What I Had Before I Had You What I Had Before I Had You

What I Had Before I Had You

A Novel

    • 3.7 • 37 Ratings
    • $6.99

Publisher Description

A woman must face the truth about her past in this luminous, evocative novel of parents and children, guilt and forgiveness, memory and magical thinking.

Olivia Reed was fifteen when she left her hometown of Ocean Vista on the Jersey Shore. Two decades later, divorced and unstrung, she returns with her teenage daughter, Carrie, and nine-year-old son, Daniel, recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Distracted by thoughts of the past, Olivia fails to notice when Daniel disappears from her side. Her frantic search for him sparks memories of the summer of 1987, when she exploded out of the cocoon of her mother’s fierce, smothering love and into a sudden, full-throttle adolescence, complete with dangerous new friends, first love, and a rebellion so intense that it utterly recharted the course of her life.

Olivia’s mother, Myla, was a practicing psychic whose powers waxed and waned along with her mercurial moods. Myla raised Olivia to be a guarded child, and also to believe in the ever-present infant ghosts of her twin sisters, whom Myla took care of as if they were alive—diapers, baby food, an empty nursery kept like a shrine. At fifteen, Olivia saw her sisters for the first time, not as ghostly infants but as teenagers on the beach. But when Myla denied her vision, Olivia set out to learn the truth—a journey that led to shattering discoveries about herself and her family.

Sarah Cornwell seamlessly weaves together the past and the present in this riveting debut novel, as she examines the relationships between mothers and daughters, and the powerful forces of loss, family history, and magical thinking.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2014
January 7
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
288
Pages
PUBLISHER
Harper
SELLER
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS
SIZE
1.1
MB
Y Y
2013
Welcome Home, Stranger Welcome Home, Stranger
2023
Her Body and Other Parties Her Body and Other Parties
2017
Cloud Girls Cloud Girls
2023
The Third Person The Third Person
2011
The Insatiable Volt Sisters The Insatiable Volt Sisters
2023
This is the Water This is the Water
2014
A Trick of Nature: A Novel A Trick of Nature: A Novel
2000
The Scent of Rain and Lightning The Scent of Rain and Lightning
2010
The Language of Secrets The Language of Secrets
2010
The Girl Below The Girl Below
2012
My Coney Island Baby My Coney Island Baby
2019