Hello Stranger, page 30
It’s working, too. Peanut takes three walks a day and has the downy fur of a teenager. He’ll outlive us all.
It’s so funny to me now that I met Joe so many times before I ever actually saw him. Sometimes I study that face of his while he’s sleeping and wonder why every single encounter I ever had with it didn’t set off buzzers and flashing lights and confetti showers.
How could I ever have walked right past him?
Dr. Nicole was so right, of course. We see what we’re looking for.
Knowing how much I used to be missing has taught me to pay better attention. To pause from the hustle more often and just take it all in.
Of course, I’m not hustling quite as much now as I used to be because I’m no longer quite as broke.
That night of the contest? When my painting got zero votes from the judges? It really was an ugly duckling. A scout from a fine art gallery named Ellery Smith was there that night, and she loved my painting. In fact, the very thing that the judges and the other artists and the patrons all disliked about it—namely, the face—was the thing that she liked the most.
She liked the mystery of it. How hard it was to read. How full of emotion it all was. She said it left her fascinated. She could never get tired of looking at it. It raised more questions than it answered.
She got in touch a week or so later to see if she could represent me, and six months after that I was doing a show in her gallery of ten similar portraits. All of which sold for three thousand dollars a pop.
Seriously. Mr. and Mrs. Kim got a bargain.
They did hang the painting in the lobby, by the way. And when I saw it hanging there for the first time, I decided it didn’t look like Gong Yoo or John Denver or Danny DeVito.
It didn’t look exactly like Joe, either, to be honest.
But it felt like him. It felt like my experience of trying to see him. It looked like all the mysteries and emotions that surrounded the man I fell in love with—before I had any idea who he was.
Artistically, it was good.
And it made me wonder if maybe these were the kinds of paintings I should have been doing all along. If I’d been trying so hard to be exactly like my mother that I hadn’t left room to explore or to play or to be a little more like me.
The experience of painting the portraits is different now, of course. Because it doesn’t take that long before the faces of strangers come into view. I’ve got only about three impressions before I see them like everyone else does.
I draw the face first and try to capture all that mystery. And I view that early time as a chance to see the world like no other artist I know does.
The superpower lady? From Facebook?
Now I know exactly what she means.
Seeing the world differently helps you see things not just that other people can’t—but that you yourself never could if you weren’t so lucky. It lets you make your own rules. Color outside your own lines. Allow yourself another way of seeing.
Most of the time now, if I see someone I know, the face comes together pretty fast. But not always. If it’s been a while since I’ve seen that person. Or if I’m tired or preoccupied. I’ve walked up to Joe in Maria’s grocery store more than once and put my arms around him—only to realize I’ve just freaked out a total stranger.
It happens.
But I find the antidote to that is just keeping a sense of humor. And staying humble. And laughing a lot. And doubling down on smiling. We’re all just muddling through, after all. We’re all just doing the best we can. We’re all struggling with our struggles. Nobody has the answers. And everybody, deep down, is a little bit lost.
Knowing I don’t have it all figured out—facing that somehow in some way every day—forces me to be compassionate with myself. Which has made me so good at compassion that I can hand it out to other people like I’m handing out champagne at a party. When someone gives me the wrong change. Or messes up my order. Or flips me off in traffic.
I see you, humanity, I think.
We’re all so limited and disappointing and so, so wrong. Much of the time. Maybe even most of the time. We’re all so steeped in our own confirmation bias. We’re all so busy seeing what we expect to see.
But we have our moments, too.
Moments when we see that tire blowout and stop to help. Moments when we pay for the person behind us in the drive-through. Or offer up our seat to a stranger. Or compliment someone’s earrings. Or realize we were wrong. Or apologize.
Sometimes we really are the best versions of ourselves. I see that about us. And I’m determined to keep seeing that about us. Because that really might be the truest thing I’ll ever know:
The more good things you look for, the more you find.
A Note About Prosopagnosia
There are two different types of face blindness, or prosopagnosia.
The type that Sadie has in this story is called acquired. It results from some sort of damage to the fusiform face gyrus—from surgery, for example, or a lesion, or a traumatic brain injury—and it results in a change in the ability to perceive faces.
The other type of prosopagnosia is developmental, and it’s typically a condition people have had all their lives. It’s more commonly associated with memory than with perception. People with developmental prosopagnosia can generally see faces in the moment—they just have trouble remembering them later. This type is by far the most common—up to one in fifty people have it—but many people don’t realize they have it. Because there’s no noticeable shift from before to after, many people who have this type assume that’s just how everyone is.
If you’re interested in learning more about face blindness, a good place to start is FaceBlind.org, a joint website of the Prosopagnosia Research Center of Dartmouth, Harvard, and the University of London. There you can read more about it, access online tests to measure your own ability to perceive and remember faces, and even volunteer to participate in research.
Author’s Note
One year, for my birthday, I got a historical romance novel as a gift.
After years of studying creative writing and Serious Fiction in school, I had never really read romance before. But I pushed past the decidedly nonliterary cover and opened it up to the first chapter to “take a look” at it.
