You and Me and Us
Page 32
To Tom Piazza and the McGee’s Sunday Funday crew; Mia Pfifer; Meredith Bailey; Katie Ross; the Sunday Dinner Club; Ken Block and the Rock Boat family; Beth Gosnell and the Rock by the Sea family; the Charleston Place crew; the men of LOVESWEAT: Steve Everett, Paul Pfau, JD Eicher, and Connor Pledger. To Jen Wedick for all the high fives, Will Byington for the friendship and the photos, David Boran for help with the cooking terms, and Dr. Carla Lewin and Lauren Black for the oxygen education. And to Andrea Kate of Great Thoughts’ Great Readers.
Thank you to my past and present FCB Chicago family for the support and encouragement. To Stump Mahoney for the music help; Kevin Grady, Jennifer Ludwig, Paige Miller, Kristin Zuccarini, Angela Carlson, and So A Ryu for your design expertise; Lauren Cabot Altergott for being one of my first readers; my CB team; and Teddy Brown for being a great boss and friend (most of the time). While I’m on the topic of my other career (and Alexis’s), thank you to GirlsDay and the Three Percent Conference for making the advertising industry a better place for everyone to work.
Thank you to all the Starbucks I have regulared for providing a great environment to write and having the “Save to Spotify” feature on your app for my writing playlist. And, speaking of music, I’d like to thank some of the artists who inspire me and frequently play before, during, and after my writing sessions: Red Wanting Blue, Will Hoge, The Alternate Routes, Aslyn, Shawn Mullins, Stephen Kellogg, Brandi Carlile, Matt Nathanson, Emerson Hart, and Sister Hazel.
For all the behind-the-scenes work, thank you to Kristin Nelson, Brian Nelson, Tallahj Curry, Samantha Cronin, and Angie Hodapp of the Nelson Literary Agency. Many thanks to Alice Lawson at Gersh and my entire team at HarperCollins: Elle Keck, Molly Waxman, Rachel Meyers, Robin Barletta, Jennifer Hart, Kelly Rudolph, Karen Richardson, Mumtaz Mustafa, Christina Joell, and Maureen Cole. Also to Crystal Patriarche and the BookSparks team.
Thank you to the booksellers, book reviewers, bloggers, bookstagrammers, and the Tall Poppy Writers, and last but certainly not least, thank you to the readers for choosing to spend time with this story. I’m grateful, and I’d love to hear from you online at AlisonHammer.com or @ThisHammer on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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About the Author
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Meet Alison Hammer
About the Book
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Behind the Book Essay
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Meet Alison Hammer
Founder of the Every Damn Day Writers, ALISON HAMMER has been spinning words to tell stories since she learned how to talk. A graduate of the University of Florida and the Creative Circus in Atlanta, she lived in nine cities before settling down in Chicago, where she works as a VP creative director at an advertising agency. You and Me and Us is her first novel.
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About the Book
Behind the Book Essay
Alexis Gold has been floating around in my head for almost twenty years. Two whole decades. She’s like a real person to me, and after reading part of her story, I hope she’s a little real for you, too.
The first time I wrote about Alexis, her last name was Hersh. I changed it pretty early on because I thought that if she had the same initials as I did, people would think she was a thinly veiled version of myself. And she is NOT me. Although I do tell people that if they don’t like me, they probably won’t like her, either.
That first first-draft was a short story called “Her Mom Was Popular with Men” that I workshopped in a fiction class at the University of Florida. I finished the story and turned it in, but I had a feeling that I wasn’t finished with Alexis. More accurately, she wasn’t finished with me.
Over the next fifteen years, I took that short story about a woman who had returned to a place from her past and suddenly remembered a traumatic event she’d witnessed as a child, and I turned it into a way-too-long novel. (I eventually cut 30,000 words—but that’s a story for another day.)
In the novel version, renamed Face the Music, Alexis Gold was a thirtysomething woman who worked in advertising and had been recently dumped by her boyfriend of ten years. She and Peter hadn’t been married—if you’ve read You and Me and Us, you know Alexis doesn’t believe in marriage. At least she didn’t back then.
Reeling from the breakup, Alexis needed to get out of the Atlanta house she and Peter had shared, so she packed her bags and headed out on a road trip for Destin, Florida. Alexis hadn’t been back to the small beach town where she spent summers growing up in more than twenty years, but she had nowhere else to go.
A few days into her stay, Alexis was on an emergency aloe trip to Publix after falling asleep on the beach, when she ran into a familiar stranger with one brown eye and one blue: Tommy.
I don’t want to give too much of that story away because I hope that one day a version of it will find its way into the world, but there are two things I can share.
The first is that throughout the book, there are flashbacks and memories of the summer Alexis was twelve: the last summer she spent on the beach with her childhood friends Tommy, Jill, Jack, and Adam.
The second, which isn’t a spoiler if you’ve read You and Me and Us, is that eventually, Tommy and Alexis cross the line from friendship to something more. Alexis didn’t know it at the time, but in one of the last chapters, she and Tommy, as she later puts it, “had the oops that turned into CeCe.”
When I finally reached the last page of the manuscript that had been fifteen years in the making, I didn’t just write “The End.” Instead, I wrote: “The End, For Now.” I knew there was more to Tommy and Alexis’s story. I just wasn’t sure what it was yet.
