by Julia Whelan
Thank you to the authors I’ve meet and befriended during my years as an audiobook narrator. Your generosity is truly humbling. I learn from you every day.
To my friends, family, and audiobook colleagues who put up with me during this very hectic writing process. Little things, like a healthy work-life balance, fell to the wayside. Especially to Mom and Ken, who watched me go round the dark side of the moon on this one. I love you and I’m back.
And finally, to Geof, my partner in all things. You are the surprise of my life. For many reasons, this book would not exist without you and it is as much yours as mine. Some wise writery person once said, “Don’t write what you know; write what you want to know.” Well, I learned about choice right alongside Ella, and G: I choose you.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Julia Whelan
About the Book
* * *
Behind the Book Essay
Read On
* * *
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Meet Julia Whelan
JULIA WHELAN is a screenwriter, lifelong actor, and award-winning audiobook narrator. She graduated with a degree in English and creative writing from Middlebury College and Oxford University. While in England, her flirtation with tea blossomed into a full-blown love affair, culminating in her eventual certification as a tea master.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
About the Book
Behind the Book Essay: On Adaptation
Ten years ago, practically to the day, I was sitting in Oxford, across from my father, as our train slowly pulled away from the platform. My junior year abroad there was over and I’d be going back to Middlebury College in Vermont in the fall. Middlebury’s small, boutique program with Lincoln College, Oxford, is unlike most semester-abroad programs for U.S. students; I was a formally matriculated member of the college, which gave me Bodleian rights, access to faculty, and rendered me an actual alumna, among other perks; in short, I’d gone “full Oxford.”
My father had come to meet me at the end of this adventure before we were set to travel together for a couple more weeks. I’d given him a good time in Ox; we’d gone punting, sheltered under a tree during a passing storm, taken a literary walking tour, visited the Oxfordshire History Centre (where I first learned about the nascent Oxenford), and gone to dinners and pubs with my friends. Those same friends had escorted us to the train station, dragging my luggage behind them, teasing me about the sheer American quantity of stuff, and were standing on the platform waving like maniacs, getting smaller and smaller through the train window. I waved back, smiling, happy that the growing distance kept them from seeing my very un-British tears.
My dad, never comfortable with emotional pain he couldn’t fix, tapped my knee with one finger and said, “You’ll be back.”
Yeah, but when? At the very least, a year, I thought. A year felt like a lifetime then. I just nodded, knowing he was right.
But he wasn’t. I didn’t end up going back for anything longer than two-day visits every few years. Pass-throughs, fly-bys, no better than a Harry Potter tourist. I should mention that like Ella, I’d been a Rhodes finalist, but unlike Ella, I didn’t get it. Instead, after graduating from Middlebury, I pivoted away from academia and returned to my old life.
Before attending college, I had been a child actor, reaching the pinnacle of my success during high school, on a show of which I am still, to this day, very proud. Once and Again was a demanding, rigorous, and rewarding job. My character was a real, thinking, feeling teenager crafted by writers who knew what they were doing.
I came back to L.A. wanting more Once and Again.
Ha.
This was 2008; HBO was out in front by a mile, Netflix was still sending out DVDs, Breaking Bad had just debuted, and networks had an artesian well of reality programming. The television landscape I had left four years prior was unrecognizable.
I pivoted yet again, throwing my energy into writing, thinking maybe I’d leave, go do an MFA in Creative Writing. But actors (or let’s be honest: actresses) have a certain window of opportunity. I knew if I’d left at twenty-five, I might as well never come back.
So I stayed, adapting to this new landscape. I was screenwriting, working as an actor off and on, and happily developing a penchant for audiobook narration. In an unexpected twist, my English and creative writing degree, which had seemed so frivolous while I was doing it, was actually applicable to the entertainment industry. Audiobooks gave me the opportunity to not only act, but read every day. And read widely, across genres I would never have picked up on my own. I always joke that in college I hadn’t read anything written in the last hundred years; suddenly I was reading things four months before they were published.
During this time I was doing some light copyediting for the Los Angeles chapter of the Oxford alum association, mostly out of my love for Bea, the octogenarian Oxonian who ran it. One day she was contacted by the president of Screen Gems (a division of Sony). He was looking for screenwriters to do a rewrite on an existing screenplay set in Oxford. A friend and I wrote some sample scenes and, for the sake of brevity, we got the job.
We were handed a screenplay that was a romantic dramedy about an American girl who goes to Oxford and falls in love with a terminally-ill young professor.
