Here’s a confession: I love writing.

I’ve loved writing ever since I was 15 years old, and I dreamed of characters even before that.

I carried a spare notebook in which I could draw a new character for a cartoon I liked when I was a first grader.

I wrote a play with my childhood best friend when I was in fourth grade.

I was 15 when I realized I had a story to tell.

By 16, I finished my first book.

Of course, it was cheesy. Immature, even. My writing was driven primarily by ideas living in my head. No plans, barely any research to back it up. Just a story demanding to be told.

What I didn’t expect, as a young, but passionate teenage writer, was for people to connect with the words I’ve typed down and felt bold enough to publish online.

Still, I vividly remember feeling a certain way.

I remember going to sleep, thinking about the story and wishing the morning would arrive sooner. I remember creating a highly-specific playlist that allowed me to make up the most heartbreaking scenarios. I remember giggling to myself, feeling giddy inside as I opened up my laptop and continued the chapter.

Still, I vividly remember loving to write.

I loved losing myself in an imagined world. I loved hearing the voice of the characters I gave life to. I feared their unexpected boldness. I loved acting out an impossible scene, living a life full of adventures that existed only between the pages I outlined.

By 25, I had the first draft of a novel I could imagine seeing on the shelves.

It still sits there; a first draft, untouched. A story I wish I could forget, but that refuses to abandon me.

Why have I stopped writing it, you ask? Because, somewhere along the way, I forgot why I started writing in the first place.

Now that time has passed, I can see that it was me who created unnecessary pressure that—in order to be considered a writer, an author—I needed to traditionally publish something. It was not enough to tell the story to myself anymore. I had to share it with the entire world in order to be eligible for the title. It had to be on the shelves, and it needed to be big. Life-changing.

I got so obsessed with the goal of publishing a novel that I forgot the feeling I experienced each time I sat down to write. I forgot all the magnificent moments, all the laughs and tears, the late night hours and the characters that held my hand throughout the years.

Life happened too. I had a difficult biomed program to graduate from. I started a PhD after that. A job too. I had to write a research paper, after a research paper, and I found little time to escape. Little time to do what brought me so much joy.

Here’s another confession: In a way, starting a Substack was my way of falling in love with writing again.

Or rather, starting a Substack was my way of remembering why I loved writing in the first place.

I wanted to give myself the chance to be 15 again, all wide-eyed and excited to type another sentence.

I wanted to tell the story for the right reasons.

Not for it to be the next bestseller, but because the story deserved to be told.

Not for it to be in all the bookstores across the world, but because the characters deserved to breathe.

Not for future readers, but for me.

For the shy 15-year-old girl with big dreams.

I hope she gives me another chance to make her proud.

My words have stopped coming because of the weight of my own creation, and I knew pushing through it wasn’t the answer I was looking for. I knew that I had to find another way to bring back the color and the sound to the world that had become so bleak and silent.

I did the most terrifying thing any writer could imagine. I stopped writing.

Each moment my thoughts lingered back to the book I was writing, I could feel my heart breaking a little more. A tiny hole fracturing into a gaping abyss.

I knew I had to save myself, because I knew I couldn’t stop telling the stories.

I started reading more, but—this time—I didn’t worry about my writing not being as good as the one I was reading. I went on walks and listened to new music. I gave space to my brain to be at peace with the newfound emptiness.

The road to recovery wasn’t easy, but quitting wasn’t an option for me. My fingers itched to type, and my eyes couldn’t stop seeing the endless possibility in the world that surrounded me.

I slowly gave myself permission to begin again. A sentence in my notes app, half a page in my journal. A bad first draft of an essay, a crossed-out summary of a book I just read written by hand in my sparkly reading journal.

I gave myself permission to create things that weren’t perfect, and I gave myself the gift of resting when I knew I couldn’t push another word out.

I discarded the word counts, the character charts, the self-imposed deadlines.

I returned to my craft, one word at a time.

In a way, this is a letter of hope. It is an attempt to say: I am ready to write again.

In a way, this is my message to all the writers and authors out there, published or not-yet-published. Never forget why you started writing in the first place.

If you manage to preserve that spark, to protect it against all the obstacles you are experiencing on the way to achieving your dreams, you will win. That is a promise.

The ending of Wild Dark Shore shattered me in the best way possible. In a way, it was a masterclass on how to build tension and pursue an unconventional route. Layer by slow-burning layer, up until the very last page. Layer by layer, until you are left stranded in the quiet aftershock, craving for more.

