Whitney

a little about my friend

This newsletter is going to be a little bit different. I have so many administrative things I need to catch you up on . . . an entire drafted newsletter I’ve had in here since JULY full of tour photos and other updates. But I know if I don’t go ahead and publish this I’ll come up with a reason not to again.

Today I would like to tell you about my friend Whitney, who played a huge role in my inspiration and overall process while writing LOST AND FOUND, my summer 2026 release.

To start telling you about my friend, though, I first have to share with you my biggest, deepest, darkest insecurity.

Truly. This is not hyperbole. This one fact used to eat me up inside. It doesn’t help that I’ve seen this particular thing shared time and time again under tons of those blanket warning statements … “I’ll never trust someone if they don’t have X.” “Women who have/don’t have X are red flags.”

Alas, it doesn’t change the fact that, growing up, I did not have a singular, true best friend. I had close clusters of girlfriends who I would sit with and play with each day. But my family moved frequently, usually just far enough to switch schools, I played multiple competitive sports that took up much of my free time, and I had divorced parents who alternated weekends, so half of mine were spent out of town with a parent who wanted to spend their allotted days with us.

What I did have, through every move and every phase of our lives, even when they veered off in completely different directions, was Whitney.

I first met Whitney at the pool in the condo complex where we lived with our single moms and younger sisters, who happened to share the same name. Whit had on a sparkly two-piece swimsuit and glittered, blue polished nails. I was six years old and didn’t have a name for it back then, but I still remember the visceral way I knew, instantly and irrefutably, that this girl was cooler than me. She had goggles and could fetch weighted toys from the bottom of the deep end with ease. I had chlorine-reddened eyes and didn’t like how the deep end hurt my ears. She had her hair cut into a bob. Mine hit mid back but didn’t move or bounce the way hers did. She told me she liked my swimsuit and offered to share her floatie, and that was that.

Our young, single moms formed a quick bond, too, and thus our friendship gained regularity. They’d go out on Wednesday nights to a country bar, aptly dubbed Incahoots, and alternated splitting the cost of a babysitter for us kids. We’d look forward to bagel bites and park time all week.

When I sift through all my memories of Whitney as a kid, the one consistency I rediscover is her generosity. Even when we went though phases when we were nothing alike, even if she thought I was annoying (I was), if Whit had school friends over or was headed to the park or had devised a plan to doorbell ditch that one boy our age who lived four doors down, she made sure I was included.

Eventually, our moms moved out of the condos. But by then our families had meshed. We spent time with them for the occasional holiday and even planned vacations including them, and vice versa. Whit’s new house was located right in between our schools, so sometimes my sister and I would walk there until we could get picked up in the evenings.

I cannot begin to tell you how invaluable it was to know I had a friend outside of school and outside of my sports teams, especially when we went on to move around. There was something indescribably special about a friendship that was heavily exposed to our family dynamics, too. No need to explain the weird idiosyncrasies between extended members or go over why making plans on Dad’s weekends was difficult, they already knew and understood. They went through it themselves.

I think, perhaps, this is why I felt safe to try “bad” things with Whitney. She’s the first friend I ever lied for, the first friend I ever smoked a cigarette with, and a joint (not much) later. I was with her the first time I got truly drunk (which happened to be on a Thanksgiving, come to think of it) and experienced my first brutal hangover by her side . . . while Black Friday shopping. I threw up in a garbage can outside of a Macy’s. Whitney was the first person I told the first time I made out with a boy. She taught me how to curl my bangs and knew about that one month in seventh grade when I stuffed my bra.

We both attended Whitney’s cousin’s eighth grade graduation for some reason (prior to most of those aforementioned “bad” things, for the record). I don’t even recall why I was there with her, but they played a slideshow in the church filled with pictures of their class throughout the years, set to I Will Remember You by Sarah Mclachlan and Good Riddance by Green Day. As you can imagine, Whitney and I both sobbed uncontrollably. I mean loud, snotty, sputtering cries. I can still see her face when she turned to me and looked, maybe for the first time I’d ever seen, embarrassed. For a long while I could not figure out why this memory kept coming to the forefront of my mind. I think now I recognize it as one of the first impactful experiences I’ve had with the duality of grief. We were coming up on our own graduations at the time and mourning something ourselves, even while we were looking forward to what was next.

Even throughout high school Whit and I kept in touch, despite moving farther apart and becoming more and more different. It’s one of those things that people say a lot after someone has passed, but anyone who knew Whitney would tell you that she was the kind of friend you could call or see after a year apart and she’d show up in whatever capacity you needed and act like no time had passed. We would text about truly foul things, the likes of which I will only ever share with my sister these days. I called her frequently for boy advice that exclusively boiled down to “Dump him, T.”