Three hours later, I was in the car—driving to the bookstore to get another one.
I felt like a person who’d spent her entire life eating boneless, skinless chicken breast … and I had just discovered chocolate cake.
That book was delicious. It was blissful. It was life changing.
It redefined reading for me. And fun.
It was the biggest writing epiphany of my life.
I mean, I knew I loved love stories. I’d been raised on Nora Ephron, after all. But those were movies. Movies were entertainment. Books, in my head at least, were work—not play.
After that first gateway romance novel, I spent the next several years reading historical romances in a blissful haze.
Did I say “reading” them? Sorry—I meant “devouring” them.
I put duct tape over the chesty man-candy on the covers—but I kept reading. In the bubble bath. At stoplights. While stirring spaghetti sauce on the stove.
There you have it: I fell in love with romance novels.
For a long time, if you’d asked me why that was, I’d have shrugged and said, “Because they’re fun?” But now, after much overthinking it, I’ve figured out—at least in part—why they’re fun.
It’s because love stories really are unlike any other kind of story.
All stories have an emotional engine that drives them. Mysteries run on curiosity. Thrillers run on heart-thumping adrenaline. Horror stories run on fear.
And the fuel for those emotional engines is anticipation. We piece the clues together and predict what’s going to happen, and we feel emotions—sometimes very strong ones—about what we’re predicting.
Stories use different scenarios in different ways to create that anticipation, but most novels use a fair bit of what’s called negatively valenced anticipation. A sense of worry. A concern that things might get worse. You know: You’re reading along, picking up the breadcrumbs of foreshadowing the writer’s dropped for you, and you’re like, “Oh god. That kid’s going to get arrested.” Or, “Ugh. That man’s going to have a heart attack.” Or, “Bet you a thousand dollars he’s cheating on his wife.”
But guess what kind of anticipation romance novels use?
Positively valenced.
Romance novels, rom-coms, nontragic love stories—they all run on a blissful sense that we’re moving toward something better. Percentage-wise, the majority of clues writers drop in romance novels don’t give you things to dread. They give you things to look forward to.
This, right here—more than anything else—is why people love them. The banter, the kissing, the tropes, even the spice … that’s all just extra.
It’s the structure—that “predictable” structure—that does it. Anticipating that you’re heading toward a happy ending lets you relax and look forward to better things ahead. And there’s a name for what you’re feeling when you do that.
Hope.
Sometimes I see people grasping for a better word than predictable to describe a romance. They’ll say, “It was predictable—but in a good way.”
I see what they’re going for. But I’m not sure it needs pointing out that over the course of a love story … people fell in love. I mean: Of course they did! I don’t think it’s possible to write a love story where the leads getting together at the end is a surprise. And even if it were, why would you want to? The anticipation—the blissful, delicious, oxytocin-laden, yearning-infused, building sense of anticipation—is the point. It’s the cocktail of emotions we all came there to feel.
I propose we stop using the hopelessly negative word predictable to talk about love stories and start using anticipation.
As in: “This love story really created a fantastic feeling of anticipation.”
Structurally, thematically, psychologically—love stories create hope and then use it as fuel. Two people meet—and then, over the course of three hundred pages, they move from alone to together. From closed to open. From judgy to understanding. From cruel to compassionate. From needy to fulfilled. From ignored to seen. From misunderstood to appreciated. From lost to found. Predictably.
That’s not a mistake. That’s a guarantee of the genre: Things will get better. And you, the reader, get to be there for it.
It’s a gift the love story gives you.
But no type of story gets more eye rolls than love stories. “They’re so unrealistic,” people say, as they start another zombie apocalypse movie.
What is that? Is it self-protection? Self-loathing? Fear of vulnerability? Is it pretending we don’t care so we aren’t disappointed? Is it some sad, unexamined misogyny that we as a culture really, really need to work on?
I think love stories are deeply misunderstood—in part, at least, because they don’t work like other stories.
Love stories don’t have happy endings because their authors didn’t know any better. They have happy endings because those endings let readers access a rare and precious kind of emotional bliss that you can only get from having something that matters to look forward to.
Yes, misery is important.
But joy is just as important. The ways we take care of each other matter just as much as the ways we let each other down. Light matters just as much as darkness. Play matters as much as work, and kindness matters as much as cruelty, and hope matters as much as despair.
More so, even.
Because tragedy is a given, but joy is a choice.
Romantic fiction thrived during the pandemic, and there were lots of theories about why. People thought we were lonely. We needed escape. We wanted some laughs.
All true.
But I think, more than that, it’s because love is a form of hope.
We all sense it deep down, I suspect—past the snark and the tough-guy exteriors. Love is healing. It’s nourishing. It’s unapologetically optimistic. It’s the thing that leads us back to the light.
So I write stories about how love does that—about people healing from hard things, and trying to connect, and working like hell to become the best versions of themselves, despite it all. About the genuine emotional courage it takes to love other people, and about the joy that courage can offer us. I hope this story made you laugh. And swoon. I hope it kept you up way too late reading and gave you that blissed-out, longing-laden, tipsy feeling that all the best love stories create. I hope it gave you something to think about, and maybe a new perspective. But what I know for sure is that reading love stories is good for you. That believing in love is believing in hope. And doing that—choosing in this cynical world to be a person who does that—really is doing something that matters.