I already unpacked its brilliant ecological subtext in my previous essay (go give that a read if you want to see the real life inspiration behind the novel).

For this piece, however, I wanted to curate a list of reads that strike that exact, precarious balance: eerie environmental urgency paired with deep thematic weight. If you, too, are drawn to stories with compelling characters dealing with harsh landscapes, systemic decay, and dark secrets, consider these your essential next reads.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

A short summary: Driven to follow the world’s last Arctic terns on their final migration, Franny Stone talks her way onto a Greenland fishing boat bound for Antarctica. As the dangerous journey unfolds, her dark past and hidden secrets resurface, revealing that her pursuit of the birds is actually a desperate quest for redemption.

Why I put it on my TBR:

• I really wanted to discover more of McConaghy’s work.

• The premise sounds intriguing.

Saltcrop by by Yume Kitasei

A short summary: In a post-apocalyptic world submerged by rising seas, sailor and plastic-reseller Skipper and her sister Carmen set out across treacherous, pirate-controlled waters to answer a cryptic plea for help from their long-lost sister, Nora. Their ocean journey transforms into a search for answers about Nora’s world-altering agricultural discovery, testing the fragile bonds of sisterhood against a backdrop of looming ecological disaster.

Why I put it on my TBR:

• There is an exploration of sisterhood, friendship and ecological disasters.

• I really want to see the world imagined within these pages.

• A promise of a quest.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

A short summary: When thirteen-year-old Barbara Van Laar vanishes from her family’s summer camp in August 1975, the search reopens deep wounds from her older brother’s unsolved disappearance fourteen years prior. As the frantic hunt unfolds, the dark secrets of the wealthy Van Laar dynasty and the working-class community in their shadow begin to unravel.

Why I put it on my TBR:

• While this one isn’t really a typical eco-themed book, the compelling storyline and the dark atmosphere remind me of Wild Dark Shore in a way.

• I love a good summer camp book.

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

A short summary: When a mother in a flood-and-famine-stricken Kolkata has her family’s long-awaited U.S. visas stolen days before their departure, she launches a frantic search to recover them amid a worsening food shortage. Told over the course of one week, the narrative contrasts her desperate quest with that of Boomba, the thief whose own family crisis drove him to steal, exposing how far both will go to protect their children’s futures.

Why I put it on my TBR:

• Shows the desperate things people are ready to do in order to survive.

• Famine, heat, flooding. Climate disaster.

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

A short summary: As a powerful hurricane threatens a collapsing Florida, Kirby Lowe searches for his missing sons while his wife, Frida, gives birth alone during the storm to a daughter named Wanda. Growing up in the aftermath of the disaster, Wanda adapts to a transformed world, navigating loss and community as she seeks love and purpose in a landscape remade by nature.

Why I put it on my TBR:

• It is told in four parts—power, water, light, and time.

• Portrayal of the ways in which people can come together in times of crisis.

One last thought

If you are still thinking about Wild Dark Shore, these stories might keep you standing on that same vanishing shores of Shearwater. I know that the sole thought of picking these up makes me excited.

Whether you are drawn to the quiet dread of climate catastrophes, the tension of isolation and survival, or secrets buried so deep they alter your entire being, this list is your road back into the dark. Pick one up, step back into the storm, and let the next obsession begin.

And, of course, feel free to share with me if you have read (and enjoyed!) some of these books.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built into an Arctic mountain in Norway and nicknamed the “Doomsday Vault,” was engineered to survive almost anything: global crises, wars, the collapse of civilization. What its designers didn’t plan for was the one threat that was already underway — climate change. So, when the rising temperatures caused the permafrost around the vault to melt, and the meltwater breached the tunnel, we had a problem. Thankfully, the seeds were fine. However, the story stuck with Charlotte McConaghy, who has said the incident left her asking a simple, terrible question: if disaster really came, what would we choose to save?

That question became Wild Dark Shore.

A fictional island built from real fears

Wild Dark Shore is set on Shearwater, a secluded, storm-battered subantarctic island that houses the world’s largest seed vault. It is also the home to Dominic Salt and his three children — Raff, Fen, and Orly.

