My latest novel, The Love I Could Have Had, was published today! And of course, as with my debut book last year, there was a whole team of wonderful people behind this book’s eventual launch, both professionally and personally.
In case not all of them make it to the Acknowledgments section at the end of the novel (or even read the damn thing), here are my heartfelt thankyous, below! Plus a little story about why I wrote this book in the first place and how the story came about.
Author Notes and Acknowledgments
I wrote this book, The Love I Could Have Had, in the summer of 2020, while I was furloughed from my media day job. I had not yet sold my debut, The Love of My Other Life — in fact, I’d only just signed for that novel to be represented by an agent in New York. I was off work for several months, unwilling to start looking for a new career move, knowing I’d either get my job back or I’d be fully let go and paid severance.
This gave me the extraordinary opportunity of having six months, from April to September, to do nothing but write, with zero guilt. Bliss.
While everybody else was juggling pandemic-induced nightmares of working from home and managing online schooling for their kids, or worse, I was going for long sunny walks to think about my next stories. Emboldened by the offer of agency representation, I figured I’d work a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday schedule as a full-time writer — it could be my only chance to do so before retirement! I decided to write as many manuscripts as possible in the free time I had, however long that would be.
I wrote three manuscripts that spring and summer. Two are very different in theme from my debut novel, and have yet to see the light of day (but may be resurrected later — TBD). The third, written in the height of summer, was the manuscript that became The Love I Could Have Had. I wrote this book as a very deliberate follow-up to The Love of My Other Life — in no way a sequel, but an exploration of the same themes — in case we got lucky, and my debut sold. Maybe there would be an appetite for more multiverse romance, if the first book did well!
However, with this new novel, I wanted to flip the concept of my debut on its head. Instead of our protagonist waking up in a universe where she has (almost) everything she ever wanted, what would it be like if she found herself in a world where she had literally nothing? And I’m not talking merely about poverty — I mean nothing at all, not even an identity. Well, that could only happen if she didn’t exist as herself in that world — either she’d never been born (which was my first instinct) or, worse, if she had died as a child. So, there were people she might encounter who knew who she had been, had loved her as a child, and had wondered about what she might’ve become if she’d lived. Plenty of scope for drama there!
And what would happen in the world she’d left behind? With no alternate body to swap with (unlike my debut), she would simply disappear. And with missing people come police investigations, and national headlines, and public accusations. I loved the idea of giving a kind of Gone Girl twist to this story, with my secondary narrative from the distressed fiancé Jake’s point of view.
I also knew that this story could end up feeling a lot heavier than the fizzy delights of my first novel, which is all luxury Manhattan real estate and champagne parties. So, I decided to set the new book in a popular coastal town — Wilmington, North Carolina — across the course of a heady summer. And I could make sure there were lots of surfing scenes, seafood dinners, and vacation vibes to give it that beach-read feel. Hopefully I managed to balance the darkness with enough light (and, of course, that incandescently happy ending).
With that concept in place, the novel just about wrote itself—I plotted it all out in a week and took four more weeks writing it, full-time, from start to finish. However, it took me two more years (because of the Big New Job that I took after my layoff) to get it redrafted, beta-read, redrafted again, and polished enough to show my agent. Thankfully, she loved it, and passed it to the team at Joffe Books, who had published my first novel. They also said yes right away, and here we are.
Speaking of, I’d like to extend my warmest thanks to them. To Victoria Skurnick, my fabulous agent at Levine Greenberg Rostan in New York, who gave me the kick up the butt I needed to finish editing this book in time for a summer 2023 publication. And to Kate Lyall Grant and the whole team at Joffe Books, who have supported my work so kindly and worked so hard to get this beach read turned around for a summer release, satisfyingly one year after my debut. Also, many thanks to the numerous beta readers and other members of the writing community who provided input — your support is always invaluable.
Big hugs of gratitude to the incredible women who have given me their friendship and encouragement throughout the years, to whom this novel is dedicated — Shona, Sarah B, Libby, Becky, Jo, Rach, Sarah J, and Nic. Love you long time.
And finally, to my family. I have had the extraordinary luck of having an incredible family whom I love dearly. Mum and Ian, whose timeless love story blows any of my plots out of the water. My big brother, Rich, his wife, Emma, and their girls, who are an amazing example of making the life you want happen. And lastly, to my sister, Alice, her husband, Kieran, and the great loves of my life: my nephews, Oscar and Felix. Thanks for being even better than Frozen at showing me that true love isn’t always about romance.
CJ Connolly 