The Brooklyn Rail

The Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie, Indiana is an annual summer conference full of talented and hardworking aspiring authors, and it’s where I had the pleasure of meeting Jaclyn Youhana Garver in July of 2022 when I was on the faculty. Even among an overall fun and friendly crowd, Garver stood out as so fun and so friendly—so funny and so dedicated—that we became friends (at least online) and kept in touch. When I had the opportunity to lead the Himalayan International Writers Retreat in India in March 2024, she immediately came to mind as someone I should invite to apply. She did, and the rest is history. Our time working and traveling together in India—along with nine other writers from all over the place—was productive and life-changing and we’ve been friends (in real life) ever since.

Back then, Jaclyn’s debut novel Then, Again—the story of Asha whose husband Charlie is trapped in an aneurysm-induced coma figuring out how her own life might be able to go on—was in its final phases of editing, scheduled for its November 2024 publication date from Lake Union Publishing. I devoured the whole book on a single flight over Thanksgiving weekend, struck by how the story, like Jaclyn, is hilarious and breezy yet deceptively profound and reflective. A romance and a comedy—a romantic comedy, if you will—the novel handles heavy topics with a movingly light touch and an enormous heart. In late January of 2025, Jaclyn and I corresponded over email about grief, grape leaves, and how reading someone’s book is one of the sweetest possible things a person can do.

Rail: I’m a sucker for an epigraph and your book has three: one by E.E. Cummings, one by Van Morrison, and one by Stephen King. Why choose those, and why choose three?

Jaclyn Youhana Garver: Publishing a novel for the first time is a lesson in how to be a newbie in seemingly every aspect of a thing. One of the hundreds of things I learned in the process, for example, is that it’s the author’s job to get permissions. I thought it was something the publisher did! The copy you read is an ARC, and by that point, no one had caught that I sort of never got permissions. My publisher realized it and asked, but because it was caught so late in the game, I didn’t have time to go through the process (which is pretty lengthy/time-consuming), so I swapped out my OG epigraph quotes (RIP, I loved you so) with a trio that were in the public domain.

I went with three because I wanted to find something to represent each of the three timelines in Then, Again, which are titled “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Autumn”—not because those timelines are set during those literal seasons, but as a representation of the seasons of a life: the hope and promise of spring (coming of age), the cheer and good times of summer (meeting your forever partner), the ending of warmth in autumn (an ending).

Rail: Although you make it look easy, the structure of your book is complex, cycling from its present day setting of Ohio in 2017 when Asha’s husband of ten years, Charlie, is in a coma following an aneurysm, to 1996/the late nineties when junior high Asha is falling in her first ever love with Jason Kapaglia, to 2005/the aughts when she’s meeting and falling in love with Charlie. How did you decide on that method of organization?

Youhana Garver: How writers craft a book is often looked at as a continuum: On one end are the plotters, writers who spend six months plotting and outlining every single aspect of what happens next so that, by the time they start writing the actual prose, it sort of just flows out, because they know every detail about every character/theme/scene/setting/etc. On the other end are the pantsers, who fly by the seat of their pants. If a plotter is a ten and a pantser is a one, I’m like three. Which is to say, I have some general idea of where each chapter is going, which I figure out after writing the chapter before it.

I didn’t work with any sort of outline here. Which might sound sort of nutty, given that this novel has three different timelines braided together. But there is an internal structure that was clear to me in the writing. In a story that deals with first love versus best love, it makes a lot of sense for a chapter that details, for example, the first time Asha’s first love comes to dinner to be followed immediately by one that details the first time Asha’s best love comes to dinner.

Rail: Throughout each of the sections, you use music—“Sexyback” by Justin Timberlake, “Boom Boom Boom” by the Outhere Brothers and so forth—as a way to capture the setting or zeitgeist and also the characters. Why make music so prominent in Asha’s life?

Youhana Garver: Music plays such a huge role in nearly everything I write. It’s such a muse for me in general. With Then, Again, setting plays a vital role, especially in the earliest, coming-of-age chapters, which are set in the mid-ninetines, in the Midwest, with a bunch of elder millennials. That time and place has such a clear soundtrack: the pop music, the ninetines R&B, the dance music, the rock. I can hear it today and be transported to my own eighth-grade dances in my junior high gym, dancing with my BFF—just two jumpy girls with bad hair trying their best.

Rail: The book is a romantic comedy, for sure, and her romantic relationships with Jason and Charlie feel so real. But just as real is her relationship with her best friend Bridget who is the kind of ride-or-die friend I hope everybody has at least one of. You dedicated the book to Stephanie, your BFF. Why make friendship such an important theme?