Their isolation feels intentional. For Dominic, Shearwater has been as much a place to hide from the grief of losing his wife as it has been a place to protect. Fen, the daughter, has drifted even further from the family, spending her days on the beach with the island’s seal colony. Raff, the older son, connects only with the whales. Orly, the younger son and the youngest child, adores anything botany-related and is incredibly creative and smart for his age. However, their seemingly peaceful life is threatened with two things: the worst storm Shearwater has ever seen, and a woman named Rowan, washed ashore and searching for a husband who was supposed to be working at the research station.

What follows is a race against a dying island. A family is forced to reckon with what they’ve been avoiding, and a stranger whose motives no one can quite pin down.

More quietly, Wild Dark Shore is a book about what we owe to nature when it’s disappearing in front of us, and about the particular kind of grief that comes with watching it happen in real time.

The real-world Shearwater

Let’s be clear: Shearwater doesn’t exist. It is imagined to be a subantarctic island somewhere south of New Zealand. As previously mentioned, the island is a home to the world’s largest seed bank.

When I first read the synopsis and discovered this, I couldn’t help but think of Svalbard and its Global Seed Vault. While located on a completely different side of the world, at the convergence of the Arctic and the Atlantic Ocean, there were quite a few similarities I noticed.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure, underground backup facility designed to safeguard the world’s crop diversity against global crises, climate change, natural disasters, and war. Svalbard Global Seed Vault is buried 130 meters inside of an Arctic mountain in Norway’s permafrost, so you can imagine why people often refer to it as the “Doomsday Vault.” It serves as an insurance policy for every possible disaster you can imagine, storing seeds from nearly every country in the world.

McConaghy mentions this inspiration in one of her interviews.

“The whole idea of this vault is that it should withstand anything and last well into the future. But the insane thing is that they did not predict the rise in temperatures that would lead to melting permafrost, and [in 2017] the vault flooded.”

She goes on to say that the seeds were saved, but that such an event piqued her interest, leading her to explore what we would save if the doomsday really arrived.

The island itself is modeled after Macquarie Island — an island governed by Tasmania and located about 1500 kilometers north of Antarctica. McConaghy has said she’d wanted to write about Macquarie for years, having heard about it from scientist friends who’d worked at its research station, and finally visited it herself while researching the book.

Macquarie Island is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the only place on Earth where rocks from the Earth’s mantle are exposed above sea level due to tectonic activity. While fascinating, the island is heavily restricted and remote. You can visit it only if you get a permit, and the amount of visitors per year is limited. The only way to access it is through small-ship cruises departing from New Zealand or Tasmania.

The island has a distinctive biodiversity, and in a way, it is logical. The island is isolated, sitting precisely where the Antarctic Convergence meets the Southern Ocean currents. The deep waters surrounding it are rich in nutrients, fueling massive blooms of marine life. Strong wind, high humidity, salt sprays and cold temperatures allow tundra to rule. It is covered in lots of moss, and no trees, and is a true sanctuary to incredible flora and fauna.

There are no land mammals native to Macquarie Island, so marine life and seabird dominate. Many animals would cover the beaches and cliffs during the breeding season. So, if you are lucky enough to ever visit the island during this period, you might be able to spot Royal penguins (endemic to the island), seals and albatrosses.

Places like this are a haven for researchers, allowing observation in undisturbed systems. They also serve as inspiration for novels such as Wild Dark Shore.

Could an island like this really disappear?

I’m not a climate scientist, but I can imagine an island can’t vanish underwater overnight. However, ecologically speaking, a place like Shearwater (or Macquarie Island) can disappear long before its highest point is submerged. Two mechanisms do most of the damage, and both show up in the novel.

• Sea-level rise and ocean warming. Due to rising temperatures, oceans become warmer. Under warmth, they expand and lead to the rise of sea levels. When we combine this with melting ice sheets, oceans and seas have the potential to swallow coastal beaches.

• Storms and erosion. Bigger storms mean bigger waves. Bigger waves cause bigger damage, eroding places like beaches where seals and penguins raise their young. Without trees to anchor the soil, slopes lose their structure entirely, and a breeding colony is gone.

Observed like this, an island doesn’t really need a dramatic ending. It just needs its living systems to stop holding together — the plants that used to survive stop surviving, the animals that depended on them leave or die, and eventually what’s left isn’t really the same place anymore, even if the coastline hasn’t moved.

Seed banks: why they exist, and whether they can actually save us

If you are anything like me, you probably haven’t heard about the term ‘ex situ conservation’ before. This term means preserving genetic material outside its natural environment. So, in contrast to ‘in situ’ conservation where we try to protect natural habitats of plants, with ‘ex situ’ conservation we are trying to preserve plants somewhere away from the extinction, the climate shifts, the wildfires, and other catastrophes they may face. This is, in part, why seed banks exist. Because we need to make sure plants survive existing and future threats.

