture of loss, betrayal, and fear. Narrator Maries melancholy yet ardent portrayal moves the reading experience from painful to downright depressing -- listeners are pulled into the story through the intensity of emotion and constantly reminded of the pain by the mournful tone. Though bleak, it is a compelling listen. sin gaetano (c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Eighteen-year-old Cody's best friend, Meg, has committed suicide, and Cody is determined to discover why and how it could be that she didn't sense what Meg was contemplating. As she begins her investigation, she meets a young musician, Ben, with whom Meg was obsessed but who rejected her. How responsible might he have been for Meg's death? How will Cody deal with his growing presence in her own life? And what is the meaning of the strange, encrypted message she discovers on Meg's computer? At first Cody finds more questions than answers, but she is dogged in her pursuit of knowledge and gradually comes ever closer to the startling truth. Suicide has always been a subject in YA literature, and to her credit, Forman handles it sensitively and gracefully, raising important issues of the ethics and morality of the subject. The combination mystery and love story is sure to reach a wide readership and excite essential discussion. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the big-budget film adaptation of Forman's best-seller If I Stay (2009) still lingering in theaters, this latest offering should generate massive teen interest.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THIS REVIEW COMES with a disclaimer: The subject is radioactively sad. There are no silver linings or surprise resurrections in either of these devastating novels in which teenagers take their own lives. Even if you think you have a high tolerance for gut-wrenching fiction, the tragedy may knock you flat. Still, reading "The Last Time We Say Goodbye" feels like exploring a forest after it's been decimated by wildfire. You will see new shoots sprouting where you least expect them. Our guide through the post-suicide wreckage in Raymond, Neb. (population 179), is 18-year-old Alexis Riggs, whose younger brother, Tyler, has been dead for seven weeks. She's a plain-spoken math whiz with no patience for euphemism: "God, I hate that pause, while the person speaking searches for the most watered down way to say died. . . . I'm determined to be straight about it. My brother killed himself. In our garage. With a hunting rifle. This makes it sound like the most morbid game of Clue ever, but there it is." While begrudgingly journaling for a therapist, Lex distances herself from well-intentioned friends and dumps a thoughtful, self-aware boyfriend of the sort in short supply in actual high schools. He's the only weak link in Cynthia Hand's brave book, which is a departure from her Unearthly series. To begin with, there are no angels; according to an author's note, it's based on events that happened in Hand's family. Perhaps this is why the story gathers its strongest momentum on the home front. There isn't a lot of time for Lex's own heartbreak, whipsawed as she is between resentment of her AWOL father and concern for her mother. We see her after Ty's first suicide attempt two years earlier, emptying bullets from her dad's left-behind guns and then sealing them in a box labeled "Romance Novels." The moment is heartbreaking; and of course, Lex is haunted by the bullets she failed to hide. Despite the finality of Ty's absence - or maybe because of it - Lex continues to struggle with questions. Why does she still smell his cologne? What should she do with the letter he left in his bedroom for a girl named Ashley? Why are certain family pictures missing? "I Was Here" also hinges on a survivor's search for answers and struggle to envision the future. In Gayle Forman's latest irresistible tear-jerker, the survivor is Cody Reynolds, a house cleaner and first-year community college student, whose best friend, Meg Garcia, recently drank a bottle of poison and died alone in a Tacoma motel room. Meg was an academic superstar and golden girl who gave no indication that she was contemplating suicide - yet her death was meticulously orchestrated, down to the time-delayed emails delivered to her parents and Cody. Cody is (understandably) livid at Meg for the ice-water shock of her absence and for landing Cody on the eulogy circuit at so many stultifying memorial services. She says of her friend: "It was bad enough she had to die. On purpose. But for subjecting me to all this, I could kill her." Suffocated by sympathy, Cody takes the chance to leave town when the Garcias ask her to pack up Meg's college room. What she finds there sends her on a topsy-turvy post-mortem trip through the world her friend built without her. (It includes a guy who is a gem in jerk's clothing. P.S.A. for teenagers: In real life, jerks don't change.) As she gets to know Meg's posse and scrutinizes Meg's final, perplexing decisions, Cody is determined to hunt down the piece of information she believes will complete the puzzle of her friend's suicide. Of course, that single fact doesn't exist. The satisfaction comes from watching Cody rebuild her life despite the bottomless guilt and uncertainty. Her quest for peace, like Lex's, elevates a potentially lugubrious story to a place of humor and grace. Forman and Hand spin heartbreak into mysteries that remain realistically, uncomfortably unsolved. Readers requiring total resolution may want to steer clear. But braver souls, teenagers and adults alike, will be rewarded for heeding Lady Macbeth's advice, echoed in a chilling context by Forman: "Screw your courage to the sticking place." The payoff may not be particularly sweet in either book, but it is hard-earned and life affirming, which is infinitely more rewarding. ELISABETH EGAN'S debut novel, "A Window Opens," will be published in the summer.