EVERYTHING AFTER

When a young woman’s marriage hits a road bump, she reconnects with a long-lost love and wonders whether she followed the wrong path into her adulthood.

Emily Gold has a handsome husband and a successful therapy practice at NYU. What she wants now is a baby. After a couple of years of marriage, her husband, Ezra, a respected pediatric oncologist, is finally ready to start trying. Unfortunately, it takes several months to conceive, and shortly after they do, Emily miscarries. The miscarriage awakens Emily’s memories of a miscarriage she suffered more than a decade earlier when she was in college and deeply in love with a man named Rob. Rob and Emily were part of a band, and they delighted in performing together. After the college miscarriage, Emily distanced herself from not only Rob, but also her own musical ambitions. Now that she’s lost another baby and her husband refuses to grieve with her, Emily starts missing Rob and the person she was when she was with him. It’s particularly difficult for Emily to forget Rob now that he’s finally had success as a musician; she hears his voice whenever she turns on the radio. Emily tracks him down so they can explore whether they gave up on their relationship too soon. Once Emily begins spending time with Rob again, she wonders if Ezra will try to fight for her and whether that’s even what she wants. Told primarily in the third person, the book is interspersed with first-person journal entries from earlier in Emily’s life. Most of the story occurs in New York, and Santopolo paints vivid pictures of city sights and West Village hot spots while, in the college flashbacks, she deftly captures the passion that can pervade early adulthood as well as the nostalgia that follows those intense experiences. Despite a few scenarios that strain credulity, like a therapy patient whose personal circumstances too perfectly mimic what could have happened to Emily, the book is consistently entertaining. More than just a love triangle, the story explores difficult topics ranging from grief and loss to self-doubt and suicide.

An often melancholy but romantic tale about the importance of compromise and growth in relationships.