My latest YA novel, Breathless, is the book I needed when I was eighteen. A very personal take on sex, love, friendship, first times, redefining yourself after the floor has been pulled out from under you, and learning to write your story. Here are 10 true-to-life moments from the book that mirror my own life…
Breathless
A week before my high school graduation, my dad came into my bedroom to tell me that he and my mom were splitting up. He also asked me not to tell anyone about the impending separation, not even my best friend.
Five days after graduation, my mom and I moved away from my hometown, my best friend, all my friends, the boy I liked, my dad, my dog, and my home. Whereas Claude and her mom go to a remote GA island for the summer, my mom and I went to the remote NC mountains.
That was the summer I had sex for the first time.
It was also the summer I really started writing seriously and began finding my voice. (Although instead of a novel, it was a play about Zelda Fitzgerald.)
I traveled to Cumberland Island—one of the islands that inspired the setting for the book—and met my husband, Justin Conway. The real-life Jeremiah Crew. JC. (I had named the character long before I met my husband.)
Every adventure we have in the book (except for the bike riding one) is an adventure my husband and I had while we were falling in love. The fireflies guiding our way through the dark. Wandering the grounds of the ruins at night. Long beach walks under a blood moon. Waiting for the turtles to appear. Sinking into the pluff mud (me in my sundress and rain boots, him in his Ranger Panties, the same shorts Jeremiah wears in the book). Getting trapped in a basement with the ghost of a woman who loves jewelry. All the things we shared with each other when no one else was listening.
Jared is a real person—a devoted reader of All the Bright Places who works at the inn on Cumberland Island.
Claude’s relationship with her mom is very similar to mine with my mom. All my life we’ve always been Penny and Jennifer, Jennifer and Penny. The Niven women.
Much of the family history of the Blackwoods comes from my own Niven family history.
My now husband taught me how to hunt for shark teeth by making circles in the sand. Now we live part-time in Los Angeles and part-time in coastal Georgia, just fifteen minutes from Cumberland Island by boat. We still go over and hunt for treasure and wade through the pluff mud and walk the beach under blood moons whenever we can. <3