Growing up, Olivia became accustomed to her mother’s short disappearances. Based on the chart kept by her mother, dubbed Divine Energies, Olivia could often predict when the cycle was heading the way toward her leaving, interpreting the meaning of the lines representing the tides, the zodiac, and other psychic strengths. Mental illness as seen through a shroud of mysticism- this is how Olivia grew up in What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell.
In the novel’s opening, an adult Olivia is traveling to her hometown for the first time since she was a teenager. On the verge of divorce, she takes her two children to this beach town before they continue on to New York to start a new chapter in their lives. Olivia is immediately haunted by the memories of that last fateful summer, and the ramifications that came later.
“Twenty years have passed, and I have not set foot in New Jersey once. I don’t know what made me think I could do it today casually, without consequence. For the truth is, here is the locus of my guilt. I left my mother here when she was sick and sad and alone. When I was fifteen, someone lowered a rope into my well, and I climbed it and pulled it up after me. I like to thinking that if my mother had waited two or three more years than she did, I would have grown up enough to come home to her. But I can’t be sure.”
The effects of mental illness, specifically the bipolar disorder that sent Olivia’s mother away for days or weeks on end, are portrayed in a myriad of ways– from the perspective of a confused child, an informed adult, and a concerned parent. Olivia herself is diagnosed in her late adolescence, and she becomes the parent of a child struggling with it as well. Olivia’s marriage crumbles from a variety of factors, but the disorder seems to be at the epicenter of the storm, and in the present time, Olivia finds herself with sole custody of her children, moving across the country all on her own. Her teenaged daughter Carrie exudes frustration and anger- at the divorce, at the move, and more than ever before, at her younger brother’s behavior, and her son Daniel is at the whim of the disease while she continues to work with doctors to find a treatment plan that will help curb his unpredictable, and often volatile, behavior.
Daniel’s sudden disappearance on the boardwalk their first day back in New Jersey sends Olivia into a tailspin of worry, fear, and reflection. As she searches for him, she is transported by memory to the experiences that shaped her growing up. Alternating between the present and the summer twenty years earlier, readers learn Olivia’s full story, how she grew up in the shadow of the ghosts of her lost sisters, who were worshiped in a way that Olivia could never understand, to the appearance of family members she never knew existed.
This is a painful, yet beautiful, portrayal of a life touched by mental illness. I couldn’t put this book down, even as it hurt to take in the story.