God, fam. She was right.

I believe we were 17 and 18 when we went on a girls trip to Cabo with our mothers that, upon reflection, would read like an A24 film. It was made up of nothing but high highs and the low lows of mothers and daughters fighting their ever-loving guts out.

I met a boy my senior year of high school who would go on to become my husband. Whit moved to Vegas for a spell. Our moms drifted apart and we floated in and out of each other’s lives for a few years, but we always, always picked up wherever we left off. I was in my second or third year of college when I spotted her on the sidewalk in a group holding up signs picketing for Proposition 8. I rolled down my window and yelled to her and she, without missing a beat, yelled back, “Ferret face!!” (Tarah=Farah=Ferret, in case you were wondering)

We caught up later that night and she told me she had a girlfriend. It was the first time I’d ever had someone “come out” to me, and I acted like a freak. I begged her to tell me what I needed to vote for and how I could support her and asked her invasive questions like when she realized and how she could tell and omg was it better or easier to date girls. I cringe even now.

Social media allowed us to keep cheering for one another and the milestones in our lives. She was the most beautiful bride I’d ever seen and I reached out to tell her as much. When she opened her business, I took my girls downtown to see it and she got my eyebrows fixed up. My skin never looked better than when she was my esthetician. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me before turning to my two toddler girls sitting beside each other on her sofa. She shook her head a little, let out a disbelieving chuckle, and said, “I can’t believe you’re a mom.” When she started operating out of her home I got to go visit and make a day of it each time. We’d always grab lunch from the same place . . . same place they’d eventually hold her memorial service.

When she first got diagnosed with breast cancer, I remember saying something to the effect of, “Ridiculous. She’s too young. It has to be so early. That can’t be right. There is no way.” It simply would not compute to me.

It certainly wasn’t early enough, though, and Whitney had to go through the ravages of chemo and a double mastectomy in her early thirties.

I have to admit something else that feels deeply shameful, now, but I do so in the hopes that someone else might recognize it in themselves and their own complicated journey, and maybe they’ll be able to redirect and spare themselves from regret. I had a very hard time looking at what Whit was going through and facing it head on. I know, I know, I wasn’t the one going through shit. How selfish. I was watching it from a distance. I would check in on her and send her messages and flowers, but I’d also catch myself actively trying to put it out of my mind, like some form of denial. I wanted to protect myself from facing mortality in general, especially when it came to a friend my age, the one friend I had known the longest in my life. Maybe I thought I could save myself some pain.

Friends, please trust me when I tell you that you won’t. We owe it to the ones we love to grieve, to hurt with them, and to share in their fears and pain however we may. They probably don’t want us to, but we can do that for them, I promise. Love makes these things agony, but it gives us strength, too.

Whitney did beat cancer. I watched her travel with her wife and friends and family and go back to living at full force, the only way she knew how. I continued to cheer her on, and she me.

Cancer came back for her, and Whit passed away on May 17^th, 2024.

Here is where I usually stop this essay entirely because what right do I have to even talk about my own experience in relation to this? This vibrant, young, sensational woman lost her life; her family and friends . . . the whole fucking world . . . they were all robbed!

But I’m going to try, because frankly, Whitney inspired me and I know she’d like knowing that. I know she would like knowing how much I miss her, and how she’s gone on to inspire all sorts of things. Doubtlessly, she’d have something clever and wry to say about it, even.

May 17^th, 2024 was four days before my first (fully) traditionally published book was released. I had to go out on tour and answer questions about SAVOR IT and its themes of living in the present and, wouldn’t you know it, grief. I’d be cracking a joke and mid sentence my brain would go “Oh my god, Whitney,” and I would have to recover myself enough to act passably normal. I cried every single night of that tour for a multitude of reasons, but mostly because I had an ocean of feelings inside me with no place to go. Constant waves beating inside my ribs.

One of the most confounding parts of grief for me has and will always be its multitudes. Just like that damned eight grade graduation slideshow (set to emotional warfare songs, I’ll remind you), you can feel good, hopeful things while mourning something in the most all-encompassing, soul-crushing way. If you have lost someone young to illness, you will likely never get to be that same level of innocent again, where you think everything happens for a reason and there must be some greater justice at work in this life. But you’ll still laugh when Thizzle Dance comes on at her memorial service and you see moms and dads start to break it down like they’re back at high school prom. My oldest friend died right before I realized a dream, on my sister’s birthday. My favorite uncle died on my daughter’s birthday. My grandpa died on New Year’s Day. There is always, always duality to death and grieving.

This unexplainable, undefinable in-between is why I write. It’s why themes of home, identity, and grief come up in every book I’ve published and probably always will. I will always strive to understand these things better, in all of their facets. I’ll never grasp them entirely.

There has not been a single time when I have sat down to type and haven’t thought of Whitney in some way since, even when I have pondered our relationship in abstract terms. Whit being the cooler, braver, less apologetic friend played a role in me eventually growing into someone better at being myself. Someone who’d take a risk and write a book in the first place. The type of sister she was is the sister I want to be. The kind of warm, fiercely protective friendship she gave out so magnanimously is what I aspire to give, and what I aspire for my characters to give as well.

The first time I thought about the concept for LOST AND FOUND, I immediately talked myself out of it. I was ruminating on the idea with a friend and very quickly said, nah, there’s no way they’ll let me write that into a romance. Especially not one of my romances that are most often marketed as romcoms. I also thought there was no way I could pull it off. Juxtaposing grief against the endeavor to create life, when you’re grappling with the realization that this world is full of pain and unfairness? Mourning who you once were while stepping into a new version of yourself, while holding a deep desire to become a mother (an additional new facet of your identity) to someone else? Fucking lofty.

Still, it was on my original submission list when SAVOR IT sold, but it wasn’t proposed as Silas’s story and it was the only idea no one brought up in any of my editor interviews.

But. The first time I had an inkling that this might be Silas’s story was the first time he came onto the page in SAVOR IT, even though I instantly tried to shove it aside. Silas was the fun brother with swagger and scars! He was going to be my book three! I thought I’d want to lower the stakes! I thought he and Bea would have had a no-strings, years-long, on-again, off-again fling.

When I had him be the victim of an accident in that first story and he refused to seem too broken up about it, I had that niggling feeling again. A years-long situationship, something physical . . . it just didn’t feel quite right. I kept envisioning a scarred, former-sunshine man finding his light again so he could share it with someone else. Someone lost but trying to find. I kept thinking about how someone valuing his help would make him feel valued. I wasn’t far into writing LEFT OF FOREVER, nor was I far into my grief over Whitney, when I knew he had to be the one.

I wish I could tell you I didn’t fight it, that I went after this story with vigor and passion and never looked back. I didn’t, friends. I was still questioning if I could do this story justice when I was 30k words into it. I have often joked about feeling things too deeply, but it was anything but funny when it came to this book. It was painful. I was forced to grieve on purpose. I was forced to remember a friend who was there for multiple pivotal moments in my life, to revel in those memories, and then feel the pain of knowing she was gone. I couldn’t just call her and say “Hey, it’s been too long. We can’t let it go this long.” I was forced to feel all my anger on her behalf, on behalf of her family and closest friends. True grief is just the final stage of love, but God, anger is the nastiest bit of it, I think.

I was forced to grieve all sorts of other things, too, I realize now. Namely, the “end” of the Spunes series, since LOST AND FOUND is, technically, my last contracted book.

Above all, I grieved the Byrds and Spunes. This pretend family and this perennially wet, slanted, degenerate little town have all become so important to me. I got to write the family and friends I have always wanted, while discovering pieces of the people I love in real life within them the entire way. Whit herself is tucked inside all these pages in all sorts of little ways.

Writing Spunes broke me open and healed me in equal measure. I got to make other people feel seen, too.

The bone-deep happiness Silas and Bea’s story gives me is in direct contrast to the pain that writing it put me through, and I think that’s perfect. I think there’s no better way to say goodbye.

Well . . . Silas won’t say goodbye, actually, but you’ll have to wait and read the story to know why that is.

At the end of this I will link places you can preorder, but please note that I will be working on adding other indies with bookplates and goodies options in the near future. For now, I’ve linked my home store, Capital Books/Knotty Novels, who my signed campaign will be through again.

[[ As always, prioritizing indies is key, but I imagine preordering from retailers might incentivize them to put them in stores? I’m not sure! When in doubt, go indie. ]]

Lastly . . . Hug your loved ones. Call that friend you’ve been thinking of calling.

All my love.

PRE-ORDER SIGNED FROM CAPITAL BOOKS

PRE-ORDER FROM BARNES AND NOBLE

PRE-ORDER FROM BOOKS-A-MILLION

PRE-ORDER FROM POWELL’S

PRE-ORDER FROM AMAZON

*I can’t say why there is not an active preorder listing at Target, but I’ll figure that out asap and will update*