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-Cody and Meg have been inseparable since childhood. They planned to leave their small town in Washington and move to Seattle to go to college, but that changed when Meg got a full scholarship to a small, prestigious private college in Tacoma, WA. Having no scholarships or money saved, Cody is now stuck in town, cleaning houses to have a little bit of money to give to her mom toward living expenses and to take a couple classes at the local community college. Those classes have gone by the wayside, though, since news came of Meg's suicide. Meticulously planned, her former best friend ordered a poison that had a high fatality rate, and sent emails to friends and family on a timed delay so that no one could interfere with her fatal decision. Cody struggles to figure out why Meg took her own life and puzzles over a suspicious line in her friend's suicide email. The distraught but determined teen begins to encrypt files on Meg's laptop, which lead her to a suicide support group and posts from All_BS, a Pied Piper-type character who encourages suicide as a way out. As she goes further down the rabbit hole, Cody comes to the realization that she needs to forgive Meg, and, more importantly, herself. Reminiscent of Nina LaCour's Hold Still (Dutton, 2009), Anna Jarzab's All Unquiet Things (Delacorte, 2010), and Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why (Penguin, 2007), teens will clamor for this latest offering from the author of If I Stay (Dutton, 2009). Have multiple copies in your collection.-Suanne B. Roush, formerly at Osceola High School, Seminole, FL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Part tautly paced mystery, part psychological study of suicide and its aftereffects. When Cody's best friend, Meg, kills herself by downing cleaning fluid in a motel room, she tidily leaves behind a tip for the maid and time-delayed emails for Cody, her parents and the police. Cody's devastated: After all, she and Meg were inseparable since kindergarten. That is, they were close until talented Meg escaped their dead-end town to attend college on a fellowship while Cody stayed behind. But when Cody travels to Meg's college town to pack up what's left of Meg's life, she's startled by how much doesn't make sense: Why would someone so full of promise and life choose death? How much did Meg's housemates know about her fateful decision? And why does Meg have an encrypted file on her computer? Seeking to justify the picture of the friend she thought she knew with the one she's piecing together, Cody faces questions about their friendship, along with a growing attraction for Ben, the boy she believes broke Meg's heart. Forman's characters are all too human: Cody's willingness to ignore what doesn't fit her picture of Meg as she struggles to come to terms with her sadness and guilt rings true of those left behind to face the tragedy of suicide. An engrossing and provocative look at the devastating finality of suicide, survivor's guilt, the complicated nature of responsibility and even the role of the Internet in life-and-death decisions. (Fiction. 14 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 The day after Meg died, I received this letter: I regret to inform you that I have had to take my own life. This decision has been a long time coming, and was mine alone to make. I know it will cause you pain, and for that I am sorry, but please know that I needed to end my own pain. This has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. It's not your fault. Meg She emailed copies of the letter to her parents and to me, and to the Tacoma police department, along with another note informing them which motel she was at, which room she was in, what poison she had ingested, and how her body should be safely handled. On the pillow at the motel room was another note--instructing the maid to call the police and not touch her body--along with a fifty-dollar tip. She sent the emails on a time delay. So that she would be long gone by the time we received them. Of course, I didn't know any of that until later. So when I first read Meg's email on the computer at our town's public library, I thought it had to be some kind of joke. Or a hoax. So I called Meg, and when she didn't answer, I called her parents. "Did you get Meg's email?" I asked them. "What email?" Chapter 2 There are memorial services. And there are vigils. And then there are the prayer circles. It gets