Visiting an Old Friend: A Guest Post by Jill Santopolo

The wait is finally over — we’ve all grappled with the heart wrenching ending to Jill Santopolo’s bestseller, and now we can finally find some closure. Join Lucy on a journey to Rome to uncover secrets of the heart and mend old wounds. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jill on writing The Love We Found.

Have you ever gone to a college reunion? I went to my twenty-year college reunion a few years ago, and the way I felt there was the way I felt when writing The Love We Found. I hadn’t seen many of the people at the reunion for about ten years, and hadn’t been close to them for twenty, but when we got together, we fell back into old habits. We remembered old stories, revived old inside jokes, and were all hungry for details for what everyone had been up to since we last connected. I found myself talking to friends I used to study and party with decades ago who now were partners in law firms, doctors saving lives on the other side of the country, politicians running for office, and spiritual leaders leading their own congregations. I was so proud of them and impressed with what they had done since graduation.

That’s how I felt about writing The Love We Found. Coming back to Lucy, coming back to her world ten years after I’d last “seen” her, felt like visiting an old college friend. We slipped into our old routines, I slipped back into her voice—aged up a little bit, of course, since we’d both gotten older since then—and was proud of what she’d accomplished and how she’d grown since the first book. I know, I know—I made her up, I made up her story, but somehow it feels like she sits separate and apart from me in certain ways. When I finished writing this sequel, I missed her and missed knowing how her life was going. I wished I could see her on social media, just to check in and make sure she was still happy.

Because honestly, that’s part of why I wrote this book. With everything Lucy went through in The Light We Lost, I wanted to give her happiness. I wanted to her to find a way to heal. And I wanted to give readers a way to heal, too. In the past eight years, I’ve gotten so many messages from readers saying that I’d broken their hearts, and with this book, I wanted to mend when I’d broken and put a story of hope and love into the world.

It really was a joy to write this sequel, to return to an old friend, and to shepherd her into a beautiful new future, where she could learn how to live alongside her grief and still find happiness, joy and love.