"PS, I Love You"
Cecelia Ahern
Hyperion, $21.95 hardcover, $13.95 paperback
“As I write this letter/Send my love to you/Remember that I’ll always/Be in love with you/Treasure these few words ‘til we’re together/Keep all my love forever/PS, I love you”
Like the Beatles song by the same name, “PS, I Love You” by Cecelia Ahern is a love story about two people who are not together, and the communication between them is shown to the audience in letters, signed with “PS, I love you.”
Holly is 30, jobless and widowed. She doesn’t know how to stand on her own, so she depends on the letters from deceased husband Gerry to get her through her life. After learning he had a terminal illness, Gerry left a list of instructions for Holly to follow to carry on in her life. Each instruction is in a letter, dated with the months she should open each one.
Unfortunately, there are only 10 letters. And even more unfortunately, she doesn’t know what to do with herself in the time in between.
For that reason, the book begins rather boring. Ahern emphasizes again and again how Holly is sad and doesn’t do a thing. She stays in bed and mopes around. She hardly looks forward to spending any time with her family and is afraid her friends are moving on without her.
And you just want to pick her up from her downs, hold her face and look her in the eyes and say, “Holly, your life isn’t over. You’re not getting left behind unless you leave yourself behind.”
But that’s probably easy for someone else to say, someone who hasn’t lost her love, her husband, her soulmate.
And the more you read Holly’s story, the more you want to see her succeed and see her move on in her life, to know that Gerry will always be there even though he isn’t here.
With “PS, I Love You” being Ahern’s first novel, perhaps the slow-moving start can be attributed to the fact that she is a first-time author, and it seems as though she learns how to tell the story as it goes along.
But the more you get to know the characters and how Holly perceives them, the more you want to continue reading to see how everyone plays out at the end of the book. And what will Gerry instruct her to do next? Will it teach her to be able to function on her own?
For being only 22 at the time she wrote this, Ahern was able to give amazing perception as to how someone can feel when her life just stops. She addresses overcoming the sloth and coming out into the world again, learning how to function normally, figuring out how to love again. And how do you explain to someone who has only known you as married that you are now widowed, even 10 months after it happened? Is it okay to tell them how you really feel when they ask how you’re doing?
Although she hadn’t mastered the art of tying together different scenes and characters who will have an effect later in the book, Ahern makes a good effort. One of her strengths is detailing the silly details in Holly’s life that make her human — like when she doesn’t have enough euro to pay for the amount of time she used the Internet at the library, or the time she stormed away from a hotel room in the wrong direction, only to find she would have to walk past the room to get where she needed to go.
Ahern shows that events in your life can affect the way you look at the people in it and change your relationships. But change isn’t always bad.
And Ahern gives hope. It feels like your life ends when you lose your one and only, but it doesn’t have to. And it doesn’t have to start again right away, either. There’s nothing wrong with being sad because the sadness is only temporary.
She’s a bit Nicholas Sparks-esque, so anyone who enjoys sobbing over his lengthy love stories will fall for Ahern’s simple way of painting feelings and the healing process. But even if you are Sparksed-out, Ahern tells a sweet story that isn’t all about love — it’s about life:
“For the first time since Gerry had died, the three of them laughed and laughed all night, and Holly learned how to finally be able to talk about her husband. It used to be that the four of them gathered together; Holly, Gerry, Sharon and John. This time only three of them gathered to remember the one they lost. And with all their talk, he became alive for them all that night. …
“Life went on.”
(page 253)
