about Joyce, on her birthday

and how she inspired my book

Content warnings: death of a loved one, mention of cancer (sorry, I hate it, too), discussion of grief

My grandma is magic. Talking about her in the present tense is a perfect example of why—she’s gone, but only physically. In every other way she’s right here and has been for the entirety of my publishing journey.

Before we get to the magic part of all this, here are some things you should know about Joyce: she made her debut into the world on May 10th (I’m omitting the year because she’d side eye me and because she never acted her age anyway) (and also because, tbh, I don’t remember it!!). She was brilliant and kind and an absolute spitfire. She loved her family and thought we were all brilliant and kind, too. She loved to paint on canvases and t-shirts. She had a hand painted t-shirt for every holiday, and some for every day, many of them featuring cats. She painted a bunch for me; I wish I still had them.

She could become best friends with a Target cashier in five minutes flat and silence a man with the sharp raise of her eyebrow. She wore eye-bleedingly bright sneakers and drove too fast. She loved old movies like Bringing Up Baby and Singin’ in the Rain. Every life experience she had could be connected to a Seinfeld anecdote—“you know, one time, Jerry—”

Sometimes she’d tell you she’d been married four times, and sometimes she’d say it was three and a half. I still don’t know what that means. Was one of them not legal?! She never told me, and isn’t that so Joyce? I think you’d agree that it absolutely is.

She loved road trips—some of my favorite days were filled with Lyle Lovett and James Taylor on satellite radio, hot wind roaring in through the windows, a quesadilla burning my fingers after our inevitable Del Taco pit stop, where, also inevitably, she would spill hot sauce on her t-shirt, to which she’d say “shiT”, emphasis on the T. Then she’d paint over the stain once she got home.

When I hugged Joyce, it was with a tightness. Her cheek was always cool against mine. Her devotion to sunscreen gave a tack to her skin, making it microscopically harder to pull away. Not that I ever wanted to; she gave the best hugs.

I’m probably telling you too much about Joyce, but the last trait I’ll list off is this: she was very woo woo (her words). She was more spiritual than religious, and loved psychics and crystals. She believed in ghosts and had been visited by a few over the years. She knew energy was never destroyed. She believed in something after death. She planted that seed in me, too.

In May 2016, I found out that Joyce had cancer. It was the mean kind, too, very fast. Way too fast. It was, to be very frank, extremely fucking uncool.

Obviously, the family she loved so much all descended very quickly on her adorable little house filled with her paintings. I’ll spare the details because they suck, but after so many years of knowing and loving and seeing her, I knew this would be our last visit.

During that trip, we all sat around, reminiscing and going through old photos. In one of the stacks I pulled out, I came across four or five pictures of a 20ish-year-old Gram standing next to a VERY HANDSOME man (see said photos below, I mean, HELLO?!). Not only was this man very handsome, but the chemistry was there. You can see it. I could see it. There were VIBES, okay?

That smile!!

I was giggling and kicking my feet when I saw this, I can’t lie

Literally this man was so handsome, look at those sunglasses, I’d be staring at my feet bashfully, too

So, of course, I was like, “hi, excuse me, who is this?” and showed a picture to one of my aunts. She said, “oh, that was Nick, a family friend of Mom’s. He was like a brother to her.”

Please keep in mind that my grandma, who was in home hospice, was fully hopped up on morphine. Like, feeling PRET-TY good. All of a sudden we heard her yell out, perfectly lucid, “not MY brother!”

She brought down the house with that line. Everyone was just absolutely delighted by her slapping down that narrative with a quickness. I learned that Nick was, in fact, not anything like her brother, but a man she was smitten with; her mom refused to let her date him (so rude, but honestly also so on brand for my great-grandmother). They never had a chance to date one another and ended up marrying other people (or, in Gram’s case, three-and-a-half to four other people).

If you know anything about You, with a View, where Noelle, the main character in the book, finds old pictures of her grandma with a handsome mystery man, you’re seeing some similarities, right? It’s because that day I thought to myself, “wow, that kind of sounds like the beginning of a story.” I loved the idea of tying a little piece of my gram’s past into a contemporary romance, so I tucked it away in my little Potential Future Plots mental folder.

And then in late 2020, as the “two week” interruption of the pandemic hurtled toward 2021, I decided I wanted to try to get published for real. I also decided to download TikTok and let me tell you, these are two diametrically opposed decisions!! Once I downloaded TikTok, my productivity cratered.

A reenactment of me during that fateful moment

I can’t say I regret it, though. As I lost myself in the algorithm of the app, I started seeing videos of people who were reminiscing about old partners they’d lost touch with, friends they’d drifted from and couldn’t find, family members they wanted to reconnect with. That old idea from 2016 came roaring back. I thought to myself, “what if someone found pictures like I found, but her gram wasn’t around to tell her the story and she couldn’t ask anyone else in her family? What if she posted a TikTok asking for information about the mystery man and it went viral? And what if she found the mystery man via his grandson, who was (obviously) very hot and (of course) her old adversary from high school, making for some delicious enemies-to-lovers vibes? What if the interrupted love story of their grandparents led to their inevitable love story?”

It was an idea I let marinate into 2021 while I finished up another manuscript and started querying it in April. I quickly realized that A) querying is one of the most painful things a person can go through, actually!! and B) this other manuscript was going one place and that was Nowhere™️. I was very sad and very discouraged and very much listening to folklore and evermore on repeat (thank you, Taylor, I know you made these albums just for my depression era).

