When I Was You
What's It About?
"Exhilarating, page-turning, shocking, this is one of those rare psychological thrillers that really is the whole package. An electric, raw, emotional story that will leave you breathless." — Christina McDonald, author of The Night Olivia Fell“Amber Garza has upped the game on the classic stalker novel! … A fast-paced, beautifully plotted book.”
— Samantha Downing, author of My Lovely Wife
There’s something fascinating about stalking. We stalk to compare our lives with others, so we can keep up with the Joneses. In our current social media-driven culture, stalking has become normalized, a pastime even. There are even jobs that require stalking to perform them — paparazzi, private investigators, etcetera.
But when we get a peek into the mind of a stalker, we feel unease and distrust. For instance, Joe Goldberg in You by Carol Kepnes makes us want to take down all our social media profiles. And now in Amber Garza’s When I Was You (MIRA), Kelly Medina makes us give our neighbors the side-eye and reminds us of our parents’ “stranger danger” warnings.
In this novel, we meet Kelly Medina, who is Rafael’s wife and nineteen-year-old Aaron’s mother. Her whole life had revolved around Aaron, who’s since left for college. But when Aaron’s former pediatrician calls and confirms an appointment with Kelly Medina for her baby’s first check-up, what turns out to be a case of mistaken identity kicks Kelly into overdrive. There’s another Kelly Medina in Folsom? Who’s this other Kelly, and what is she doing here?
This leads the reader down a long road that involves not only a little Facebook stalking but the old-fashioned, illegal kind as well: following the other Kelly, hiding behind trees at her house and befriending this stranger, whom, incidentally, her friends and husband think may not exist.
A NARRATIVE YOU CAN’T TRUST … IN THE BEST WAY POSSIBLE
They’re not the only ones. Kelly’s mental state is always in question in this novel, which puts the reader on edge during the entire story. There’s a sense of uncertainty about what’s real and what’s not, what’s happening now and what’s in the past, in a dream, inside her mind. As the story unfolds, we meet her therapist and see instances of mental instability and learn of the traumas in Kelly’s past, all of which make us question what she’s doing in the present and will do in the future. It heightens the suspense of this psychological thriller while making us wonder if we even trust our own understanding of the narrative.
The novel is written in a dual first-person point of view: that of our main character, Kelly Medina — wife and empty-nest mother of a college kid — and that of the other Kelly Medina, struggling single mother of a baby boy, Sullivan. Each Kelly has a distinctive voice, a distinctive personality and disparate motivations and goals. However, it turns out that what they share is a strong penchant for stalking, an overwhelming curiosity about each other’s lives, and a liberal dose of judgment on the other’s roles as mothers or wives.
By showing both Kellys’ thoughts, Garza displays here not just each Kelly’s fascination with the other but the assessments they make about what they observe. It is amazing how wrong someone can be when they’ve only observed another from afar and in snippets of their subjective lives. It could even be dangerous.
When I Was You doesn’t just entertain us with the psychological mystery of two women with the same name. It’s also a cautionary tale of what can happen when we assume things about people based on nothing more than a little stalking. And the lengths to which maternal instinct can drive us in order to protect our children and ensure their well-being, as well as the grief and anger that comes when we can’t. In doing so, Garza makes some compelling statements about mom-shaming and being a wife that will resonate with the reader after the psychological thrill is over.
When I Was You is available for purchase. Visit Amber Garza’s author profile page.
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