What I Had Before I Had You

Summary (from the publisher): In What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell, a woman must face the truth about her past in this luminous, evocative literary novel of parents and children, guilt and forgiveness, memory and magical thinking, set in the faded, gritty world of the New Jersey Shore.

Olivia was only fifteen the summer she left her hometown of Ocean Vista. Two decades later, on a visit with her children, her nine-year-old son Daniel, recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, disappears. Olivia’s search for him sparks tender and painful memories of her past—of her fiercely loving and secretive mother, Myla, an erratic and beautiful psychic, and the discovery of heartbreaking secrets that shattered her world.

Review: I received an Uncorrected Proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.

"What if all the transcendent moments of your life, the sound-track moments, the radiant detail, the gleaming thing at the center of life that loves you, that loves beauty - God or whatever you call it - what if all this were part of your illness?" (268-269).

The thread that connects the different characters and storylines of this novel is bipolar disorder. Olivia, recently divorced from her husband, is traveling to her hometown, Ocean Vista, with her two children. Her son, Daniel, has recently been diagnosed with Early Onset Bipolar Disorder. When Daniel disappears, it sparks Olivia to reminisce on the summer of 1987, her last summer at home with her mother, who also suffered from Bipolar Disorder.

I struggled to feel connected to the characters in this novel. I understand part of this may be their mental disorder, yet I never felt like any of the characters is fully developed. Olivia, the narrator, still seems remote in some ways, and exhibits little emotion when her young son goes missing. Olivia herself reveals that she thinks she has been distant from her children, and in some ways, seems so with the reader, despite sharing memories of her difficult childhood. Additionally, once Olivia runs away, the storylines about her parentage start to get difficult to believe and I found myself growing suspicious of how realistic the novel could really be.

However, the beauty of this novel is in the writing, which occasionally struck me with its unique turns of phrase. "It is my first kiss, and how terrible. His tongue is chill as lunch meat" (53). And in the clarity with which Olivia pinpoints the central rupture of her marriage: "When something broke in our house, a lamp or a glass, I would take it to my workbench and try to glue it back together. But if Sam found it before I did, he would drop it in the trash without a thought. This is why I left him in the end" (203). Because of course, Olivia and her son Daniel are both broken in some ways - Olivia sees pieces to salvage that Sam cannot.

Cornwell does an excellent job portraying the realities of living with bipolar disorder. "I nurse a global feeling of poor fit. My clothing itches and pulls, and all things become shadow cousins of themselves: songs slide off-key, the sand is too hot, the ocean a rude blue, mean with undertow. The sun scorches the part in my hair. I have appetite only for citrus and cold tea" (15). Over the course of the novel, Olivia confronts her past and being raised by a very mentally unstable mother, ultimately leaving her ready to fully confront the reality of raising a son with the same disorder.

Stars: 3