Acknowledgments
I always panic when it’s time to write acknowledgments because I’m terrified of leaving someone out. Let me not forget to thank my friend Dale Andrews—founding member of our legendary Romantic Book Club of Two—for reading (and loving) early drafts of both The Bodyguard and Hello Stranger.
Many grateful thanks also to my friend of many years Karen Walrond, who so joyfully took the time to teach me about the culture of her home country of Trinidad—even helping me think through Dr. Nicole’s wardrobe and baking me some homemade coconut bread. So much gratitude, also, to my dear friend Sue Sim, for consulting with me on the Korean American character of Sue Kim (who I wound up naming after her). The real-life Sue is one of my all-time favorite people, and she graciously met me for coffee many times—even though we kept getting distracted and talking about our kids. Many grateful thanks as well to Sue’s dad, Mr. Young Kim, for letting me borrow his name.
I must also thank my friend (and vet!) Dr. Alice Anne Dodge, DVM, for letting me spend a day observing behind-the-scenes life in her clinic. My friends Vicky and Tony Estrera kindly let me borrow their last name. Artist Gayle Kabaker let me interview her about portraiture and life as a working painter, and I also found much inspiration in the work of Sargy Mann, an artist who kept painting even after entirely losing his sight. The work of face-blind artist Chuck Close was also fascinating to learn about, and I owe much to the BBC article “Prosopagnosia: The Artist in Search of Her Face.”
Science is not exactly my area of expertise. Huge thanks to Lauren Billings (half of the Christina Lauren writing duo), who saw a post about my researching science-y stuff for this story and DM’ed me to say: “You know I have a Ph.D. in neurobiology, right?” Thanks also to Paula Angus and Elise Bateman for sharing resources about neurology and memory. I also learned much about the brain from neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight. Deep gratitude to Dr. Erin Furr Stimming, professor of neurology at UT Health Houston McGovern Medical School, for letting me interview her—and also referring me to Dr. Mark Dannenbaum of the Department of Neurosurgery of McGovern Medical School so I could ask some very unscientific questions (like “Is it kind of like ice fishing?”) about brain surgery. Both were so generous with their time and so delightful to talk to.
My most extensive research, of course, was on prosopagnosia. I knew very little about the condition when I started, and I had a lot to learn. For that, I owe much to neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks’s writings about prosopagnosia, a condition that he himself had. I also listened to every episode of Jeff Waters’s podcast FaceBlind—some many times—and found it profoundly helpful.
I could not be more thankful to two people I reached out to cold after hearing them interviewed together on a podcast about face blindness. Dr. Joe DeGutis, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who also co-runs the Boston Attention and Learning Lab, made time to talk with me and patiently answered many questions. The charming and delightful science writer Sadie Dingfelder, who met Joe while learning about her own prosopagnosia in his lab, also talked with me at length about face blindness. Sadie’s Washington Post article “My Life with Face Blindness” was a massively helpful resource, and I’m so happy that when I described my idea for the plot of this book to her and asked, “Could that happen?” she replied with so much enthusiasm, “That could totally happen!” I’m also beyond grateful to her for taking time to read an early draft of this book.
No discussion of prosopagnosia would be complete without mentioning the very helpful website FaceBlind.org, run jointly by Dartmouth, Harvard, and the University of London—where you can learn much more, and even participate in online research studies.
So many adoring thanks to the good people of St. Martin’s Press—in particular, my brilliant editor, Jen Enderlin; cover designer Olga Grlic; unstoppable publicist Katie Bassel; genius marketers Brant Janeway, Erica Martirano, and Kejana Ayala; and the lovely Christina Lopez. Huge thanks also to my fantastic agent, Helen Breitwieser of Cornerstone Literary, who has stuck with me from the very start.
Many hugs to my family. My astonishingly enthusiastic and supportive husband, Gordon, and my endlessly helpful and encouraging mom, Deborah Detering, are always tied for Most Helpful Superstars when it comes to getting my books written and out there. Thanks to my fun kids, Anna and Thomas, for just being such delightful humans. Much gratitude to my two sisters, Shelley Stein and Lizzie Fletcher, for their support, and to my dad, Bill Pannill, for memorizing “The Walrus and the Carpenter” with me when I was a kid.
And last—but never least: Thank you.
If you’re reading this, thank you! This is my tenth novel, and I’m willing to bet there’s no writer on earth more grateful than me for every tiny butterfly-wing flap of help, word spreading, and recommendation that readers—and bookstores and other writers—do. My career has been the definition of a long, slow burn and there’s nothing about it that I take for granted.
Writers can only write stories if there are people out there who want to read them—and I’m so grateful to you for being one of those people. And for helping find more of them. And for allowing me to spend my life obsessing over stories and practicing their soul-nourishing, page-turning, life-changing magic.
