A fine sheen of perspiration glistens under the strip-lights. He holds his head low over his double Scotch, but every few minutes he glances up and out, behind him, towards the door. Will’s death was supposed to leave her with a bigger life instead, it turns out, it diminished her.The big man at the end of the bar is sweating. “But that’s just a fairy-tale ending, isn’t it?” After You is about the way that the first book’s version of a happy ending failed-not just in that Will died, but in the sense that Louisa didn’t grow and change as Will, and the book’s readers, thought she would. “Man dies, everyone learns something, moves on, creates something wonderful out of his death,” Louisa bitterly tells her grief-support group. In fact, in some ways, the whole novel is a failed HEA. After You explicitly toys with the idea that it is the same sad story as Me Before You-and explicitly rejects it.Īfter You offers other wrong turns and unhappy, or mixed, endings, though. And Louisa herself asks the paramedic if she is paralyzed. The parallel is very direct Louisa’s accident is recounted in a foreword, just as Will’s is. The first of these comes right at the beginning of the novel Louisa accidentally falls off her roof and for a moment thinks she is paralyzed, like Will before her. “Give me the end I’m hoping for,” he says. You have no idea how happy that has made me.” Will wants to die not because he is sad, but because he won’t accept the limited life he has, and the prospect of things getting worse.
“I’ve watched you these six months becoming a whole different person,” he tells Louisa, “someone who is only just beginning to see her possibilities. Louisa, for her part, helps Will to overcome his self-centeredness, his bitterness, and even his depression.
Over the course of the book, Will opens Louisa’s horizons: to opera (shades of Pretty Woman), travel, and her own potential. Will, before his accident, was, in his own words, a self-centered “arse” and a callous womanizer after his accident, he is consumed with bitterness. Louisa at the start of the novel is a lower-middle-class woman afraid to dream beyond her small English town and bland, exercise-crazed boyfriend. Even beyond the damaged hero, though, Me Before You functions as a romance because it’s about two people falling in love, and becoming more complete, and more themselves, while doing so.
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