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    What I Had Before I Had You: A Novel
    What I Had Before I Had You: A Novel
    What I Had Before I Had You: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    What I Had Before I Had You: A Novel

    Written by Sarah Cornwell

    Narrated by Karen White

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Written in radiant prose and with stunning psychological acuity, award-winning author Sarah Cornwell's What I Had Before I Had You is a deeply poignant story that captures the joys and sorrows of growing up and learning to let go.

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 7, 2014
    ISBN9780062337535
    Author

    Sarah Cornwell

    Sarah Cornwell grew up in Narberth, Pennsylvania. Her fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, and Hunger Mountain, among others, and her screen- writing has been honored with a Humanitas Prize. A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, Sarah has worked as an investigator of police misconduct, an MCAT tutor, a psychological research interviewer, and a toy seller. She lives in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for What I Had Before I Had You

    3.5/5

    42 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A beautiful work of literary fiction, What I Had Before I Met You by Sarah Cornwell is a look into the lives of one family and how bipolar disorder affected their lives. Cornwell’s writing is beautiful and brings the past and present to life for the reader allowing the reader a look into the lives of Olivia, her mother Myla, and Olivia’s son Daniel and their struggles with mental illness. What I Had Before I Met You would make a perfect book discussion pick.
    • 5/5
      I listened to the audio version of this book and LOVED it. I have not yet put an audio book on my "Favorites" list because all the others were read and I don't quite know how to compare the two ways of experiencing a book. I suspect if I'd read it, it would have made the list. As it is, I'm going to put it in the "Almost Favorites" category.
    • 4/5
      Another in the seemingly endless parade of alternating chapter novels. There has to be another way to do this. Is chronological THAT bad?That said, this one has two interesting plots: a teenager growing up with her bipolar mom and the grown up teenager whose son is growing up bipolar. The first mom reminds me of Carrie's mom in Stephen King's novel and the great movie adaptation. They live in a shabby post-Springsteen Jersey Shore town and the daughter's rebellion is captured very well. There is a good surprise in the middle, too. But I'm afraid the dueling chapters just put me off of giving this a fourth star. I would say, however, that I will be watching out for Sarah Cornwell's next effort.
    • 4/5
      An insightful and engrossing read about bi-polar disorder and its effects on a family throughout generations. Olivia was used to her mother leaving and then re-appearing all happy and boisterous. All she wanted was a normal home and a mother who was always there, but though she did get a mother who loved her, normal would have meant her mom taking her medicine, something her mother did not like to do. It would be years, before she would learn the truth and at that point she was confronting her own demons. Her search would uncover hidden secrets and her mother's hidden past. I quite identified with Olivia and this story absolutely pulled me into a place I am very familiar with. Bi-polar disorder runs or should I say gallops through my husband's family. We are very fortunate that the treatment for this is for the most part capable of controlling this life changing mental illness. I think this author did a fantastic job portraying the lives and fears, the secrecy, the acting out and all other facets of this illness. The prose was haunting at times and though there were plenty of occasions when I did not much like Olivia, I did understand what she was going through. The reveals in the book were surprising and the book is very well done.
    • 4/5
      What I Had Before I Had You opens with fifteen year-old Olivia seeing her twin sisters for the first swimming in the ocean off her Jersey Shore home in Ocean Vista. As the story unwinds, we discover that Olivia's mother, Myla, miscarried her twin daughters a year before Olivia was born.Myla decorated a nursery in their home, and acts as though the dead girls are ghosts, living with them. Olivia has grown up with this, and her mother claims to be a psychic, so she doesn't know that this is a manifestation of her mother's mental illness.Sometimes Myla will disappear for days or weeks, leaving a young Olivia alone. James, Myla's married boyfriend, would bring by groceries and check up on her. Eventually, Olivia rebels, as teenagers will, and when Myla causes an incident that threatens Olivia's status with her new friends, Olivia runs away.Years later, Olivia is bringing her teenage daughter Carrie and eight-year-old son Daniel back to New York City after a separation from her husband. While visiting Ocean Vista, Daniel disappears and Olivia and Carrie must find him.The storyline moves back and forth in time, and as it progresses, we see how the bipolar disorder that plagued Myla is genetic. Olivia has bipolar tendencies, and although her husband at first is able to handle the situation, when Daniel begins to exhibit the signs of it at a very early age, he bails on the family, throwing