I knew she had committed suicide, but I didn’t know how she had done it (pocketing a large stone and drowning herself in a river), and I had never read the note she left behind, addressed to her husband: I didn’t know that she, like Finch, had suffered from frantic highs and bleak lows – the Awake, the Asleep. I knew some of her story – she’d had a tumultuous life, she’d had a tragic death. I went flipping through the book and landed on a page about Virginia Woolf. When I started work on All the Bright Places, a friend of mine loaned me a book called … Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes, thinking I might find something in it to add to Finch’s collection. Doing so somehow makes him feel more in control of himself and his moods, and more alive.Ī younger Virginia Woolf, by George C Beresford. One of the things Finch does is collect facts and anecdotes about suicides. This is because he is either Awake or Asleep, with no in-between. Actually, he’s more than a little death-obsessed. Popular Violet is reeling from the recent death of her sister, while class freak Theodore Finch is doing what he always does: thinking about killing himself. In All the Bright Places, my characters Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of their high school bell tower, both contemplating jumping.
Usually, if you’re lucky, the right quote/scene/scenario/idea has a way of showing up for the right book at the right time. As a former English major, I studied around her in school, unable to click with her on the written page the way I wanted to.īut you never know where inspiration will come from. To me, she’s always been one of those well-respected writers other people say they enjoy reading, when in reality only a few of them truly do. I should say upfront that I’ve never been a huge fan of Virginia Woolf.
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