The Light We Lost

The Light We Lost is Jill Santopolo's debut novel, published in 2017, and it tells the story of a relationship in Lucy's own voice, addressed to the man she is describing. The book opens on a choice she has to make and then goes back to the beginning, which is a university in New York, and it stays in that retrospective mode for the whole of its telling.

Lucy and Gabe are both seniors when they meet, and what draws them together is a conviction each of them arrived at separately, that the years ahead ought to add up to something. Santopolo follows them across thirteen years in which that conviction takes them in opposite directions: Gabe to war zones as a photojournalist, Lucy to a career in publishing in New York, and both of them into marriages and cities the other has only heard about. They keep meeting again at intervals, which is how the novel measures time.

Two questions sit underneath the story from the first page: whether fate brought the two of them together, and whether it is choice that keeps them apart. Because Lucy is telling it in retrospect, from the position of a woman about to make a decision, the whole book reads as a long letter with a destination the reader can sense but not yet see. The frame is a choice that has already been made by the time the telling starts, and the thirteen years in between are the argument for it. It was a New York Times bestseller.