Mosquitoland author and 2015 PW Flying Starts honoree David Arnold explores themes of connection, healing, and reincarnation in I Loved You in Another Life, a speculative YA love story in which teenagers Evan Taft and Shosh Bell are inexplicably drawn to each other across all their previous lives. As Evan manages stress surrounding his mother’s breast cancer diagnosis and Shosh copes with grief over her older sister’s death, they both begin hearing a mysterious voice singing haunting lyrics, leading up to their eventual meeting. Arnold spoke with PW about the inspiration behind writing a “David Arnold Love Story,” the influence of music on his life and work, and his thoughts surrounding soulmates, life after death, and the inevitability of love.
In your acknowledgments, you write that “even though I fell in love at a young age, I’d never written a true love story.” What does a “true love story” mean to you, and how and why did you decide to go about crafting one now?
I wrote four novels before I Loved You in Another Life, where romantic love was sort of hinted at or danced around, but I’d never written a book that centered two characters falling in love. And because I did fall in love young, I think I’ve always been wondering, what’s my way into that story? We all read for different reasons, right? And while I enjoy reading romance—and some of my friends write it really well—I never gravitated toward writing it; it’s just never been the most natural thing for me. So, I thought, “Well, what does a David Arnold Love Story look like?”
Music has always been a really big part of my life; I was a professional musician for a decade. And so, when I had the idea about two strangers who start hearing music out of thin air… once I realized that music could act as a sort of map for the characters, I thought that would be the perfect opportunity for me to write about people falling in love. And I’ve always been interested in the storytelling mechanics of reincarnation, so the idea that maybe these two souls just continue to fall in love over and over again really stuck with me and made me want to finally tackle my own love story.
In the primary, present-day story line of I Loved You in Another Life, Evan and Shosh are two teens living in Illinois. But in their previous and future lives—which are featured in interstitials throughout the narrative—they’re often physically different people from different parts of the world. Why was it important for you to include these alternate perspectives?
Once I worked out how the reincarnation aspect functioned—how Evan and Shosh’s original souls worked and where they originated—I felt that there needed to be some sort of draw to that origin point. So, I came up with some rules for myself around that. I also didn’t want them to just to be reborn in the same place in every life, so, I was looking for ways to incorporate different regions into each of their narratives.
It occurs to me that I’ve done something similar in a couple of different ways in my previous books. I love when I’m able to present these short little snippets throughout the story; it’s almost like, when you’re reading the main narrative, it feels as if you’re at a museum, and you’re standing really close to a painting, and you see all of the details and everything that’s incorporated into it. You’re kind of fully immersed in this single painting. But then if you step back, you notice that this one painting—that you feel like you know everything about now—is actually just one in a series of paintings. And I feel like the vignettes add a sense of like, this story of Evan and Shosh’s is just one of many. And even though we aren’t standing as close to those other stories, just knowing that they exist allows us to more fully benefit from the one that’s in front of us.
You’ve been quoted as saying that you’re driven by character and that you feel compelled to finish a story for them. What was it about these characters that drove you to tell their story?
The seeds of books are always really hard for me to track down. When I think, “What was the beginning of this book?” I mean, the idea of two strangers who hear music, that was certainly a seed. But another seed was the relationship between Evan and his younger brother Will, and the bond that they share in the act of loving a movie: in this case, E.T.
My son had a period when he was five or six years old where E.T. was the only movie he wanted to watch. We watched it probably once a week for five or six months. And—actually, this is kind of a funny story—originally, I had an idea for an I.P. project, which would have taken place after E.T. flies off forever. I thought, “Well, what about Elliott?” He’s developed this relationship with this friend who’s now gone. I thought it would be cool to see his story set, like, seven years later, when he’s 17, and he’s trying to contact E.T. I wrote up a paragraph and sent it to my agent, Dan Lazar, and I was like, I don’t even know how we would begin going about writing this, because it’s very much not my intellectual property. And he said, well, let’s check with your film agent. And so, he sent it to her. And then she emailed back and was like, “I don’t know, let me ask Steven.” And I was like, “I’m sorry. What? As in Spielberg?” And she’s like, “Yeah,” and then three days later, I get an email from her saying, “I’m very sorry, but Steven said no.” And I’m telling you, we threw a three-day-long party at my house. I had asked a question; Steven Spielberg said no. And that was a win.
But with this idea of love around the world, and the kind of “never let me go” aspect, that was when I realized, “Okay, I think the real story here isn’t the characters in E.T.; it’s about two people who love a movie together.” So yeah, Evan and Will are very much based on the dynamic between me and my son at that age. That was certainly a character and a relationship that I wanted to see through.
