You've Reached Sam (You've Reached Sam, #1)

by Dustin Thao

The second I close my eyes, the memories play, and I find myself back at the beginning.

Hi readers, let's cry together as we go through ten of my most highlighted quotes :')

“Don’t worry,” Sam says. “I can make you another one. I can make you a thousand more.”

I'm so glad this quote by Sam is his most popular, because it is one of my personal favorites. I can't imaging something sweeter than a boy promising to make you not one but thousands of paper cherry blossoms, which becomes a motif that appears throughout the book, representing pieces of him left after his death. This moment is partly inspired by something in high school. During senior year, one of my best friends found an origami rose on her desk. It wasn't until weeks later that the new boy from school told her it was him. They ended up dating for a few years. In many of my interviews, I mention the same best friend who I thought of during the writing process. I'm thinking of her now as I'm looking at these popular quotes :)

“Julie … if I could stay with you, I’d never leave.” “But you did leave.” “I know … I’m sorry.” “You never said good-bye…” “That’s because I never thought I had to…”

Even out of context, this passage always gets me. The thing about goodbyes is you can never prepare for them. Something interesting about the prologue is it almost didn't exist. When I sold the book to my publisher, the story immediately starts with Julie throwing out Sam's things a week after his death. However, my editor asked me, "so how did they fall in love?" This became one of my most challenging chapters to write, as I had to tell Sam and Julie's entire love story, from the first day they met to their last, in a few pages. I believe love doesn't happen all at once, but in small moments that add up to something meaningful. Like remembering someone's drink at a coffeeshop, or dancing together for the first time in the parking lot during the school dance. Of course, the last page needed to pull Julie back to the present in order to work with chapter one (which didn't really change). So in some ways, the prologue is a short version of the entire book. It's a love story between two teens that ended too soon.

If the ending is this painful, I don’t know if this was worth it all.

This passage gets quoted by quite a lot by readers, and I understand why. It really embodies the complex feelings we all have at some point, from either a breakup or something else. For Julie, it was the death of the person she loved. Now that the book is out, Julie has been somewhat categorized as an "unlikeable character" due to her thoughts and behaviors that some readers find selfish. She skips his funeral, throws away his things, maybe wishes they never fell in love. The truth is grief is a complicated, nonlinear experience that can sometimes bring out the worst of us. Aren't we all a little selfish, especially during the hardest moments of our lives? Julie is far from perfect, and I love her for that.

know? I feel like my life didn’t start until I met you, Julie. You’re the best thing to happen to this small town.

The yearbook letter Sam wrote is one of the few things that didn't change from the first draft. What's also interesting is I haven't read this letter in years, so it is surreal to see it now. This passage is sweet because it touches on the differences in where they grew up, Julie being the city girl and Sam the small town boy, though neither truly feel at home until they meet. This always reminds me of duets like Stevie Nicks' "Leather and Lace," which almost made it into the book.

There’s a long silence before he finally answers this. He says, “I wanted to give us a chance to say good-bye.”

This moment always breaks me, when Sam finally answers her question, "why did you pick up the phone?" Sometimes the truth is the last thing we want to hear, isn't it? When I first came up with the idea for the book, this phone call came to me first. Before I sat down to write, I knew this was Sam's answer. Even having experienced my own losses, I can't imagine how devistating this would be to hear.

“Use your time at the store. Talk with the books for inspiration. They’re full of ideas.”

One of the best writing advices I've been given is to "read like a writer." For me, this means to be engaged in how the story is being told. If it made you cry, pay attention to 'how?' As writers, we read as much as possible to get new ideas and inspiration, especially when we are stuck. Also, it is such a joy and surprise to know how many people love Mr. Lee. He is truly a character, and they way he imbues life into the books around him is magical and was so fun to write.

“We have too many voices inside our heads. You have to pick out the ones that mean something to you. What story do you want to tell?”

Because I was revising this book while simultaneously taking classes for my PhD program, my research occasionally influenced moments in You've Reached Sam. I was reading some Bakhtin at the time, specifically "The Diological Imagination." He stresses that our voice never exists in isolation of other voices, meaning we carry forward ideas and beliefs from previous conversations, and always speak in response to our percecption of others whom we are in diologue with. Essentially, everything is in coversation with others, even in our own heads. I like to imagine we sometimes get lost in these social contexts, as we worry about the audiences we are speaking to and what they will think. I think that's where a lot of our anxieties come from, including with Julie. As Bakhtin says, individuality "lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he approporiates the word."

“Julie,” Sam says, somewhat tensely. “Don’t do this.” “Do what?” “Hold on to us,” he says. “As if we still have forever.”

This moment is significant because it's the first time you're meant to question whether these phone calls would be good for a person, whether they're truly a gift or a curse or both. Letting go of the one you love already seems impossible. Imagine having to do it a second time after being connected again. This is also the first scene where that takes place in the fields, which becomes an important location in the book. In fact, the temporary title was actually called "call me in the fields." I'm very glad we changed it.

“I wish you were here,” I say. “I wish you were lying right next to me. I wish I could look over and see you smiling back. I wish I could run a hand through your hair, and know you’re real. I wish we could finish school and graduate together. So we can finally leave this place like we always planned, and find an apartment somewhere, and figure out the rest of our lives together so I don’t have to do it alone. I wish you were alive again … and I wish I had picked up the phone that night, so that all this would be different, and everything would go back to before…”

This is one of the scenes that came to me first, long before I knew their names were Sam and Julie. I had a vision of a girl laying out in the fields, afraid to turn her head to see no one there beside her. I think a lot of us have these imagined experiences, where we close our eyes for a moment, pretending the impossible is still a possibility. It's even more complicated for Julie, having Sam partially there. I also think this is the first scene in the book that made me tear up a little as I wrote it.

Letting go isn’t about forgetting. It’s balancing moving forward with life, and looking back from time to time, remembering the people in it.”

I truly love this line from Yuki and I'm so glad it has resonated with so many people. If you were to ask me to pick a sentence from this book to sum it up, I believe it would be this one. It's the message that you can never truly lose someone, as they become a part of you. I want to leave you readers with a quote from WandaVision, "What is grief, if not love persevering?"