Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Adele Griffin to HJ!
Hi Adele and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, First Love Last Love!
Please summarize the book for the readers here:
Vida Jamison has built an ordered life around her work, her son Luke, and Tom, the man who has stood beside her for years. Then a winter storm and a freak accident land her in the same hospital as Elijah Beck, who was once the great love of her life.
Vida and Elijah met young and loved each other with the intensity of people who thought their love was the answer to everything. But as Elijah’s musical talent turned into fame, his life became marked by recklessness and addiction. His return, however, reawakens everything between them: attraction, nostalgia, rage—along with the seductive question of what their lives might have been if they’d made different choices.
Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:
“What’s the definition of success for you?”
“Sharing time with someone I love, who loves me back.”
Please share a few Fun facts about this book…
- A fun fact about First Love Last Love is that it began in a small way with that old Dan Fogelberg song “Same Old Lang Syne.” My mom loved that song and she used to play it on cassette when I was growing up. Even then I had this feeling she was listening to it while thinking about an old love (um, not my Dad)—and that fascinated me! The song begins with two people unexpectedly running into each other in a grocery store, so that is where I let Vida and Elijah meet again, too.
- And I guess another small fun fact is that I often start a novel that way, with a memory or an image or a feeling that I follow until the story becomes its own thing.
What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?
What attracts Elijah to Vida is that she knows him from before he became anybody. Most of us meet the people we love when we’re already beginning to perform some emergent idea of ourselves—even as teenagers, we’re launching a self and trying it out on the world. But Vida knew Elijah before his talent and ambition became his identity, and before millions of people were watching him.
I think what attracts Vida to Elijah is slightly different. Vida has very little original family, and Elijah gives her the private feeling of being in her life all the way back to the beginning of it. They grew up together, almost Wuthering Heights-style, so Vida never has to explain who she is or how she became herself, because Elijah remembers it all.
Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?
I felt a lot of joy writing Vida and Elijah when they were younger. I do remember laughing to myself over the time capsule, because I deliberately chose items that my little brother said he would have put into one (he is a bit younger than I am, and V &E are his age).
There’s also a scene where Vida looks at herself in a full-length mirror that I took a lot of tender care with. It felt surprisingly intimate to imagine this woman really scrutinizing her own aging body through her own eyes.
And I definitely cried writing some of the later scenes between Vida and Elijah. They have this enormous, shared history, but by then they’ve also reached a stage of life where they’ve made so many choices that didn’t involve each other. So much of the road they’ve traveled, they’ve traveled apart. There was something heartbreaking to me about that—the fact that you can know someone that deeply and still have created whole lives without them.
Here’s a spliced moment in Elijah’s voice (it’s dual pov)—I think this moment feels very “thesis of the book” when they spend an ordinary, extraordinary day together.
“I’m just taking it all in,” I say. “What it feels like if we’d really had a life together.” A day I didn’t deserve but got to live anyway.
Vida is looking at me. I open my arms and she sets down the stock pot and steps into them. How many times have I wanted to pull her close like this? I hold on, trying to stretch this one big enough to hold all the others. . . .
I chop vegetables with unhurried strokes. Jazz plays low. Something hearty and alive begins to rise from the pot. We talk about the Philadelphia Auto Show. The Moore place on the corner going up for sale. We could have been married a couple of decades. I can see that life now, with the clarity that hurts. Mornings that begin in peace and open into a day you want to stay inside forever. A glimpse of the life we could have made.
Readers should read this book….
Readers should read this book because I think most of us carry at least one person who knew us before we became who we are now. And sometimes even if you knew that person was wrong for the future you wanted, or even if you knew you couldn’t actually create a life with them, the devastating imprint of that relationship stays with you.
Those early feelings can become a kind of template. Maybe it’s a passion template or maybe it’s a chemistry template, or maybe it’s just the first time you felt completely overwhelmed by your feelings. And because we’re often so young when those feelings happen, they can carry enormous weight. I know that personally, years later, after I’d made so many of the Big choices that shaped my life—good, enduring choices that made me really happy—I realized I was nevertheless still comparing everything I’d built to this alternate life path that was never really sustainable in the first place.