The American in Oxford part I had down. I understood the allure, I’d survived the culture shock, I loved it as fiercely as you can love something that doesn’t love you back.
But the part of the story that really called to me was how the main character, a young woman brimming with possibility, was unexpectedly forced to grapple with mortality; because at that time, for the first time, I was in the throes of dealing with grief.
Almost exactly a year before taking on the screenplay, I’d lost my father. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. A day like any other day except that I got “the call.” He left behind his eighty-six-year-old father and step-mother and I inherited the responsibilities of their care. By the time I started on the screenplay I was one year into (what would become) three years of helping loved ones transition to the ends of their lives. By the time I started on the book, they were both gone, having died six months apart. In fact, the contract for the book came through two hours after my grandfather died. I’m writing this sentence on what would have been my father’s sixty-ninth birthday; and my grandfather’s been gone for two years.
I do not understand the ineffable function of timing.
So, in the space of three years—my late twenties—I’d suffered the shock of sudden death and, twice, the process of dying.
I wanted to say something about it. I wanted to understand something about this eternal mystery. I wanted to unravel these knotted feelings living inside me.
But a screenplay, for all its exciting attributes, does not lend itself to interior philosophical exploration. For that, I needed a different medium.
I needed a novel.
Novelizing a screenplay is not unheard of. In fact, one of the inspirations for the Oxford screenplay was the 1970 film Love Story, which was itself, novelized. Certainly the reverse is not unique: a screenwriter adapting a book to which she might have a personal connection. But I’m not sure how often one gets the opportunity to adapt a screenplay that was not one’s own into a book that very much is.
All forms of adaptation owe a debt to the material that came before. Everything comes from somewhere.
For instance, Love Story was, in fact, based on its own source material: Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas. Upon which the Verdi opera La Traviata is also based. I was compelled to include a nod to this narrative lineage in the book; when Jamie gets up from the coq au vin dinner at the town house to put on music, he puts on La Traviata. An ode not only to Lady of the Camellias and Love Story, but generally to the process of adaptation.
My history with Oxford is its own kind
of love story. Even though I was thriving in L.A., there was a part of me that was still a bit jealous of everyone else who got to be in Oxford (Two paths! Choices that continue to taunt us!). Oxford was like the one that got away. I wonder what he looks like now. I wonder if he’s happy. I wonder if he ever thinks of me.
In the final editing phase of this book, I made a pit stop in Oxford. I was shocked to discover how much it had changed. I hadn’t been back in three years at that point, but it felt like thirty. The cafes, the hipster bars, the actually-good food! There was a massive amount of building going on. Cranes were interspersed with the spires, sidewalks closed, facades tarped. I discovered that I had some rewriting to do. In my first draft, when Ella attempts to track Jamie down at the Lincoln library, she enters the library the way I always would: through a building at the end of Grove Quad, down the long hallway, out through the door at the end, across the rector’s garden, through the gate on the other side. Now, there’s a stunning glass and wood building in the way. The library can only be accessed by going outside the college and entering from Turl St. As one student said to me, “Yeah, it’s brilliant. Now I have to put on actual clothes to go to the library.”
I also got to catch up with beloved professors and have sherry before dinner in Hall, where I sat at High Table, looking out at the undergrads in their black gowns in a staggering moment of cognitive dissonance.
Our memories of places, much like people, are subject to our own adaptation process. Once the active living is done, and they pass into memory, we assume control of the narrative. We adapt it, sometimes without meaning to. This is, perhaps, the one advantage of death: when people die, they can live on in our memory as we choose, but places continue to exist, to change.
For example, the memory I have of my father on that train, being supportive, the wonderful week we’d just shared, clouds the reality that by the end of our travels together I was ecstatic that our travels were over. I’m sure he felt the same way. But luckily that memory is in the background. The foreground is this: his eyes sparkling while looking up at the ceiling in the Lincoln College library, collecting brochures for summer archelogy programs at Oxford that he would never get to do, the two of us standing in an aisle at Blackwell’s, me telling him that we’d have to lug whatever books he bought to Bath, to Windsor, to Cambridge, to Paris, to London; of him regretfully putting a book back on the shelf because of what I’d said; and my hating now that I’d made him do that. And then there was that simple touch on my knee: You’ll go back.
I did go back, at least in my memories. I wrote this book to the songs I was listening to ten years ago in my room at the top of staircase two, that came through my earbuds while walking to lectures up Park Rd.; to the Whittard tea I drank out of my Blackwell’s mugs. I kept pictures handy. I picked the poems for each chapter opening out of the worn anthologies I had when I was there, anthologies that I—contrary thing that I was—lugged to Bath, to Windsor, to Cambridge, to Paris, to London, before heading home.
