Everything I Love, I Love on Loan

The book came out September 15; I wrote this the night before. There is one sentence in it that the whole thing was written to arrive at, and it is buried in the Author’s Note at the back, where roughly nobody looks. So I am going to put it here instead and tell you where it came from.

Everything I love, I love on loan.

The trade

The Author’s Note opens like this: My family is the most precious thing in my life. So I wrote a book about a man who loses his.

I know how that sounds. Why take the thing you treasure most and give its loss to someone else, then make him live inside it, page after page? The only answer I have is the one I put in the note. I don’t know a truer way to measure what love is worth than to imagine it taken away.

Michael Sawyer is not me. But writing him through the worst thing I can imagine turned out to be the most honest way I know to say how much I love mine—and how little of it I actually hold in my own hands.

That is an uncomfortable thing to discover in the middle of a manuscript. I had thought I was writing a book about a man and a dog. I was writing a book about custody.

What the sentence means

On loan is not a gentle way of saying temporary. It is a claim about ownership.

The things I love most are not mine the way a car is mine. I did not earn them into existence and I cannot secure them by force. And the Author’s Note names the three ways I try anyway: by gripping harder, by carrying the weight alone, and by hiding what frightens me. Those are my instincts, not a novelist’s invention. I handed all three to Michael, and they nearly cost him everything a second time.

Which is why there is a dog

Michael’s defining flaw is not grief. Grief is what happens to him. His flaw is that he cannot ask. He will absorb any amount of damage rather than say the words I need help out loud to a person who loves him. If you have ever done that, you already know most of this book.

A dog does not require you to ask. That is the entire mechanism, and it is why the animal on the cover is load-bearing rather than decorative. The dog needs to go out whether or not you have the strength to want anything. He leans against your leg when you have not spoken to anyone in two days. He asks for nothing and gives you no way to refuse him.

Which is why the epigraph is two sentences: Grace rarely announces itself. Sometimes it just lies at your feet.

What rescue actually looks like

This is the part I would want a reader to know going in, because it decides what kind of book this is.

Michael’s rescue, when it comes, is not something he manages into being. He does not out-think it or out-work it or earn it. It arrives the way grace tends to—a dog who won’t leave, a town that won’t let him disappear, neighbors who show up to help before he can make himself ask.

I did not plan that as a theme. I noticed it in the third draft, looked at what I had actually written, and realized every good thing in the book comes from outside the person who needed it. He is not the agent of his own recovery. He is the recipient of other people’s stubbornness.

If you want a novel where a man pulls himself together through discipline and insight, I have written the wrong one. That book is a lie, or at least it has never once been my experience.

The fireflies

There is a scene near the end of the first half that I think of as the honest center of the book, and it has no plot in it whatsoever.

Michael is on his back step in Franklin with a glass of iced tea, watching the color drain out of the sky, and the yard fills with fireflies. He has gone his whole life without seeing this. There were none in California. He had read about them the way you read about snow in a country you will never visit. And here they are, in his own plain backyard, soundless and unhurried, as though they have done it every June he wasn’t watching.

He thinks about the people he would have wanted to show them to. And then this:

The thought comes, and it aches, and it does not take him under.

That is the whole book in thirteen words. Not healing. Not closure. Not moving on. Just the discovery, arriving unannounced on an ordinary Tennessee evening, that a thing can hurt exactly as much as it did before and no longer be the end of you. I do not know how to argue anyone into believing that. I only know how to put a man on a back step and let it happen to him.

Who this is for

One practical note, since people are now deciding whether to spend money on this.

If you want a warm, gentle book where a dog arrives and a family is mended and nothing serious happens, this is not that. The first third is hard. Several readers have told me they put it down for a day and came back, and I take that as the book working rather than failing. If you read Remarkably Bright Creatures for the animal and stayed for the grief, or if The Art of Racing in the Rain got further into you than you expected it to, you are the reader I was writing for.

Out now

Jetson’s Journey published Tuesday, September 15—ebook, paperback, and case-laminate hardcover. The ebook is $9.99.

We launched it in person on Tuesday, September 22, at Landmark Booksellers, 114 East Main Street in Franklin. Jetson—the real one—was there, and he is better at this than I am.

BUY JETSON’S JOURNEY

Or start with Riverspook, free. Or trace every mile Michael and Jetson drove: the journey map.