What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?
I’m working on a book that’s a love triangle involving a man from a famously mythologized American family and the two women who know very different versions of him. One woman is there while he is still young and wild, the other falls in love with the man that he eventually becomes. It’s a little bit mystery, a lot love story, and thematically I think it’s also about the difference between the public story of a marriage and the secrets inside it.
But I’m still drafting, so this could be a whole different story in six months.
Besides First Love Last Love, out November 3, Julie Buxbaum and I published (under the name Taylor Hutton) a spicy romance earlier this year, Axe and Grind, which is the companion world to our novel Strike and Burn. We had a lot of fun with those!
Thanks for blogging at HJ!
Giveaway: A copy of FIRST LOVE LAST LOVE by Adele Griffin
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Excerpt from First Love Last Love:
The weather flips like a coin.
Down the frozen foods aisle, someone whistles.
I turn my head from the freezer’s glow of toaster pizzas
and Klondike bars. It’s a kid in a puffy silver jacket, hood up, looking
out the window, where the sky’s gone dark as granite. The
forecast won’t commit—a
chance of flurries, maybe more—but
the
clouds are saying something else. Either way, Luke is back from his
ski trip tomorrow, and he’ll be, as ever, starving.
Hence the errand: a dash through the Wawa food market
instead of settling in with my girl-dinner
of cheese, crackers, and a
glass (okay, maybe two) of Chablis. I know better than to be snowbound
with a growing fourteen-year-
old
and nothing more to offer
him than a couple of limp carrots and half a box of stale, welded
raisins.
Before he left, Luke let me fold him into a big hug, the way
I used to. A mom squeeze like an old song that says everything’s
okay. It’s been years since he let me hug him like that, and it felt
big and right.
2 ADELE GRIFFIN
He lingered, just a second, then backed off.
“It’ll be a great weekend, I promise.”
“Maybe.” Luke’s new answer for everything.
However much I stock up, no doubt tomorrow I’ll be splurging
on Grubhub treats as a way of making up for Luke’s year of
upheaval: the split weekends and the separated-parent
shuffle
between the main house and the two-bedroom
rental in Manayunk.
Behind me, I feel a light tug at my coat sleeve.
“Vida Marie?”
My heart stops. Nobody ever adds the Marie. Nobody but him.
There was a time when I’d hoped to bump into him everywhere.
A time when I’d prayed that I’d never see him again. I force
a long inhale before turning.
“Elijah.” Speaking his name turns some small lock inside me.
Because yes, it’s Elijah, his jacket hood pulled low to avoid recognition.
I’d pegged him for a teenager from behind—he’s
that thin.
“Of all the Wawas in Pennsylvania,” he says, a wry half-smile
on his face, “I had to walk into this one.”
“What are the odds,” I manage, and the meaning of it hangs
there, unspoken. We always used to come here after school for
Italian hoagies drenched in vinegar and sweet cherry peppers. I
can still taste them, the same way I can still feel Elijah behind me
in line, his arms snug around my waist, his chin on my head.
Now we just stare at each other, stunned. Caught in a moment
neither of us was prepared for. My heart’s thudding. I want to step
forward into the hug I know Elijah yearns to give, but the idea of
touch also feels like it might knock me over.
Who are we to each other now?
His face is familiar, and also not. Those gray eyes, so wide-set,
FIRST LOVE LAST LOVE 3
the cheekbones even sharper now. It’s a face that can shift from
beautiful to haunting, depending on the light. Tonight I’m struck
by how seeing Elijah feels as much like a homecoming as an intrusion.
Forty-four
last week, and he looks it. Handsome but…forty-four.
I see the silver threading his hairline, the etch of worry between his
brows, a herringbone scar puckered at his left temple. His fingers,
hands, and wrists are a map of tattoos. Many more than I remember:
some finely inked, others smudged as faded bruises.
He’s doing that thing, his old anxious habit, where he rubs his
thumbs over his nail beds.
“Next,” calls the checkout girl.
He leans close. “Wait for me?”
I nod and move forward. Once my items are bagged, I step
aside, watching as he takes a pint of heavy whipping cream and a
carton of eggs from his plastic basket.