In your Flying Starts interview, you mentioned that you were “trying to write a book the way Arcade Fire performs a song, with reckless energy, and very youthfully.” Can you elaborate on how music influences your writing today, and about the importance of the songs that are included in I Loved You in Another Life?
It’s funny that you mention that quote, because I actually just finished an essay about how everything I know about writing books I learned from writing music, and I feel like 2015 David was a very different David. I love that I said that because that’s very much where I was at the time, though I hope that I’ve learned to write with maybe a little bit more restraint. In the acknowledgments of my first book, Mosquitoland, I thank Elliott Smith for teaching me that an honest voice is more compelling than a pretty one, and I think that’s one of the many things that I learned during my time in music: that honesty is the most important element, and if the reader doesn’t believe it, then what’s the point?
My North Star is less about making something that people like and more about making something that people believe, because that’s the thing about music that draws us in. Oftentimes, we can’t explain what it is about a song that moves us; we’ll just be driving or cooking, and a song will come on, and we’ll start crying. Some songs have very obvious reasons: they come at the right time, or the right moment, or they’re passed down to us from someone we love. But for other songs, there’s no rhyme or reason; they just move us. And I feel like it’s because we’re drawn to things that we recognize as true. And so, I think that’s something I’m always trying to instill in my own writing.
From a practical perspective, the songs in I Loved You in Another Life were so important. If these two characters are going to use the songs as a map to each other, then the songs needed to actually exist, and I knew that early on. It was really cool, because it gave me an opportunity to recall my own past life of being a musician and writing songs every day, which I hadn’t done in years. But for this book, I had to revisit that, and I was so glad to do it. I was able to record the songs that are in the book and they’re actually streaming now. (To listen, go to Spotify and YouTube.)
What are your thoughts on the concepts of soulmates, reincarnation, and the inevitability of love, and how did you distill them into this book?
I think that writing is about exploring possibilities; it feels less like excavating something within myself and more like playing in the sandbox of truth. I have to write about something that interests me, especially since it takes me at least two years to write a book. Otherwise, burnout is inevitable. If I’m not interested, I’ll know it pretty quickly. For me, writing isn’t necessarily about tracking something down, it’s about aimless exploration. It’s like, when you hear about how some of the most important scientific discoveries were made by accident. It’s because we tried different things that we discovered, you know, a cure to a disease that we weren’t even searching for. Sometimes, writing can feel that way, like an accidental domino effect: I didn’t set up the dominoes on purpose, but I decided to push one over anyway, just to see what would happen.
I can’t say that I fully believe that when we die, we’re reborn. It’s just one of those ideas that I’ve always been interested in. You’ll hear stories of people having memories from past lives and well, what does that mean? And what would that look like? From a practical standpoint, I can say that turning these ideas into a book was quite difficult, especially when trying to make sure that all the timelines of Evan and Shosh’s births and deaths made sense.
Your debut graphic novel Luminous Beings, illustrated by Jose Pimienta, is planned for fall 2024. Can you talk about the origins of the story and how developing a graphic novel has differed from writing your previous books?
It’s just been so fun. Luminous Beings started as a screenplay that I was writing during the early days of lockdown. I was working on a very serious adult novel at the time that I felt was suddenly not making sense. Like many other people, particularly creatives, I didn’t know what I was doing, I just knew that I needed something different. I couldn’t work on the adult novel during that time. So I gave myself a challenge, which was to take my silliest idea and treat it with the utmost sincerity. And my silliest idea at the time was zombie squirrels.
I was like, “Okay, what would zombie squirrels look like if I treated it like writing that story was my job?” And pretty quickly, I realized that the only way to do it was going to be if the story wasn’t really about zombie squirrels, but instead they were the backdrop. While writing, I didn’t realize that I was processing the world as it was with Covid-19. You know, Covid isn’t part of the book, it’s not mentioned at all, but the way the world responds to the zombie squirrels—I can’t even say that without laughing—makes it very obvious that I was thinking about the pandemic.
I really jumped into that story and spent about five months writing it as a screenplay and talked about it with my agent a few times, until we thought, “But what if it was a graphic novel?” And as soon as I saw Jose’s work, I was like, “I have to work with this artist.” Jose has been amazing. From the moment they agreed to be part of the project, it has definitely been a collaborative effort. Every step of the process has been such a learning experience for me, especially because Jose has written a few really brilliant graphic novels on their own. I’m really excited about it. I would love to do more graphic novels.
I Loved You in Another Life by David Arnold. Viking, $19.99 Oct. 10 ISBN 978-0-593-52478-7
