Draft:If He Had Been With Me

• Comment: Fails WP:NBOOK, requires significant coverage about this book (not other books by the author) in multiple reliable secondary sources. Dan arndt (talk) 02:52, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

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If He had been with Me is a novel within the genre of Young Adult Contemporary Fiction written by Laura Nowlin, published by Sourcebooks Fire on April 1, 2013. It is Nowlin’s first published book and soon became a New York Times bestseller after becoming a sensation on BookTok and achieved number-one status in 2023. This book contains themes of love, grief and regret.

Plot

This novel is told in the past tense and is told by Autumn as she describes her life with Phineas Smith, her next-door neighbour all throughout her childhood and teenage years. Their mothers have been best friends since childhood and when they both were pregnant one spring, Aunt Angelina moved next door. The story of both Phineas’s and Autumn’s fathers has been complicated, and so living next to each other made it easy to support each other. We follow Autumn through high school and all of the experiences that come with it, including building friendships, falling in love, as well as all the confusing thoughts and feelings. Autumn talks about how she feels in all of these situations, and also discusses her regrets and what-ifs. In the meantime, we follow her through her toughest losses and periods of grief.

This book is a retelling of Autumn’s life and foreshadows the future by starting with details from the ending in the first chapter. By telling the story in this way reader can anticipate what is going to happen but still have hope for the future of the book. After we have been given details about the end as well as some background information on Autumn’s childhood and how she got to know Phineas. We get to follow her when she starts high school, where she becomes part of a friend group in the same year as her. The group consists of three boys and four girls, of which Autumn knows Sasha from before. The group consists of Autumn, Sasha, Angie, Brooke, Jamie, Noah and Alex. Autumn falls in love with one of the boys, Jamie, and within the first three weeks of school, they are in a relationship. He keeps pushing for sex throughout their entire relationship and he never seems to understand that Autumn wants her first time to be something special and almost magical.

While out shopping with Sasha waiting out the hours before they are supposed to meet up with Jamie and Alex (who Sasha is in a relationship with), they go into a cheap jewellery store where Autumn finds a plastic tiara that she ends up adoring and so, she buys it. This seems to spark some sort of comfort since she continues to wear it almost every day and it is a conversation starter a number of times. She receives a few new tiaras from friends and family. Most people aside from her friends dislike the tiaras and judge her for them, but Phineas, nicknamed Finn (Autumn calls him Finny), asks her about it once and then accepts them as a part of her.

The friend group spend most of their time together during their years in high school, and with time something becomes different. Readers will notice that something has changed, Jamie and their friends have changed. He starts spending a lot of time with Sasha, for example going to the cinema together or generally just hanging out the two of them. Another thing that changes is that Angie and her boyfriend get pregnant after being together for some time and they end up getting married so that their families will approve. Jamie breaks up with Autumn, accusing her of being depressed all of the time. He then reveals that he and Sasha have gained feelings for each other and have been cheating on Autumn. The one to come and console Autumn when she feels betrayed by everyone, is Finny. He takes care of her and takes her out of the house to get her to think about something else. They spend lots of time together and one day, Angie goes into labour and so they go and visit her and her new baby together.

During this time she stops wearing her tiaras, which could be read into as a sign that she is embracing change. She and Finny spend loads of time together and one weekend when ‘The Mothers’ are gone, they end up talking about their past. They make out for a while and they have sex and confess their love for each other. During the time period that Autumn was with Jamie, Finny had been with Sylvie and still was. He goes to break up with Sylvie so he and Autumn can finally be together, but he never comes back home. He and Sylvie get into a car crash and he gets electrocuted and dies. A month later, Autumn tries to take her life in Finny’s old room. She ends up surviving and finds out at the hospital that she is pregnant. She decides that she needs to stay alive for Finny and for their baby.

Major themes

One major theme throughout the book is love and jealousy. Autumn and Finny are jealous of the love the other has for another person. They want to be the ones loving each other but never speak it out loud until the end of the book. Finny mentions that he punched his wall when he thought he had really lost his chance with Autumn, and she mentions that she wanted to push Sylvie in front of the bus when she had hurt Finny. It is clear that they have always had a special bond, whenever they discuss their childhood together with other people, the friends are always shocked that they were allowed to have sleepovers and such. Their love for each other has always been there and they simply never talked about it. This relates to the following themes that are mentioned below.

Loss and grief is also a big theme in this book. Autumn struggles a lot with the seasonal changes and goes to a therapist for a while because of her seasonal depression. It is tough for her seeing her mother struggle so much with her mental health and also relating to it in different ways. Her father is usually not at home either and her parents end up getting a divorce because of it. This must be a bit of a relief as well as something sad, it’s a change that might be necessary but it doesn’t make it any easier. Add to that the betrayal from her friends and ex-boyfriend who cheats on her as well as keeping their secret from her. She goes through a lot and everything is just piled onto Autumn. The constant feeling of loss and grief in different ways keeps her down. She lives through betrayal from her old friend group, the new friends, and then her boyfriend as well. Apart from that you have Finny’s death and her own attempted suicide.

Autumn also dwells quite a bit on regrets and ‘what-ifs’, both in the past and in the present. She wishes she had told Finny earlier about her feelings and been more honest with him about how she truly felt. She seems to regret her relationship with Jamie quite a bit, or atleast parts of it. She regrets the extent of their relationship and that it lasted so long when it clearly wasn't a healthy or a respectful one. She would always compare Jamie and his actions to what she thought Finny would have done in the same situation. The regret and what-ifs don’t only happen to Autumn, but also her family and friends. They realise the situations they’ve put others through, and most probably realised their behaviour wasn’t okay. An example of this is when Autumn's friend group say that they regret their behaviour and for protecting Jamie and Sasha’s secret.

Development history

This is a novel within the genre Young Adult Contemporary Fiction and is Laura Nowlin’s first book. She has written a sequel, If only I had told her, and is the same storyline but told from Finny's perspective. The sequel was published in February 2024. Nowlin has also written This Song is (not) for You which was published in February 2016.

Nowlin has not spoken out about the books and seems to keep a low profile on social media. The public opinion on this novel is very varied as is noticeable when looking at different websites and reviews. While the book was first published in 2013, it has been reprinted in 2019 with a modification of the cover and the internal design of the book. This book became a sensation on TikTok’s booktok and with this as a boost, became a New York Times bestseller in 2023. Kirkus reviews has written a review on the book, which summarises the events in the book.