This is where it starts getting weird and woo woo—I fully believe Joyce was like, “actually, I’d like you to write this book that was partially inspired by me, get on that right now.” It wouldn’t leave me alone. I thought about the plot, talked about it with my CPs, fleshed something out enough to get started, and on May 1, the month that Joyce was born and the month that I found out she was going to quickly leave us, I sat down at my computer and wrote the first words of what would become You, with a View.  

Screenshot of my original draft doc. I called this story Zion to begin with, because the first scene I thought up when I was deep in my brainstorm was a scene where Theo and Noelle are at a swimming hole in Zion National Park and yell out their frustrations together underwater 🥹 Also, this first line never changed!

I chose Joyce as my pen name because I wanted to bring her along on the journey she would have been so incredibly stoked about. But when I tell you she was with me while I wrote that manuscript over the summer of 2021 and beyond, I mean it with my entire EVERYTHING. The draft basically fell out of my head fully formed. I felt like Annie in Sleepless in Seattle:

I told you Joyce is magic, and this is where I circle back to it. She didn’t let a little thing like death stop her from telling me that she was with me, and not just in name.

The first time I realized it was after I wrote chapter 3, specifically this snippet:

Keep in mind the only reason I chose tennis as Noelle’s sport of choice was because my husband is an excellent tennis player and I knew he’d make sure I didn’t fuck up the tennis rep in my book. My gram loved bocce ball and golf, a hobby she shared with my husband.

As I was writing that chapter, I thought about how much I wished Gram was around to share this with. I was writing a story partially inspired by those pictures of her and Nick, and she wasn’t there to see it (relatedly, the amount of times I listened to “marjorie” was unhealthy).

Fast forward a few days later when my husband says out of nowhere, “I had a dream about your gram last night.” I, of course, was INSULTED, like, “why isn’t she visiting me in my dreams?!” I asked him what it was about, and he said, “Not much. We were just playing tennis.”

!!!!!!!

I didn’t think much of it in the moment, but later that night I was in bed and it came out of nowhere, this knowing that my gram had visited my husband in his dream, had played tennis with him even though she wasn’t a tennis player and the more logical sport of choice for Dream Them would’ve been golf.

She wanted to provide me with a very clear confirmation: “I see it. I know what you’re doing.”

She was with me again when I got my first agent offer on September 25^th (also my mom’s birthday!). She was with me when my mom came to visit me a week later and set a magnet down on my kitchen counter. She’d seen it at a store and had the urge to buy it for me. I looked at it and said, “UM?! THIS IS ANGELS LANDING.”

The picture I took when my mom gave me the magnet (you can see her a little bit in the top right corner, I love her)

There’s a chapter in You, with a View where Noelle and Theo hike Angels Landing, a very harrowing trail at Zion, and in fact they hike the exact portion you see in the magnet above:

That chapter also features this line:

It’s also worth mentioning that the art I commissioned from horreurscopes features Noelle and Theo at the peak of Angels Landing, and since we’re talking about it let me just show it again because it’s quite literally perfect:

Anyway, back to the magnet: keep in mind that my mom hadn’t even read my book at this point!!! She just picked it up on a whim!! It was Gram giving her a nudge, that sly gal.

She was with me when my agent—the dream agent I’d only queried because I though “eh, I have nothing to lose”—emailed me that following Monday telling me how much she loved my manuscript, how it made her think of her relationship with her own grandma, and how she’d love to set up a call with me.

And Joyce was with me again when my best friend, Anya, visited Zion and sent me a text alongside a picture of a billboard that proclaimed WHERE TO NEXT:

This one really got me, because Where To Next is the (obviously fictional) name of thick-thighed and single-dimpled love interest Theo Spencer’s travel app company. His and Noelle’s stop in Zion is one of the most pivotal stretches of time in their head-over-ass slide into love. I had zero idea this billboard even existed until Anya sent me the picture. We agreed it was once again Joyce, saying “I’m here! I see you!” via a person I love.

She was with me when I talked to a psychic not long after I got my book deal; I’d booked her because I was so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of signs I was getting that I started to not believe they were signs. The first thing the psychic said to me was, “your grandma is asking why you bothered paying for a psychic when you know she’s communicating with you.” LIKE!! GRAM. Way to make the poor woman say it out loud.  

She was with me again the other day when I was having a tough one and had just dumped an entire, long-ass soliloquy into Discord. One of my CPs (the indomitable Livy Hart) was on a walk and sent this picture:

She was there, saying “chill out, you goose. I’m here. I’m with you.”  

And listen, it’s not like her reaching out to me from the great beyond is satisfactory. I told you a little bit about her and I’d like to think it’s clear that she was phenomenal. But the truth is, anything I say about her will never begin to touch just how incredible she was in Earthly form. I wanted more time with her and I don’t have it and that’s so unfair that some days, even seven years later and with her regular signs, I get the wind knocked out of me. I want to be able to hear her voice and get one of those sunscreen-tacky hugs. I want to drive down the highway in her passenger seat. I want to look out at the audience at some future event and see her face. I want to hand her my book, the one that has her name on it, too. So, I mean, I’m not saying that still having her in some celestial form is enough.

I’m just saying that Joyce is magic in perpetuity, that she knew You, with a View was the book I was meant to debut with, and that the idea started with her and so she held my hand through it. I’m just saying that her magic is in every page, and on her birthday, I wanted to tell you a little bit about it.

If you made it this far, I appreciate you and she would’ve, too. And then, honestly, she probably would’ve figured out a way to tie in some sort of Seinfeld anecdote.  

Xoxo,

Jessica (+) Joyce