I did have one idea—that it would be interesting to show Alexis with a daughter the same age as she had been during the flashbacks in Face the Music. I knew their daughter’s name would be CeCe, based on a scene where Tommy and Alexis sang and danced to several “name songs,” including Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecelia.”
But that was it.
I had no idea what the story would be “about.”
It was the end of September 2016, less than two months away from November, or as I now call it, NaNoWriMo.
National Novel Writing Month is an international writing event where writers around the world are challenged to write 50,000 words in the thirty days of November. I first heard of NaNoWriMo in 2006, when I was five years into the writing process of Face the Music and thought the idea of writing a book that quickly was insane. Still, I was curious, and the timing was right, so I decided to give it a shot.
For a few weeks, I tried to think of what story I could tell about Alexis, Tommy, and their twelve-year-old daughter, CeCe. (I aged CeCe up to fourteen after a few early readers told me what a big deal it would be for a twelve-year-old girl to drink beer and kiss boys. What can I say, it’s been a long time since I was twelve.)
One day, I was sitting out on the community porch of the building where I lived at the time in Pittsburgh, thinking about how NaNo was coming up and I still didn’t have an idea for the story. And then it came to me, just like that. Tommy was sick.
I don’t do much research in the early stages of my writing (I have a very strong “Finish First” philosophy), but that afternoon, I did a lot of googling about different terminal illnesses, their symptoms, and the reality of someone passing away a few months after diagnosis.
My first thought was pancreatic cancer, after losing a friend, Tattoo Dave, to the horrible disease a few years earlier. But after looking into the symptoms, it didn’t seem right for the story. A few Google searches later, and I found out there were different kinds of lung cancer—one of them, small-cell cancer, was harder to beat, and its symptoms were things that I could picture happening to Tommy. The cough, the weight loss, and the shortness of breath. Once I knew what Tommy would have, I started writing a very loose outline of the story.
&nbs
p; In the writing world, people say that they are plotters, who plot a story out, or pantsers, who fly by the seat of their pants. I like to say I’m a plotser, a combination of the two. There are a lot of scenes that are still around from that first outline—but some of my favorites weren’t planned at all. Like the wedding scene, or even the idea that Tommy and Alexis would eventually get married. I know I wrote the words, but every time I read that scene, it makes me cry.
I wrote the first line of You and Me and Us at midnight on Halloween in 2016, with a glass of champagne as soon as it officially became November 1.
Thanks to NaNoWriMo, I got in the habit of writing every day. My day job is in advertising, so I’m used to writing on a deadline—I actually prefer it. I’m an expert procrastinator, so having a deadline helps kick my creativity into action. I’m also pretty competitive, so I didn’t just complete NaNo. I WON IT. I crossed the 50,000-word finish line almost a week ahead of schedule, and then I kept going, writing every day until I reached the end of that first draft the third week of December.
At the time, I thought I had written a story about what happened to Tommy. But then a few very wise writer friends informed me otherwise. They helped me see that the story wasn’t “about” Tommy getting sick. That’s what happens in the story. The story itself was about the relationship between Alexis and CeCe. (For the record, my mom and I have a great relationship—she wants to make sure everyone knows that!)
Four years after that first spark of an idea, I’m still heartbroken over the loss of Tommy. I wish his story didn’t have to end that way, but I’ve got a feeling that Alexis’s story still isn’t finished. And neither is CeCe’s.
In the meantime, I’ve got other stories I’m excited to tell, but I can’t wait for the day when CeCe and Alexis pop back up and fill me in on what’s next.
Reading Group Guide
Do you think Tommy made the right decision choosing not to get treatment? How would you approach weighing the factors he had to consider—quality of life versus quantity of life—if you were in his shoes? And what about his choice to spend his last weeks at the beach? Where would you spend your last days?
A lot of parents and teenagers have tough relationships. Do you think the way CeCe and Alexis saw each other was fair? Without Tommy’s illness, do you think they would have been able to repair their relationship?
Alexis didn’t want to get married because she equates the legal bond of marriage with her parents’ relationship, which was nothing like hers and Tommy’s. Why do you think she changed her mind in the end? How do you think this will affect CeCe’s future views on marriage and relationships?
Alexis has two best friends—Jill and Becky. Her friendships with each woman fill very different purposes in her life. What are those purposes? Do you have more than one best friend? If life has ever brought you all together, did everyone get along?
CeCe has a moment when she realizes that Tommy isn’t just her dad, but that he’s also his own person. At what moment in your life did you realize that your parents were more than just your parents?
What did you think of Tommy’s decision to see and forgive Monica? If you were Alexis, would you have been okay with having his ex over to your house?
Do you think Alexis made the right decision taking CeCe to California? Why or why not?
Where do you think Alexis and CeCe will be in five years? Ten years?
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
YOU AND ME AND US. Copyright © 2020 by Alison Hammer. 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 Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photographs © Anna Dykema Photography/Getty Images (ocean); © Oleh_Slobodenjuk/Getty Images (girl, left); © PeopleImages/Getty Images (girl, right)
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition APRIL 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-293486-4
Version 02142020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293485-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-299386-1 (hardcover library edition)
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