While I used my memories to write, I did not want to write my memories. My own Oxford year is not half as interesting as Ella’s. I wanted to write a story fueled by the untying of emotional knots, but beyond that there are no strong similarities between us. I have lifted nothing from my own time there. I never had a bike, I never stole a punt (really, I swear!), and I did not fall in love (I was too busy studying).
The adaptation process, like memory, is one of selection; of negation and amplification simultaneously. Every lens, every layer of the palimpsest, changes the story. Even the audiobook will be its own version. When the film of My Oxford Year is made, the director will have a version. Then the actors. Then the editor. And you, the reader, get to have your own version; what you choose, perhaps even unconsciously, to negate, to amplify.
Pick this book up again in ten years and see how your memory of it has changed. I promise to do the same. Let’s see how it ages. Let’s compare memory to reality. Maybe there will be a cure for multiple myeloma by then. Maybe Ella’s wish for an arts-based education system in the U.S. will have been realized (hey, a girl can dream). Maybe you’ll remember where you were when you read it, who you were when you read it.
Or maybe you’ll confuse it with the movie and wonder what happened to the scene of Ella and Jamie’s first kiss.
You could have sworn it was in the book.
You could have sworn you remember how it all went down.
And you will think, my version was better.
And that’s okay with me.
That’s how it should be.
Julia Whelan
June 30, 2017
Read On
Reading Group Guide
Ella has dreamed of being at Oxford since she was thirteen. Is there a place you’ve always dreamed of going? Where would it be and why? Have you made it? If you have, would you go back?
One of Ella’s education proposals is that the arts are essential to an education that creates independent thinkers. Do you agree? Why or why not? Is this something you think should be implemented in your local education system?
Are there characters you instantly rooted for? Characters you disliked? Did your opinion of any characters change as the story went on?
When Ella and Jamie first get together, it’s supposed to have “no strings.” Can this type of relationship work? Generally speaking, do you think men and women want the same thing from casual relationships? Was Ella misleading Jamie at the beginning when she claimed she didn’t want a relationship?
When Jamie comes clean about his illness, he admits that he believed he deserved Ella, that she was his “last hurrah.” Do you believe him? Or do you think he thought there was more there? Should he have told her the truth from the beginning?
When Ella first finds out Jamie is ill, her immediate reaction is to feel “trapped.” While we come to understand that this feeling was triggered by her relationship with her mother after her father’s death, do you understand why she felt that way? How do you think you would have reacted in this situation?
What do you think about Antonia and William’s relationship? Do you believe they love each other the same amount? Is one person stronger than the other?
The mention of Tennyson’s famous line, “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” catalyzes a turning point in Ella’s trajectory with Jamie. Do you agree with Tennyson? Have you experienced this difficult lesson yourself?
Poetry is an important part of Ella and Jamie’s relationship, as well as being critically important to the book itself. Is poetry still relevant or interesting to contemporary thinking? Have you ever written a poem as an adult? Why?
Jamie has a philosophy about his “Oxenford,” the place where a person is ready to “cross over.” Do you agree with him?
In your opinion, did Ella make the right decision to stay in the U.K. with Jamie? Would you have made the same decision in her place? At her age? At your age now?
If you could choose, would you rather die suddenly or have time to say goodbye? Do you wish the same for the people you love? Specifically, your partner? Your parents? Are the answers different?
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Praise for My Oxford Year
“My Oxford Year is a pure delight with unpredictable depths. Julia Whelan has crafted a story that is as fun and charming as it is powerful and wise. Ella Durran is a breath of fresh air and her story will stay with you long after you’re done.”
—Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
“Full of humor and romance, My Oxford Year has it all—I loved it!”
—Jill Shalvis, New York Times bestselling author
“My Oxford Year is a funny, tender, heartbreaking coming-of-age adventure.”
—Allison Winn Scotch, New York Times bestselling author
“My Oxford Year is an achingly beautiful debut.”
—Robinne Lee, author of The Idea of You
“Vivid, smart, and utterly charming, My Oxford Year is a heartfelt journey.”
—Allie Larkin, author of Why Can’t I Be You
Copyright
Based on the screenplay “Oxford” by Allison Burnett.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
MY OXFORD YEAR. Copyright © 2018 by Temple Hill Publishing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by nathanburtondesign.com
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition APRIL 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-274065-6
Version 03172018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-274064-9
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada