You Are Not Alone
When Shay Miller witnesses a stranger (Amanda) committing suicide by jumping in front of a New York subway train, she can't get the event out of her mind. She attends Amanda's memorial meeting and meets several of her friends—who then befriend Shay. Shay is grateful. She's been feeling alone and friendless; she recently lost her job and is working as a temp, and the guy she thought she was falling for has a new girlfriend. Being accepted by Amanda's friends fills a gap in her life.
But as readers, we know things Shay doesn’t. We know that there’s something ominous about this group of Amanda’s friends. We gradually learn more about what happened to each of them in the past … and why they are being so nice to Shay now.
They don’t have Shay’s best interests at heart. Anything but.
Shay tries to keep track of everything, recording statistics and other information in her Data Book. “Numbers don’t lie,” she writes at the beginning. She needs to believe that ultimately, statistics will be in her favor.
I found the book to be a quick read and definitely entertaining. There are a lot of flashbacks, some going back weeks or months, some going back years. Each gives us more insight about the characters and what led up to the developments we've been following in the present.
I’m often amazed at how recently a bestselling author’s life as a published novelist began. Sarah Pekannen’s first novel, The Opposite of Me, was published in 2010. Since then she’s published a book every year, seven more as sole author. Her working relationship with Greer Hendricks, then her editor at Simon & Schuster, quickly developed into a firm friendship and a recognition that they had similar narrative instincts. When Greer decided to leave S&S and commented that she would like to write a novel, Sarah suggested they write one together. That first novel, The Wife Between Us, generated a bidding war and was published in 2018 to great acclaim. It’s now being made into a movie by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners; Sara and Greer wrote the screenplay together. Their second book, An Anonymous Girl, came out in 2019 and has been optioned for TV. You Are Not Alone, published in March 2020, is their third collaboration.
Sarah and Greer have a lot in common: they are the same age (54), they both studied journalism and psychology in college, and both are now married with two children. Sarah was a journalist and feature writer before launching her fiction writing career; she and her family live in a Washington DC suburb. Greer was an editor at Simon &Shuster for 20 years, and lives in Manhattan with her family.
Though they live in separate cities, they write “every word” together, using Google Docs and Google Hangouts as their collaboration tools. Once a month they get together in person for a working weekend, plastering their hotel room walls with post-it-notes as they plan characters and plot twists.
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