Youhana Garver: I knew Asha would be going through something unimaginable, and I knew I wanted her to have a strong foundation of support. To get through something earth-shattering like a spouse falling into a coma—“detonating” into a coma, as Asha puts it—I think requires those I-love-you-no-matter-what friends and family members. I did choose to dedicate this to my personal Bridget—the aforementioned junior high BFF dancing with me in the gym—because I couldn’t have written that type of friendship without experiencing it myself. Bridget and Stephanie have different personalities and jobs, and the friendships are pretty different, but there’s an essence of Stephanie in Bridget. The loyalty, the foundation, the “I am purely myself around you, and thank the Lord I can be; this world is so hard, and you are a balm.”

Rail: You write about the affirmations that Asha and Bridget put around “the oval mirror above the sink: There is beauty in you. You shine. Sexy as Hell.” This was a great detail and made me wonder: do you have any affirmations or mottos or life philosophies?

Youhana Garver: One phrase I find myself thinking of a lot is “do it anyway.” I could easily be a scared person, and I don’t want to be. I want experiences, which require a lot of saying “yes” and a lot of hard work. So I put in the work and I say “yes,” or “do it anyway,” even if I’m scared or worried.

Rail: Early on, you have Asha pose the book’s central question: are you allowed to date while your husband’s in a coma? I love that it takes almost three hundred pages to feel like we’ve reached an answer because ethical issues like that are not suited to a binary yes or no. What makes fiction such a good place for exploring this kind of question?

Youhana Garver: I read about a study years ago that pointed out that people who read fiction tend to be more empathetic than those who don’t. Which makes so much sense to me. Where else do you get the opportunity to slip into the skin of someone who’s nothing like you? To see and study different experiences through eyes that aren’t your own? Fiction lets you in on those other identities like a costume, and it can present so many different aspects of those big, ambiguous, not-black-and-white questions. You’re so right—we do like to think much of life is black and white, yes or no, good or bad, which is such a simplistic lens to look through. And we do so at our own peril. Black-and-white thinking makes us miss so much nuance and beauty. Fiction lets you get into those mid-tones, the gray, the beauty.

Rail: This book is about Asha’s love life, but it also feels like it’s about your love life—with books. You have Charlie read to her from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being in one scene, and elsewhere you mention Stephen King and Judy Blume and more. Who were your biggest influences while writing this book and why?

Youhana Garver: You definitely named three of the biggest influences for Then, Again. I’ll focus on Judy Blume here, who I grew up reading and still read as an adult. Asha reads from Forever …, which is a book I read every few years. It’s fascinating to have a book you’ve engaged with periodically starting as a twelve-year-old up to a forty-something: The first time I read it, I was younger than the protagonist, a teenage Katherine. The last time I read it, I was older than Katherine’s mother. That experience is one of the major reasons I love reading—as a reader, you bring so much of your own experiences to the story. How I viewed Katherine’s first love experience at twelve was very different than how I did at thirty-seven. And both were right. Rereading the novel like that added this additional layer of richness and nuance.

I knew I wanted the coming-of-age chapters in Then, Again to touch on female sexuality and teen girls’ curiosity around sex. So often, books either ignore the fact that teen girls can want sex, or if they do address this, the outcome is STDs and unwanted pregnancy. In Forever …, Katherine doesn’t have a baby; she has an orgasm. Which shouldn’t be avant-garde or shocking but, fifty years later (HOLY COW, FOREVER … IS A HALF CENTURY OLD???), here we are. I was interested in paying homage to that, from an adult Asha’s point of view, looking back on her curious, horny teenage self with kind eyes.

Rail: That makes sense because like Blume, you depict teen-girl sexuality without being traumatic or punishing, letting Asha and her friends be realistic and intense, but not trapped in a sorrow-fest. How did you walk that line between capturing the intensity but also the touching goofiness?

Youhana Garver: I love this question! I can’t imagine talking about sexuality as a teenager without getting into the goofy. Because it’s all goofy! In the moment, it can feel so intense and huge and giant and all-encompassing…but there’s such a goofy sweetness to figuring it all out.

Personally, adding in that goof came pretty naturally, in part because of my upbringing: I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic school until fifth grade, was an altar girl, went to Sunday night teen classes at church when I was in a public high school, attended some weekend retreats in the woods. Catholicism is pretty vocal in its teaching that sex is for marriage and your virginity is a gift for your spouse. I vividly remember the VHS we watched that called it that, “a gift to give after marriage.” And every time we had sex, we tore the paper and ripped the bow. And who’s gonna want a mangled and crinkled gift?! So to be a curious teen in the midst of being taught that your future husband will think you’re dirty and used up if you have a little sex before you meet him—and nevermind that premarital sex will also disappoint God spectacularly—it felt a little safer to tack on a side of goof.

Rail: There’s a moment I LOLed at in one of the 2006 sections:

I had until 6:30 the following evening to turn my house into a restaurant. I spent that day scrubbing everything—yes, my Saturday evening—and I went to the grocery store at 10 pm. You know who goes to the grocery store at 10 pm on a Saturday? No one. I had the place to myself and twirled in circles down the frozen-foods aisle just to give anyone monitoring security cameras something to watch.

This distills the essence of you as a writer and a person—exuberant, idiosyncratic, thoughtful, and hilarious. This book could have been super-heavy, a really melodramatic bummer. But you keep it so light (which to me is even more moving). How did you decide to take the comic approach?

Youhana Garver: So, fun fact: I didn’t realize I was taking the comic approach until I started talking to readers after the fact. Which is an insanely cool thing to learn about myself as an author, so thank you for that.

I did, though, make a conscious decision to keep it light. Part of that is because I have a gallows sense of humor. I’m the one laughing at the funeral, and I wanted to bring this lightness to Asha’s story. Because, while this is a book about a woman whose husband is in a coma, it’s not a coma book. It’s a book about hope and change and love, and the fact that love can be much bigger than we think, and that there is no wrong or right person to love, and if you love both the wrong and the right person, it’s okay, and one doesn’t diminish the other, and the two can actually coexist, and that doesn’t make you a bad person—and oh look, we’re back in the fact that none of this is black and white.

My good friend’s mother died a few years back, and I went to her sister’s house for the memorial. I hadn’t seen my friend in a while—long distance friendships are the worst—and within an hour, she and I were seated next to each other laughing so loud, her sister had to come over and shush us. Which clearly made us laugh harder. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the absolute best outcome of going through something like a death; there are certain losses a person doesn’t ever get over. But you can grow around them. I think laughter, which is really just joy’s cousin, is one way to participate in that process.

Rail: When Asha and her dad are cooking Assyrian food, I got so hungry. You write food so well and so specifically, I felt like I could use these pages in lieu of a recipe to make my own grape leaves. How did you decide to make food, especially Assyrian food, so important in the story?

Youhana Garver: I knew I wanted Asha’s background to be important to the novel, and to me, culture comes out in food. To be honest, earlier drafts didn’t touch on it quite so much, but my editor loved those details and asked me to add more. Which I did quite happily. The scene where Asha and her father make dolma, for example, was a later add-on. I’d never made dolma before, so I called my folks and asked if I could visit that weekend and make it with them. I took notes while we did so, and that experience turned into the scene in Then, Again. I’m so happy I got to add it; food is such a basis for comfort and security. If Asha’s friendship with Bridget provided some bricks in her foundation that helped her get through the absolute worst thing, then her experiences with food and her father’s Assyrian culture are foundational bricks, too.

Rail: Also, shout-out to the peanut butter s’mores that crop up a couple times—now I really want to try it. Is that something you do?

Youhana Garver: Absolutely! The idea totally came from the Lindsay Lohan version of The Parent Trap. When the twins are stuck in the timeout cabin together, they realize they both love to dip Oreos in peanut butter—which I promptly started doing. An early experience that taught me that anything that’s good with chocolate can be made even better with a swipe of peanut butter.

Rail: Maura, Charlie’s hyper-judgmental and religious younger sister, is an excellent antagonist and foil to Asha. You do such a convincing job depicting her self-deceit, her manipulation, and her pettiness. But you also manage to make the reader understand why she’s so terrible. Was it hard not to go overboard making her suck?

Youhana Garver: As I mentioned, I was raised Catholic but had virtually no experience with Protestant fundamentalism. A dear friend had a lot of experience in that realm and even lived in a Christian house in college. We had a lengthy chat about the folks she encountered there and some of the things that happened that she witnessed. Learning about all that helped me create Maura.

And yes, it was absolutely hard not to go overboard—it’s so much fun to write sucky characters, and I super leaned into it. I knew I needed to pull back thanks to one of my readers; there’s a scene toward the end of the novel where Maura’s mother admonishes her a bit. In an earlier draft, the admonishment was a little more than “a bit”—I had Joanie absolutely tear up her daughter. And an intelligent and insightful reader was like, “Um, that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

Rail: You have an interlude where you meditate on the transience of technology and the objects that define our lives but also become obsolete: “When Charlie and I got home, I dragged out the tower of CDs relegated to the back corner of my closet. Spice Girls, Boyz II Men, Natalie Imbruglia, Ja Rule, Blackstreet—all bands this year’s crop of high school freshmen would likely not recognize were they to grace the cover of Rolling Stone.” It’s not exactly that this book is historical fiction, but in a way it is—how did you handle that?

Youhana Garver: I’ve read that the music we love most as an adult is what was popular when we were teens. Maybe that’s when we write certain songs and artists to our poetic memories? Asha and I are the same age, and it was fun to share a general taste in music with her. I’ve never written anything longform that took place in a year I never personally experienced. I am amazed by writers who tackle this, who submerge themselves into the research necessary to successfully transport readers to something the writers never experienced. I’m thinking very much of your most recent novel, From Dust to Stardust. The research required to write about the silent film era! By comparison, I almost feel like I cheated in Then, Again, to write about a timeline I know so intimately.

Rail: I love the scene where Asha’s grandmother tells her fortune using coffee grounds—why is it so appealing to try to know our future?

Youhana Garver: My grandmother reads Turkish coffee grounds. And Asha’s fortune might be the precise fortune my Nana gives me every single time she does it, which is the absolute sweetest thing. I think my cousins might get a similar fortune, too, come to think of it.

Oh man, who hasn’t thought “If I could just figure out how XYZ would turn out, I can stop wondering about it?” And especially when we have to make a decision that is extra difficult, it’s such a balm to think, “Maybe the universe has my back—what a relief!”

Rail: One of my favorite characters is Asha’s dad who is kind, insightful, and supportive. He’s an immigrant and a single parent and he’s trying his best to raise his daughter in a loving environment, and all of their scenes felt full of emotion without being mawkish. You write, “At the time, of course, I had no idea how progressive this was for my Middle Eastern father, but here he was paraphrasing ‘love is love’ back in 1998.” Was he always this way in early drafts?

Youhana Garver: Adam Khoury came together pretty fully formed. I knew I wanted Asha to have that strong, loving, supportive foundation. I also knew how important it was in her youth to be trusted by her father. It’s easy for adults to dismiss young love, and I never wanted that to be Asha’s experience. One way I achieved that was to make sure there were some parallels between Adam’s and Asha’s romantic lives. It’s one of the reasons he’s able to support her so well during both her teen and adult years—he’s been there, both in terms of falling in love very young and in dealing with loss.

Rail: We don’t get the scene where Charlie has his aneurysm until page 224, even though we’ve been reading about the fallout from that event since page 1. How did you decide to put it so late in the timeline (which I think is effective)?

Youhana Garver: I know this isn’t a terribly sexy answer, but it fell where it did out of necessity. I knew that scene had to happen in the “Summer” timeline, and I wanted to make sure Asha’s and Charlie’s relationship was well established by that point. Maybe it’s manipulative, but I wanted to make sure the scene packed a pretty severe emotional wallop. I couldn’t do that with the element of surprise—the reader learns about the coma in the first chapter of the book—so I needed Asha and the reader to fall in love with Charlie together before we could see the immediate aftermath of the aneurysm.

Rail: You thank your reader in your acknowledgements: “There’s an intimacy that comes with spending time inside what another person writes, and I’m honored that you chose to spend your precious hours with me and in these pages. You, sweet reader, are a delight.” Why did you decide to put that in?

Youhana Garver: It’s such an intimate thing, to live in an author’s fictional world. Because even in fiction, there are pieces of the author there. We write what we’re passionate about, what we’re obsessed with, and we invite strangers to dive into those passions. Similarly, what we choose to read is so personal. No one wants to spend ninety thousand words in a world they don’t enjoy, with characters they don’t connect with in some way. To find that marriage, for a reader to match up with the right world and to dive in, is damn special. And there are so very many other ways a reader can spend their time. That anyone chooses to spend it with me? With Asha? With Then, Again? What magic!

Rail: Have any readers been less than sweet? How do you handle reviews?

Youhana Garver: One of the most important lessons I learned in journalism school was to let the other person have the last say. That some readers would want to call in and tell me off because they didn’t like how I wrote X or how I handled Y. And they really wouldn’t care what I had to say about any of it—they just wanted to tell me I’m an idiot.

The lesson has been helpful in so many aspects of my life, most recently in dealing with reviews. To be honest, I don’t really read them. I keep an eye on my average star ratings on Goodreads and Amazon, primarily because I want to be a career writer, and that’s easier to do when you get good reviews. But in terms of a review’s content? Honestly, reviews aren’t for authors; they’re for other readers who are trying to decide if they should spend their precious time with a novel.

This isn’t to say I haven’t peeked at some. Of course I have, though it’s more of a scan. I did find one one-star reviewer who left a comment, which absolutely tickled me: She wrote “Just ick.” I’m cackling again, just writing that out.

Rail: What’s next?

Youhana Garver: I just had a new short story accepted into the anthology Tiny Terrors, which is scheduled to come out by Graveside Press this year. I’m currently on sub with what I’m hopeful will be my next novel, about best friend breakups, and am about halfway through the first draft of another novel. I’m always writing poetry and gathering ideas. Being a writer is a blast. “What’s next?” is doing whatever I can to just keep at it.