hard to keep them straight. At the vigils, you hold candles, but sometimes you do that at the prayer circles. At the memorial services, people talk, though what is there to say? It was bad enough she had to die. On purpose. But for subjecting me to all of this, I could kill her. "Cody, are you ready?" Tricia calls. It is late on a Thursday afternoon, and we are going to the fifth service in the past month. This one is a candlelight vigil. I think. I emerge from my bedroom. My mother is zipping up the black cocktail dress she picked up from the Goodwill after Meg died. She's been using it as her funeral dress, but I'm sure that once this blows over, it'll go into rotation as a going-out dress. She looks hot in it. Like so many people in town, mourning becomes her. "Why aren't you dressed?" she asks. "All my nice clothes are dirty." "What nice clothes?" "Fine, all my vaguely funereal clothes are dirty." "Dirty never stopped you before." We glare at each other. When I was eight, Tricia announced I was old enough to do my own laundry. I hate doing laundry. You can see where this leads. "I don't get why we have to go to another one," I say. "Because the town needs to process." "Cheese needs to process. The town needs to find another drama to distract itself with." There are fifteen hundred and seventy-four people in our town according to the fading sign on the highway. "Fifteen hundred and seventy-three," Meg said when she escaped to college in Tacoma on a full scholarship last fall. "Fifteen hundred and seventy-two when you come to Seattle and we get our apartment together," she'd added. It remains stuck at fifteen hundred and seventy-three now, and I suspect it'll stay there until someone else is born or dies. Most people don't leave. Even when Tammy Henthoff and Matt Parner left their respective spouses to run off together--the gossip that was the hottest news before Meg--they moved to an RV park on the edge of town. "Do I have to go?" I'm not sure why I bother to ask her this. Tricia is my mother but she's not an authority in that way. I know why I have to go. For Joe and Sue. They're Meg's parents. Or they were. I keep stumbling over the verb tenses. Do you cease being someone's parent because they died? Because they died on purpose? Joe and Sue look blasted into heartbreak, the hollows under their eyes so deep I don't see how they'll ever go away. And it's for them I find my least-stinky dress and put it on. I get ready to sing. Again. Amazing Grace. How Vile the Sound. Chapter 3 I've written a dozen mental eulogies for Meg, imagining all the things I might say about her. Like how when we met in the first week of kindergarten she made me a picture of us, with both our names, and some words I didn't understand because unlike Meg, I could not yet read or write. "It says 'best friends,'" she'd explained. And like all things Meg wanted or predicted, it turned out to be true. I might talk about how I still have that picture. I keep it in a metal toolbox that houses all my most important things, and it is creased from age and multiple viewings. Or I might talk about how Meg knew things about people that they might not know themselves. She knew the precise number of times in a row everyone generally sneezed; there's a pattern to it, apparently. I was three; Scottie and Sue four, Joe was two, Meg was five. Meg could also remember what you wore for every picture day, every Halloween. She was like the archive of my history. And also the creator of it, too, because almost every one of those Halloweens was spent with her, usually in some costume she dreamed up. Or I might talk about Meg and her obsession with firefly songs. It started in ninth grade when she'd picked up a vinyl single by a band called Heavens to Betsy. She'd dragged me back to her room and played me the scratchy record on that old turntable she'd bought at a church jumble sale for a dollar and rewired herself, with a little help from YouTube instructional videos. And you will never know how it feels to light up the sky. You will never know how it feels to be a firefly, Corin Tucker sang in a voice so simultaneously strong and vulnerable that it seemed almost inhuman. After the Heavens to Betsy discovery, Meg went on a mission to find every good firefly song ever written. In true Meg fashion, within a few weeks she'd amassed an exhaustive list. "Have you ever even seen a firefly?" I'd asked her as she worked on her playlist. I knew she hadn't. Like me, Meg had never been east of the Rockies. "I have time," she'd said, opening her arms, as if to demonstrate just how much life there was out there, waiting for her. # Joe and Sue asked me to speak at that first service, the big one that should've been held in the Catholic church the Garcias had attended for years, but wasn't because Father Grady, though a friend of the family, was a rules man. He told the Garcias that Meg had committed a cardinal sin and therefore her soul wouldn't be admitted to heaven, nor her body to the Catholic cemetery. The last bit was theoretical. It took several weeks after Meg's death for investigators to release her body. Apparently the poison she'd used was rare, though anyone who knew Meg wouldn't be surprised by this. She never wore clothes from chain stores, always listened to bands no one else had heard of. Naturally, she found some obscure poison to swallow. So the casket everyone had sobbed over at that first big service had been empty and there'd been no burial. I'd overheard Meg's uncle Xavier tell his girlfriend that maybe it would be better if there never was one. No one knew what to write on the gravestone. "Everything sounds like a reproach," he'd said. I tried to write a eulogy for that service. I did. I pulled out the disc Meg had burned of firefly songs for inspiration. The third one up was the Bishop Allen track "Fireflies." I don't know if I ever really listened to the words before, because when I did now, they were like a smack from her grave: It says you can still forgive her. And she will forgive you back. But I don't know that I can. And I don't know that she did. I told Joe and Sue that I was sorry, that I couldn't give a eulogy, that I just couldn't think of anything to say. It was the first time I ever lied to them. # Today's service is being held in the Rotary Club, so it's not one of the official religious services, though the speaker appears to be some kind of reverend. I'm not sure where they keep coming from, all these speakers who didn't really know Meg. After it's over, Sue invites me over for yet another reception at the house. I used to spend so much time at Meg's house that I could tell what kind of mood Sue was in by what I smelled when I walked through the door. Butter meant baking, which meant she was melancholy and needed cheering. Spicy meant she was happy and making hot Mexican food for Joe, even though it hurt her stomach. Popcorn meant that she was in bed, in the dark, not cooking anything, and Meg and Scottie were left to their own devices, which meant a buffet of microwave snack foods. On those days, Joe would joke how lucky we kids were to get to pig out like this as he made his way upstairs to check on Sue. We all played along, but usually, after the second or third microwave corndog, you kind of wanted to throw up. I know the Garcias so well that when I called that morning after getting Meg's email, I knew even though it was eleven o'clock on a Saturday that Sue would be still in bed but not sleeping; she said she never did learn to sleep in once her kids stopped waking up early. And Joe would have the coffee brewed and the morning paper spread out over the kitchen table. Scottie would be watching cartoons. Consistency was one of the many things I loved about Meg's house. So different from mine where the earliest Tricia usually woke was noon, and some days you might find her pouring bowls of cereal, and some days you might find the house empty, Tricia's bed untouched since the night before. But now there's a different kind of constancy about the Garcia household, one that is far less inviting. Still, when Sue asks me over, much as I'd prefer to refuse the invitation, I don't. # The crowd of cars outside the house is thinner than it was in the early days when the whole town came on sympathy calls carrying Pyrex dishes. It was a little hard to take, all those casseroles and the "I'm so sorry for your losses" that accompanied them. Because elsewhere in town, the gossip was flying. Didn't surprise me. Girl always hung her freak flag high, I heard people whispering in the Circle K. Meg and I both knew that some people said things like that about her--in our town she was like a rose blooming in the desert; it confused folks--but with her dead, this sentiment no longer felt like a badge of honor. And it wasn't just Meg they went after. At the bar where Tricia worked, I overheard a couple of townies sniping about Sue. "As a mother, I would know if my daughter was suicidal." This coming from the mother of Carrie Tarkington, who had slept with half the school. I was about to ask Mrs. Tarkington if, being all-knowing, she knew that. But then her friend replied. "Sue? Are you joking. That woman is floating in space on a good day," and I felt sucker punched by their cruelty. "How would you feel if you'd just lost your child, you bitches?" I'd sneered. Tricia had had to escort me home. After today's service, Tricia has to go to work so she drops me off at the Garcias'. I let myself in. Joe and Sue hug me tight and for a moment longer than is comfortable. I know that they must take some solace in me being here but I can hear Sue's silent questions when she looks at me, and I know that all the questions boil down to one: Did you know? I don't know what would be worse. If I did know and didn't tell them, or the truth, which is that even though Meg was my best friend and I have told her everything there is to tell about me and I assumed she'd done the same, I had no idea. Not a clue. This decision has been a long time coming, she wrote in her note. A long time coming? How long is that? Weeks? Months? Years? I have known Meg since kindergarten. We have been best friends, sisters almost, ever since. How long has this decision been coming without her telling me? And more to the point, why didn't she tell me? Excerpted from I Was Here by Gayle Forman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.