As you can imagine, a lot of resources and expertise go into constructing and operating a seed bank. It requires heavy architectural engineering and precise climate-control technology. We need to be able to harvest seeds from wild populations or farms, to clean and test them for viability. We need to bring them to the seed bank which is typically located in a stable, underground location. Before we freeze the said seeds, they must be dehydrated. Why, you ask? Because too much water might destroy cellular walls. Just based on this, you can see that the seed banks require a lot of effort in order to preserve seeds for decades or centuries.

So, could they actually save humanity?

It is a difficult question to answer.

Seed banks can preserve the genetic building blocks of life, so, technically, they can offer a second chance. They can preserve what we need in order to rebuild a functional world. However, what about the bees and pollinators, about insects and fungi? What about other ecological relationships?

There are many more questions to consider, but we can see that seed banks are only a part of the answer.

Solastalgia: homesickness without leaving home

At the heart of Wild Dark Shore lies not a storm, or a mystery. There is a specific form of grief that doesn’t have an obvious name in everyday language. Professor Glenn Albrecht coined a term for it: solastalgia, the distress of watching your home environment change for the worse while you’re still living in it. Not grief for something already lost, but grief for something actively disappearing before your very own eyes.

In Wild Dark Shore, McConaghy writes two different versions of it through Orly and Fen and their relationships with the Shearwater’s fading life:

• Orly and his love for the plants: Because he cares so deeply for plants, he makes it his priority to constantly learn about them, and to save every single seed before the environment unravels completely.

• Fen and her love for the wildlife: Fen sees animals as companions who share the same shrinking sanctuary. She considers them family, and watching them disappear simply isn’t an option. This is why we see her running around the island, sleeping far away from the safety of her home. All to be close to animals, in case they need help.

Through Orly and Fen, we begin to understand that climate grief is not an abstract concept, but something very real.

When you can’t save everything, how do you decide what deserves to live?

This is the question Wild Dark Shore refuses to answer plainly, and it’s the reason the book stays with you after the plot resolves.

When the catastrophe arrives, what and who do you save? Do you save a seed bank, and let the ecosystem go? How do you help animals that occupy the island? Do you prioritize the species most at risk of extinction, or the ones most useful to human survival? Do you prioritize genetic diversity? Do you place human beings in the first place?

What makes Wild Dark Shore so devastating is that there is no right answer.

There is no single solution because true ecological collapse doesn’t have one. It leaves us standing on the shores of Shearwater, to make a choice for ourselves.

Further reading, if this sent you down the same rabbit hole it sent me:

• The Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the 2017 flooding incident

• The Millennium Seed Bank

• Cryopreservation of plant genetic material

• Ex situ vs. in situ conservation strategies

• Solastalgia and ecological grief

• Sea-level rise projections and saltwater intrusion

• Why seals congregate on particular islands

• Breeding colonies and human disturbance of breeding sites

• How animals use remote islands as refuges

• The vulnerability and resilience of island species

• Theory of Island Biogeography

And, in true scientist nature, I present you with a research question: If Shearwater’s seed bank existed in the real world, what would scientists actually do as the island became uninhabitable?

“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”

― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

I have recently read the widely-celebrated The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, and I think I belong to the rare group of readers that simply found it mild. Underwhelming, if you will. My expectations for this novel were high, and not just because of the current 4.4 ranking on Goodreads (based off of 811,120 ratings). I fell in love with the premise, and I will be the first one to admit that I am a sucker for epistolary novels, but I struggled to get into and through it. Nevertheless, The Correspondent made me pause and think—of Sybil Van Antwerp and her life, of the importance of accepting yourself and all the imperfections and mistakes you carry, and of letters we rarely write and send today.

Inspired by the proud, opinionated, and sometimes arrogant Sybil, I dare write this reflection in the form of a letter.

Dear Sybil,

I have never addressed a letter to a fictional character before. I am still unsure why I am choosing to write to you specifically, but I guess Virginia Evans is to thank for the existence of this piece. She is the sole reason why you, Sybil Van Antwerp, a sharp-tongued ex-lawyer and passionate, seventy-something, letter-writing woman, continue to linger in my mind long after I’ve said goodbye to The Correspondent. She is the reason why you feel like a real person, with a real voice, even though you continue to live and breathe within her novel.

