Amy Neff on The Days I Loved You Most connecting people
Evelyn and Joseph have spent sixty years together. And they want to end their lives together.
The Days I Loved You Most follows Evelyn and Joseph who have spent sixty years together. Today they have gathered their three grown children to share the staggering news: Evelyn has received a tragic diagnosis, and he cannot live without her. So in one year’s time, they will end their lives on their own terms.
In this devastatingly beautiful love story, Amy Neff opens the conversation about love, hope and mortality. We are honoured to have her here to chat about writing a book with such a hard subject matter.
Many people compared this to The Notebook, which came out in 1996. Why do you think there aren’t too many books that have a similar theme?
It’s funny you ask because I am always on the lookout for love stories, but they are usually tucked inside another genre, or they are packaged as romance novels which have different frameworks and tropes. I set out to write a story that is a love story, period, because I wanted to explore what happens after the characters get together, what it looks like to love someone for decades, what it means to build a life, and maybe to some it feels too ordinary to fill an entire novel, but to me, the ordinary is what real love stories are made of.
Having written a book about such a hard subject matter, did you find yourself talking about life and death with people around you more?
I wasn’t prepared for how much people would share with me after reading my book, the connections they feel to their own lives or have seen in their parents and grandparents. Their own losses, the great loves they’ve lived or witnessed. These stories are a gift, I am honored my book moved them enough to share them with me, and I’m thankful The Days I Loved You Most gives them a place to honor those beautiful, and difficult, parts of their own histories.
And in fact, please tell us how writing this book has changed your outlook on life?
I think the book less changed my outlook as it helped me to explore things I am already hyper aware of — that everything beautiful in life is fleeting, and that at some point we all have to say goodbye to the things we love most. I have no answers or easy outs for this, but it gave me space to explore this tragic truth we all must grapple with.
Some readers might be very against Joseph’s decision to end his life with Evelyn. How would you persuade them to give The Days I Loved You Most a chance?
At its heart, this novel is a life-affirming novel of love, and a celebration of the beauty of life. I understand the moral objection, and I think what readers will come to find is that every character in the novel disagrees with this choice at times, including Joseph. This book is not championing his decision, it is grappling with what life looks like for all of us at the end, and the difficult choices we all face when saying goodbye to a life well-lived.
The two POVs help readers understand the couple’s relationship. How did you write their POVs so that they feel distinct?
This book has been with me for a third of my adult life. I started writing it when I was twenty-two, and it has taken over ten years to get to the final published version. These characters feel distinct because they are two distinct people who are extremely real to me. I know how they think and talk and react, the secrets they keep and the lies they believe. Writers must know any character that well to do their characters justice, no matter how many POVs they write.
The Days I Loved You Most spanned across World War II to 9/11. Why do you think it’s important to include real life events in your book?
No story exists in a vacuum. Everything that is happening around Joseph and Evelyn affects them as individuals, as parents, and in their marriage. Including historical events helped me to evoke the time period and move them forward through their life, while also providing crucial context for the world they inhabit.
This book is also a love letter to Connecticut. Why do you think this backdrop is so perfect for this story?
I wanted to capture the feeling of belonging to a place as well as another person, and the complications inherent in having deep roots. Stonybrook is a fictional town based on the very real one where I spent my childhood summers, and the revolving door of cousins and the feeling of belonging are inspired by my experiences growing up. It is a deeply special place to me, one that has imprinted itself enough that I wanted to set this story on its shores, to keep it forever between the pages of this book, a place where the reader can pull up their own sand chair on Bernard Beach and feel at home.