them away like he throws away broken household items.The last half of the story is really gripping, and there are some twists to the storyline that I didn't see coming, but they add so much to the emotional power of this sad story. Cornwell does an amazing job putting us into the middle of this family and showing us how Myla's illness rips through her family and causes repercussions even many years later.Cornwell's writing is lyrical and her descriptions put such vivid pictures in your head, like the "crepe-paper elbows" of elderly women swimming in the ocean, and her realization that her teenage Carrie is becoming her own person, imagining her "writhing on her bed, shedding her skin, moving from a larval to a pupal state".The title of the book comes from this passage about the power of the past."The past, I feel in this moment, is something that parents dangle in front of their children, something hoarded and valuable that we can never touch. They pretend to share, pulling out old albums at Christmastime, but under their breath, they are saying, This is what I had before I had you."Mental illness is something that our society ignores and doesn't want to face. Cornell shows us the despair and difficulty of living with people who have bipolar disorder, the not knowing what to do to help someone who doesn't seem to want help.This is a heartbreaking story that has stayed inside my head and heart, and if good fiction creates empathy in the reader, then What I Had Before I Had You qualifies as good fiction.
    • 5/5
      As Olivia Reed's family begins to fall helplessly apart in the wake of a dry affair and along with her recently diagnosed son's growing instability, she whisks her children away from their once-comforting ranch in Texas, doing the one thing she does best: run. She knows she's out of her mind going back to the place she left behind long ago, the place where she is certain her ghosts still reside, but in an act of desperation, she has no choice; she's hometown-bound, and the moment she steps onto the long-missed boardwalk and breathes in the salty ocean air, she knows she has made a mistake.Losing her son, combined with the familiarity of Ocean Vista, conjures various memories—of her first love, of her best friends, and most painfully, of the one person she never fully forgave: her mother. What I Had Before I Had You exposes Olivia's life in its slow, harrowing full, alternating between her unfairly influenced, unsupervised childhood and the unsettling, untold present-day. It sweeps readers through the lonely adolescence, teenage rebellion, and liberal prominence of the 1970's and 80's, all the while describing the frenzied, unnerving search for Daniel in the present, before escalating to the fateful summer when everything changed—when Olivia first indulged in her art of abandonment.Reading this book was an experience itself. The brief glances into Olivia's shaky childhood—the result of a mentally ill but in-denial mother and the burden of independence that came much too early—as well as the current frustrations over muting her disorder while simultaneously muting herself, are penetrating, completely eye-opening. Cornwell masterfully balances the struggles of hereditary bipolar disorder—not only a diagnosis, in Olivia's bloodline, but also an inheritance—and the struggles of being a mother—of being human—in this glittering narrative.Olivia's past is told with a vintage filter, a dusky, dreamy undertone; deeply periodic and exquisitely lush, it involves Myla's divine convictions, sleepless nights spent alone, and the unaware suffering she felt as a child—both unmedicated and uninformed. This is the childhood that adult Olivia has tried so hard to forget, the childhood that her family now knows nothing about, and as it unravels with ruthless precision and targeted blows, it culminates into the story of what happened when she was fifteen—the summer of extreme emotions and ultimate betrayal.I was even further impressed by how complex the storytelling is; it isn't simply a factual retelling, it isn't just a secret revealed. Olivia's past is narrated with the haze of an unreliable brain, a time-worn rememberer; readers are only given the version of events that have become Olivia's own, tempered by her imagination and improved by the million small revisions of memory. We will never know whether the emotions presented, as intense as they are, have been dulled by time, weathered by maturity, and this is the entire essence of the novel—this is Olivia's pain, which, through Cornwell's rare gift for detailing and piercing hearts, readers feel, themselves.Pros: Emotionally searing // Evocative; beachy, warm setting // Nostalgic; memories of childhood revealed with a tragic veil of time // Writing is powerful and poetic // Biting, wounding, affecting // Insightful; psychologically and stunningly precise // Phenomenal incorporation of the past into the present // Historically and culturally rich, vividCons: Slow start // Disorienting at timesVerdict: Heartbreaking, silver-lined, and deeply meaningful, What I Had Before I Had You meditates on one mother's frantic search for her son, as well as on the even more hazardous search for herself. Sarah Cornwell elegantly constructs the thin membrane that separates childhood from parenthood in this luminous debut; as if slipping in and out of consciousness, the storylines alternate—unwinding slowly, lazily at first, and then gaining torque, and consequently, destructive power—a depiction of the debilitating effects of a mental illness such as bipolar disorder. This novel blends together the tenderly told story of a failed first love, the bittersweet flavor of resurrecting family ghosts and family history, and the delicate, learned craft of holding on and letting go—indeed, an intoxicating melange.Rating: 9 out of 10 hearts (5 stars): Loved it! This book has a spot on my favorites shelf.Source: Complimentary copy provided by publisher via tour publicist in exchange for an honest and unbiased review (thank you, Harper Collins and TLC!).