It took me a moment to understand why everyone loved you so much. Or perhaps that is not entirely true. You tickled my curiosity from the very first letter, yet something prevented me from falling in love all the way. Looking back at it now—two weeks after I finished reading the novel—I think I felt intimidated. You are a great many things, Sybil. A mother, a grandmother, an ex-wife, a friend, a successful lawyer. A woman in her seventies with endless stories to tell. A woman who has lived a beautiful, rich life, and knows it. A woman who speaks honestly, without sugarcoating her thoughts. A woman who is confident, and brave, and makes a mistake, and continues to live.

I am nowhere near close in age to you. I am a girl in her twenties, attempting to navigate the years everyone worships. I am not a mother, or a wife. I am a daughter, a sister, and a friend, and hope I am a good one. I work in academia and hope to be able to pass on at least a tiny bit of passion and curiosity I have through teaching and research. I am a woman with many stories to tell, but sometimes I am afraid. Afraid of being judged, of my words not meaning anything to anyone. I am a woman who is trying to live her life, who is trying to speak honestly, but often sugarcoats her thoughts because she is afraid of hurting people’s feelings. This goes to such an extent that I end up being the injured one.

On one hand, you are the woman I aspire to be. I wish I possessed your confidence. I wish I cared little about what others said, and shared my mind freely and without worries. I am working on that part, but it’s a long journey. On the other hand, I also see how important it is to be my own self. I couldn’t imagine judging people as easily as you did, or being so cold and distant, or being so proud and unable to apologize, especially when I am deadly wrong. You made me realize that I want to nurture my kindness and my imagination, that I want to protect the innocent heart beating in my chest.

I also wish I could sit down with you, and understand—at least in part—your grief. The burden you carry is a heavy one. I don’t know what it feels like to lose a child, but I have experienced grief. I have had the misfortune of losing my grandfather without getting to say goodbye, without getting to hold his hand and tell him how much I loved running down the stairs and jumping into his arms whenever he visited us. I also had the misfortune of not getting to wish my grandmother one last ‘happy birthday’. One thing I’ve come to realize, as the years passed, is that grief and loss aren’t always reserved for the dead. Sometimes, we lose the people who are still breathing the same air as us. Following my parents’ divorce, I fell out with my father. Our last conversation was a threat wrapped in a seemingly-friendly encounter. It’s been three years since then, and my heart still constricts at the sole thought of accidentally crossing paths with him on the streets.

What I am trying to say is that you made me think, Sybil. I may have found you unlikeable, entitled and arrogant at times. I may have struggled to follow your reasoning and agree with the decisions you chose to make, but you convinced me to take a closer look at myself, at my life. For that, I thank you.

In the letter you addressed to your daughter, whom you have failed to connect in a meaningful way, I realized how complex human relationships can be. How we could fail to support someone, even though we love them endlessly. If you don’t know which words I am referring to, I will copy them below:

“I’m sorry I didn’t do better. I know you think of me as your mother only, but please inside, I am just a girl.”

I think that might have been one of the rare times when I truly felt sorry for you. That may have been the only moment I could imagine you being sorry for something you did. I also realized that I may have been too harsh, too quick in judging you. You are too, after all, living this life for the first time. You are allowed to make mistakes, even if they come with terrible prices. There are many people around you who understand, who love you despite your flaws. It is a sign, I guess, that you are doing something right.

When I picture you reading this letter, I imagine you shaking your head. You would probably despise my sentimentality. I mean, you would probably pass on writing me back, if it weren’t for this paragraph. A provocation in an exchange for a reply. Clever, you might think, or foolish. Both are an option.

I wish I could hug you, Sybil, even though you would probably stare at me like I was a mad woman.

Thank you for everything you taught me,

Helen

If you enjoyed this letter, hit reply and continue the conversation: Have you ever written a letter to a fictional character? If yes, to whom? If not, who would you write to?

What follows are the thoughts Almost Life left me with; the kind that refuse to let you go.

The grief associated with the road not taken

There is a particular kind of grief that belongs only to books.

It isn’t the grief associated with death or betrayal, but with possibility. With the road not taken. With the person you might have become if you had answered a question differently, if you boarded a different train, if you braved enough to storm down the stairs and join the strangers conversing below your dorm room window.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s Almost Life is built on that grief. It’s far from a simple love story between Erica and Laure, two women who meet on the steps of Sacré-Cœur in Paris, part ways within the year, and spend the following decades circling back to each other. Their story is an impossible game of choices, of decisions that come with high prices.

