What would you do if you woke up as a 16-year-old in your 29-year-old body with no recollection of how you got there? In Emma Grey’s newest novel Pictures of You, that’s the question that Evie Hudson confronts when she wakes up one day in the hospital room as a widow to a husband she didn’t even know she had.
Just N Life had the opportunity to sit down with Grey, the internationally bestselling author of The Last Love Note, to talk about her latest release and advice for aspiring authors.
Pictures of You is beautifully evocative, following Evie after she wakes up from a car accident that killed her husband. This would be a devastating story of grief if Evie remembered her husband. The problem is Evie can’t remember anything since she was 16.
In order to accurately write about the complexities of this specific type of memory loss, Grey consulted with Catherine Burney, the head of the National Women’s Safety Alliance in Australia, and did additional research on the condition. According to Grey, this type of amnesia “will sometimes plunge you back into a time in your life when you felt safe, which is why [Evie, the main character] has plunged back to the time just before she met her husband.” This is due to Evie’s unknown traumatic relationship with her deceased husband—a relationship fraught with coercive control. Even in the novel, Evie remarks,
“They call it dissociative amnesia,’ she proceeds. ‘You’re able to function pretty much normally in the present. You’re still yourself and know who you are. You can remember parts of your life, but there’s a localized memory gap about a certain event, or series of events” (62).
Despite the heavy content that may be triggering for some readers, Grey balances the novel and makes it feel equal parts mystery and romance. She remarked that it was important to her to have two separate love stories for Evie through this novel, because “when you’re talking about a relationship that often starts with a lot of love bombing and that feeling of being swept away by someone, it’s easy to sort of romanticize it and it’s just so important that we don’t.” In this novel, you’ll find the stark difference between Evie and her late husband and Evie and Drew, her former best friend, is revelatory in indicating what an unhealthy relationship looks like compared to a healthy one.
Grey also opened up about her writing process. “I don’t plot my novels,” she shared, even though a novel this complex seems like it would require years of plotting. Instead, Grey just recommends going straight into the writing process, and ensuring that you don’t write anything you find boring (because the audience will find it boring too).
This came as a shock due to the impeccable formatting of Pictures of You. This novel is written not only in dual perspective chapters—narrated by either Evie or Drew, Evie’s high school best friend and love interest that she doesn’t quite remember—but also alternating between the present and all the years between when she was 16 to 29. Evie met Drew in a photography club, which is where Grey embeds information about her other passion of photography.
We recommend you don’t go into this novel with too much knowledge on the content (save for the content warnings) because it reads as a romance mystery. The twists and turns that we experience as Evie tries to piece together how her life got so far off-track make every moment of this book worth the read and Grey’s captivating writing will have you unable to put the book down.
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