    • 5/5
      “What I Had Before I Had You,” by Sarah Cornwell, is a quiet, meditative, psychological character study and coming-of-age novel enveloped within a subtle child-at-risk thriller. It is a stunning debut by an author who demonstrates remarkably keen emotional maturity and nuanced literary craftsmanship. In summary, this book is the story of Olivia and her stunning auburn-haired mother, Myla. Both are bipolar. One successfully treats her disorder, the other does not. And then there’s Olivia nine-year-old son, Daniel; he has an intractable form of child onset bipolar disorder. It is his disappearance that drives the plot forward.Olivia remembers her mother as “a burning star, a tigress, a prophet.” She was “the heartbeat that filled the house.” But much of her sparkle and abundant energy was, of course, the product of the manic upside of her untreated bipolar disorder. The fun mother would eventually morph into the inert depressed mother and then that strange frightening entity would disappear for weeks on end leaving Olivia to fend for herself alone at home. Even as a very young child, Olivia knew she could tell no one that her mother was gone. She made do alone with boxes of cold cereal and canned foods and the memory that her mother would always return.Myla loved her affliction. She was sure her illness was a gift that gave her psychic powers. She enjoyed being the notorious local beauty. She didn’t care that everyone thought she was crazy. Neighbors watched and gossiped as she gathered men at her doorstep like bees to honey; they’d come to have their fortunes told, but they’d leave late and come back often. Many of them were married. Olivia grew up extremely independent. As a very young child, she learned to be the stable “adult” helping her mother get through life. Sometime after adolescence, Olivia developed her own bipolar condition, but unlike her mother, Olivia sought treatment and was able to stick with it. She doesn’t like the medications, but she is strongly motivated to not repeat the mistakes of her mother. After all, she’s raising two children: thirteen-year-old Christie and nine-year-old Daniel. Ten months before the novel begins, after years of abnormal behavior, Daniel is diagnosed with child onset bipolar disorder. He is prone to rages, tantrums, and nightmares. Olivia’s husband blames her for their son’s disease; after all, she’s the one who carries the cursed gene. The marriage disintegrates. The father can’t face the hassle of taking care of a special-needs son. Olivia gets full custody. The book begins in the summer of 2007. The divorce is complete and Olivia is in the process of driving herself and her two children from Austin, Texas to a new home in New York City. Olivia makes a planned stop in her childhood hometown of Ocean Vista, New Jersey. She wants to give her children the opportunity to experience the laid-back seaside tourist town she knew as a child. Her children enjoy their visit; they have a dip in the ocean and a stroll along the boardwalk. Reminiscences crowd Olivia’s brain and spill out with enthusiasm, but her children are bored with her nostalgia. Olivia knows she’s overloading their young brains with too much of what-I-had-before-I-had-you information. There’s a brief moment of distraction and before she knows it, Daniel is missing. The entire arc of the book takes us through the next seven hours as Olivia searches for her son with the help of her daughter, a childhood girlfriend still living in the area, and the police. But most of the action takes place in Olivia’s mind. Everywhere she goes and everything she does brings back memories. This is a book made up almost entirely of recollections. We are in Olivia’s mind through the entire book as she deals with the present and recalls her past. In particular, she remembers the summer of 1987. It was the summer that changed her life. She was 15 years old and a rebellious, uncontrollable hellion. She found a gang of new friends, fell in love for the first time, and spent the summer exploring the mystery of twin teenage tourist girls with gorgeous auburn hair just like her mother. From the first moment she sees these two girls, she is certain, beyond any reasonable doubt, that they are her sisters. She is determined to know the truth. I loved this book. I never doubted for a moment that each and every character was absolutely real. I felt perfectly at home in Olivia’s stable, introspective mind. I wanted to be there. The author’s writing compelled me to stay within the pages—within Olivia’s mind—so I could discover the dimensions of her unique history; so I could learn the truth about the auburn-haired twins; and of course, so I could find out what happened to Daniel. At no point did this novel let me down. It seemed like a perfect package from beginning to end. This is a fine literary novel of significant psychological depth and integrity. I recommend it highly.