Naturally, it got me thinking.

Every life we choose leaves another unlived, and yet the unlived life never really abandons us. It lingers in the back of our minds. It follows us around like a lost puppy. It asks the terribly difficult question of: What if?

If we go back to the title, it should serve as a warning.

It does not speak of another life, or a different life. The book is, very deliberately, called Almost Life.

The novel suggests proximity, but never possession. A life close enough to daydream about, but forever out of reach. It captures something most of us eventually discover: our greatest regrets are rarely epochal mistakes. More often, they are simple, daily decisions that slowly close doors until one day we no longer remember what was on the other side.

How do we live with the knowledge that every fulfilled life contains countless abandoned ones?

Almost Life reminds us that adulthood isn’t defined through making choices. It’s defined through losing possibilities.

When we’re young, life feels like a blank canvas with endless possibilities. We can paint a magnificent landscape, or give shape and colour to the person we might meet one day. Every future seems available. We can become almost anyone, love almost anyone, live almost anywhere. Then, as if overnight, that possibility shrinks. The canvas we tended to is shredded, and every “yes” buries a hundred other futures.

That isn’t tragedy.

It’s simply what living is.

But Almost Life refuses to pretend those futures disappear.

Instead, they remain vividly alive in our memory. They continue to haunt.

This is what makes the novel linger long after its last sentence. Erica doesn’t merely remember Laure. She remembers a version of herself that existed beside her. The woman she might have become. The courage and freedom she might have possessed. The future she might have inhabited. The love that would have enriched her every day.

Perhaps that is why this novel hurts so much.

It speaks about timing, longing, and two people who struggle to bridge the distance between who they are, who they wish to be and the kind of life they want to have. What makes Almost Life devastating, in my opinion, is that it transcends youth.

Almost Life understands adulthood. It understands the inevitable process of growing older. It understands that some choices cannot be remade because they have already become lives. There are children to raise, partners to respect and decades to account for. The question is no longer whether two people should be together. It is what happens when an imagined future has lived alongside your real one for decades.

That is a quieter kind of heartbreak.

Perhaps a more devastating one.

The novel joins a selection of books built on the particular kind of regret, but it’s worth pausing on what separates it from its closest comparatives. Almost Life is compared to David Nicholls’ One Day. At its core, One Day is a book about timing. About the ache that comes from the sense that if the calendar had simply cooperated, things might have gone differently. Almost Life is doing something colder and, I think, truer. Erica and Laure aren’t kept apart by bad timing. They’re kept apart by the growing weight of the lives they each go on to build. Nicholls’ novel mourns a missed window. Hargrave’s mourns something with no window at all — a life that was never really pursued, except in the imagination.

These novels aren’t asking whether different choices would have produced happier endings. They’re asking something more unsettling: how do we live with the knowledge that every fulfilled life contains countless abandoned ones?

There is no answer to offer us comfort and erase the heartbreak.

The novel suggests that our almost lives remain part of us. They don’t disappear because we choose another path. They become stories we tell ourselves, dreams we occasionally revisit, alternate selves that quietly accompany us through seemingly ordinary afternoons.

Everyone has an “almost”

I think there is a reason I enjoyed Almost Life so much, and it isn’t because I have experienced a love like Erica and Laure’s. It’s the realisation that everyone has an “almost.”

Mine is common, unglamorous: a life lived on another continent, erased as a possibility years ago, simply because I was too afraid of being away from everything I knew and everyone I loved. I don’t know that other version of my life in detail. I couldn’t tell you the apartment, the street, the person I might have become in it. But I know another version of myself is there, fierce and unapologetic and brave. I think about that version of Helen maybe twice a year, usually for no reason at all, and then I say goodbye all over again.

We carry stories like that alongside our daily, visible lives. Most of the time they are quiet. Occasionally, they remind us they are still there.

Perhaps books exist partly for this reason. Not to show us better lives, but to give voice to the ones we never lived.

After finishing Almost Life, I found myself thinking less about Erica and Laure than about my own abandoned futures. The people I never became. The conversations I never had. The ordinary moments that, without my noticing, determined everything that followed.

My final thought for this essay is simple. The ghosts of our almost lives walk beside us, quietly enough that, for a moment, we can almost hear them.

Next essay is on The Correspondent by Virginia Evans — if you’ve read it, I’d love to know what you thought before this drops.