Points of Light

There are good people in this world, and I don't want them to think they're alone.

They're not.

We are all points of light, reaching for each other. Sometimes we find one another. Sometimes we almost do. Sometimes timing, distance, fear, circumstance, grief, or simply being human keeps us from making contact.

But the light is still there.

That may be the deepest reason I wrote The Girl He Kept Losing.

I wanted to write about connection—not the easy kind, and not the kind that always resolves neatly. I wanted to write about the people who move through our lives and remain with us, even when we cannot keep them. About the ways we try to reach each other. About the distance between what we feel and what we manage to say.

And beneath all of that, I wanted someone reading the book to recognize something of themselves and think:

Someone else understands this.

There are people carrying love, regret, hope, tenderness, loneliness, loyalty, and memory just as deeply as you are. You may never meet most of them. You may pass one another without knowing. You may spend years believing that whatever you are carrying belongs only to you.

It doesn't.

A book can cross a distance that people sometimes cannot.

A stranger can open a story and find a feeling they have never been able to name. For a few pages, two lives that would otherwise never touch can make contact.

Maybe that is what stories are for.

Not to give us perfect answers.

Not to convince us that everything works out.

But to send a little light across the distance and say:

I'm here, too.