(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
In a great many seasonally redemptive romcoms, tragedy is usually just the curtain raiser to something good and wonderful down the track.
Sure, the person’s heart is torn in two and terrible changes are wrought in the fabric of their life, but by and large, the grief is packed away fairly smartly, the pain healed and the loss replaced in no time flat.
After all, these stories exist to reassure that while life can be desperately sad and ruinous, it can also be a time of healing and new beginnings, and people lap it up because who wants to feel like a seismic catastrophe is all she wrote, folks?
The absolute beauty of This Year’s For Me and You by Emily Bell, is that it observes all these tropes and cliches of the seasonal romcoms without once pretending life is some easy-to-fix fairytale from which you rebound without blemish or lingering hurt.
In fact, so affectingly and beautifully human is this story that if you have ever experienced grief, you will well relate to how long it takes for the protagonist, Celeste, to recover from the untimely passing of her BFF since she was 18, Hannah, and how when all the but mandated happiness does find her, she feels guilty that not only is she happy again but that it feels like this renewed emotional vivacity says she’s moved on from Hannah and their life-defining friendship.
‘Thank you! So does yours!’ I said fervently [Celeste to Hannah], hugging her back and thinking that if the world was about to end, at least we had given it a great send-off.
You ache for the pain that Celeste, Hannah’s boyfriend of four years Vik, and their friendship network of Mel, Rishi and Sibéal and Patrick feel and how the loss of their close and much-loved friend rips a hole in everything they have known up until this point.
You also completely relate to the fact that in the wake of Hannah’s death – no spoilers here by the way; it’s all in the back cover blurb – Celeste begins to reassess her high-pressure, workaholic management consultant job, and wonder whether there isn’t more to life than she’s been letting herself experience?
All fairly familiar narrative themes if you have ever experienced grief yourself, or read stories where it is the chief emotional driver, but the groundedness inherent on every page of This Year’s For Me and You means that they are never feel like retread’s in Bell’s mostly assured hands.
In fact, there is a freshness to all the themes of loss, inertia and moving on that fill the novel, their impact and relatability bolstered by the fact that the romance, when it does occur, is far from the main game in town narratively and emotionally, and while it comes to occupy a central final act place in the narrative, it is never eclipsed by the truth of what Celeste undergoes in the wake of Hannah’s passing.
Nothing about Celeste’s reinvention, which owes its genesis to a list of 12 unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions by Hannah that Vik finds and passes onto her bestie, feels false or manipulatively engineered and it’s that central emotional truthfulness that anchors This Year’s For Me and You through it’s highly readable 375 pages.
(courtesy The Soho Agency)
So masterfully handled are the central themes in This Year’s For Me and You that the only time Bell stumbles, and it’s really not even close to narratively fatal, you don’t feel like the story overall has been diminished in anyway. (The stumble in question is in the final act where the insertion of a tried and true break-up/reunite romcom dynamic feels unnecessary in a story that hasn’t relied on any kind of gimmick up until that point.)
This is a romcom that offers escapist potential, sure, and which reminds you of how rich and lovely life can be if you can open yourself up to it, yes, even in the wake of tragedy, but it doesn’t use as some cheap diversionary party trick, pretending that great loss can be remedied by ticking off items on a NYE resolutions bucket list.
That Hannah’s undone resolutions do change Celeste for the better is inarguable, and they do heal her and everyone around her, but as she tries hot yoga, or jogs in Hyde Park (London, where This Year’s For Me and You is set) and visits a Christmas market, Celeste also has to confront the fact, again and again, that her best friend for life, is never ever coming back again.
‘Anyway,’ he says, raising his glass. ‘Here’s to your Chairman’s Award, and your fifteen-year award — and, drum roll, we almost forgot: your birthday! Come on. Life’s not so bad.’
‘Of course it’s not,’ I say, clinking his glass. ‘Life is good. Life is great.’ I smile at him, feeling grateful for the reminder.
It’s a lot to deal with and bell doesn’t pretend otherwise; but as This Year’s For Me and You progresses through a year and more of great changes and the firsts that inevitably and painfully punctuate the days, weeks and months, it thoughtfully and insightfully also puts forward the idea that life can go on, even when it feels like its dead and moribund for good.
There is a real warmth and inclusion to Celeste and her longstanding group of friends, and Bell realises this beautifully, just as she evokes how messily destructive Hannah’s loss is to the dynamic that came before.
This is a romcom with its emotional feet very firmly on the ground, which knows escapist loveliness can exist in the harsh light of post-death emptiness but which understands that the light doesn’t follow the dark without some very painful, if promising transitions first.
It’s a fitting theme for any romcom but especially one partially set at Christmas and New Year when redemption is high on the popular agenda and eyes are always firmly focused on where to next, rather than where we’ve been.
This Year’s For Me and You is a wonderfully told and richly realised story that stares grief and loss firmly in the eyes and admits they are not easily, if ever, evaded, but which also offers up the comfort of life renewed and redone and how wonderful it is, after you have felt like life has ended with no possibility of any kind of restart, to find that you can both not forget and yet move on to places new and worlds yet to be explored.