“You here long?”
He shakes his head. “Through the holiday. Staying with Ruben
Ruiz.”
“Oh! Say hi. Ruben’s son, Andreas, and Luke play basket—”
“No way!” The checkout girl gasps. “Eli Beck? Aren’t you
Eli Beck?” Elijah’s fans are relentless, especially here, where he’s
Philadelphia’s favorite son, weighed on the fame scale somewhere
between the Liberty Bell and the Rocky statue. Or, at least, he used
to be.
Elijah offers his trademark oversized grin. “Yup.”
“Can I get a picture?”
“Sure.” And just like that, it begins. Fans materializing from
the ether, insistent and curious. People craning for a better look,
Eli-world
expanding by the second.
4 ADELE GRIFFIN
“Eli, I saw you twenty years ago at Staples Center!” says a guy
with a professor beard.
“Cool, cool,” says Elijah. “Solid tour.”
“You were on fire.” Professor Beard holds up his phone. “One
pic? For my wife?”
“Let’s do it.”
I remember this rhythm—I
used to run interference, once upon
our time. “Not now, sorry!” I was polite but steely. “We need to get
going!” I learned how to be the heavy, the buffer, so that Elijah
could stay the good guy, the charmer.
“Eli,” calls out a woman in a velour tracksuit, “sing a line from
‘Birthday Baby’ for my nephew, Jake?”
Elijah throws me a don’t leave glance as he takes the woman’s
phone. “A single charm on your gold chain, baby! Day-old
cake for
your big day, baby!’”
My skin prickles to hear it, as the store erupts in cheering and
clapping.
It’s been decades since “Birthday Baby” topped any chart—now
it’s a staple at children’s birthday parties—including
Luke’s, a
few years ago. But Elijah’s remarkable voice pulls me under like it
does. I can see his bare, boyish shoulders, his head bent low over
his guitar, his dog-eared
songbook flopped open.
I lean in, whispering, “I’ve got a virtual telehealth visit scheduled,
and snow’s starting—”
“Okay, then can I call you?” he asks. “We’re overdue.”
Overdue is putting it mildly. Usually, Elijah’s name comes up
in secondhand updates from school friends like Ruben, though
he’s been back in the headlines lately—first
for the awful thing that
happened at his house this past summer; better and more recently,
FIRST LOVE LAST LOVE 5
his very first Grammy nomination—an
honor he’d coveted since
the day he wrote his first song. The last time I actually saw Elijah
in person was three years ago, at Miriam’s funeral.
“Sure,” I say, just as every phone in the store blares a severe
weather alert.
Two Wawa employees burst from a back room.
“Eli Beck! No shit, it is you!” one of them yells, gripping Elijah’s
hand.
I mouth goodbye, but Elijah’s already performing again. Signing
autographs, posing for photos. Same old song and dance. Blinking
back the sudden heat in my eyes, I push out the door and into the
storm.
Shock, tears of shock. That’s all it
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Book Info:
“From the very first page, you know First Love Last Love is something special. Griffin writes of the bittersweet pangs of love and loss with piercing clarity, and delivers a beautiful story that’s both achingly raw and beautifully messy. This book will live with me for a very long time.” — Terah Shelton Harris, bestselling author of Where the Wildflowers Grow
“With complex characters that transcend the page, Adele Griffin weaves a relatable and tender tale about the people in our lives that stick, no matter what, for better or worse. Equally heartwarming and heartbreaking, Vida and Elijah will stay with readers long after the last chapter.” — Rachel Koller Croft, USA TODAY bestselling autho
Book Links: Amazon | B&N |
Meet the Author:
ADELE GRIFFIN is the acclaimed author of over thirty books. Her works include the
National Book Award Finalists Sons of Liberty and Where I Want to Be. Her novel, The
Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, was named a YALSA Best Book, an Amazon Best Book of
the Year, a Booklist Top Ten Arts Books for Youth, a JLG selection, a Romantic Times
Finalist for Book of the Year, and a School Library Journal Top Fiction pick. Her most
recent novel, The Favor, received praise from several acclaimed authors, including
Rebecca Serle and Jenny Han.
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