By Megan Hatfield

Have you ever thought what it would be like to be invisible and no one could either hear or see you? What about having the ability to control your future or go back to the past, while still living in the present? “Imagine if all your choices were gone. Except one. And it’s the only one that truly matters.” Well If this intrigued you, I would say that this book is definitely the perfect fit. 

If I Stay by Gayle Forman is about a 17-year old girl Mia Hall who experiences a tragic car accident with her family after a perfect snow day to visit her grandparents for the weekend. After the catastrophic accident, she undergoes an ‘out-of-body experience’ that makes her seem alive, while her ‘real body’ is laying in a hospital bed in a coma. Her invisible body is able to helplessly wander around the scene of the accident and the hospital, while her life is hanging in the balance. But the catch is that no one can either hear or see Mia. Mia is the only member of her family to survive, and she finds herself in a situation where she has to weigh the pros and cons about how to go on without her family. She experiences several flashbacks and reflects on the memories that she has with her family and friends. Mia has to decide if she wants to live to pursue her relationship with her boyfriend, Adam, and her career in music. Or, if she wants to die and leave everything all behind. Mia eventually decides that she would prefer not to wake up from her coma, when suddenly she has an awakening moment while her boyfriend plays her own Cello music. This gives her the strength to wake up from her coma, to be able to live her life pursuing her dream in music and living in the memory of her family.

Mia’s ghost body is an important device that is connected to the story’s central problem and themes. The story revolves around the themes of life, death, and sacrifice that centers around the main problem the whole story portrays: Does she want to live through the grief of losing her family members and sacrifice not seeing her family in heaven again, or sacrifice her life with Adam and her career in music at Julliard by joining them in heaven? Mia’s ghost body is able to overlook her family members that frequently visit her in the hospital. She overhears her grandparents discussing who has the responsibility to decide whether or not Mia should stay or go. “She’s running the show. Maybe she’s just biding her time. So you talk to her. You tell her to take all the time she needs, but to come on back, you’re waiting for her” (Forman 33). Mia realizes that this is ultimately her decision and that she has to find the strength that will allow her to continue her life. “If I stay. If I live. It’s up to me…I decide. I know this now. And this terrifies me more than anything else that has happened today” (36). Her decision is difficult for many reasons and she often questions why she even needs to think about what to choose. 

During these invisible body scenes, the author uses narration in a non-traditional way that you may not expect in a regular first-person perspective book. Mia is the narrator of this book and the entire story takes place in Mia’s mind. Throughout the book the narration shifts between the present while she is lying unconscious in the hospital bed to the past when she experiences flashbacks of her most important memories throughout her life. This type of narration affects the reader’s experience and helps better understand the story. According to Wayne Booth’s concepts of narration, this book mostly relies on self-conscious narration, commentary, and observer narration. This ties into how the book switches from the present to the past  tense. Booth’s distinction between observer v. participant narration helps show how Mia is the invisible ‘observer’ narrator in which she is observing the scene in present tense. Mia is aware that she is speaking to us and Mia’s invisible body is observing the book as if she is an “outside” viewer. At first, Mia is confused as she begins to learn her situation and this out-of-body experience. She isn’t sure what exactly is happening and is trying to figure out what this means for her. “Am I dead? At first it seemed obvious that I am. That the standing-here-watching part was temporary, an intermission before the bright light…(8). As the story goes on, she understands what this allows her to do and how crucial it is for her to be able to make this important decision for her future. One passage that helps visualize what she sees is when Mia describes herself as she lays on the operating table for surgery:

12:19 P.M… The operating room is small and crowded, full of blindingly bright lights, which highlight how grubby this place is. It’s nothing like on TV, where operating rooms are like pristine theaters that could accommodate an opera singer, and an audience, The floor, trough buffed shiny, is dingy with scruff marks and rust streaks, which I take to be old bloodstains. Blood. It is everywhere. It does not faze the doctors one bit. They slice and sew and suction through a river of it, like they are washing dishes in soapy water. Meanwhile, they pump an ever-replenishing stock into my veins… The operation goes on and on. I’m exhausted by it…I start to zone out. And then I start to wonder about this state I’m in. If I’m not dead and the heart monitor is bleeping along, so I assume I’m not but I’m not in my body either, can I go anywhere? Am I a ghost? (17-18). 

Then it instantly switches from flashback-Mia. This is more of present-tense-coma-Mia’s consciousness of Mia as ‘participating’ narrator in which she goes through important memories from her past. Mia is aware that she is talking to the readers as she explains events or times in her life that made her happy, sad, or something that is going to help her make her decision.  One passage that shows this type of narration and allows Mia to share a memory of her family before the accident:

4:47 P.M. Mom once snuck me into a casino. We were going on vacation to Crater Lake and we stopped at a resort on an Indian reservation for the buffet lunch. Mom decided to do a bit of gambling, and I went with her while Dad stayed with Teddy, who was napping in his stroller. Mom sat down at the dollar blackjack tables…I watched Mom play, mesmerized. It seemed like we were there for fifteen minutes but then Dad and Teddy came in search of us, both of them grumpy. It turned out we’d been there for over an hour. The ICU is like that. You can’t tell what time of day it is or how much time has passed. There’s no natural light. And there’s a constant soundtrack of noise only instead of the electronic beeping of slot machines and the satisfying jangle of quarters, it’s the hum and whir of all the medical equipment, the endless muffled pages over the PA, and the steady talk of the nurses. (30)

This passage goes back to a time that made Mia happy and was a memory of the happiness she once shared with her family. She uses her coma-state-unconsciousness to connect her past memories with the present, in a way that helps Mia understand what is going on around her and eventually connects with her decision to live or die. Throughout the book, the way in which Mia tells the story, exemplifies the big picture of the novel and the problem that surrounds Mia, to allow readers to interact with the story as if they were in her shoes. 

This story is really interesting to me and I thought this book was very meaningful in many ways, even in life today. This story could be connected with people who are struggling with choosing whether or not their life is valuable enough to continue living or choosing the option to die, whether as a result from dealing with grief or other reasons. I think, for many people, experiencing flashbacks or flashing forward to what their future could be like is crucial for their process in what they would believe to be a deciding factor or factors. This is not a traditional story that portrays real life events, in terms of having your ghost body wander around trying to figure out where your next step is, but I find this to be a helpful book for those who may be struggling with how to go on with their life and if everything they have now is going to be worth it. It devastates me that there are many people out there that really have to undergo this way of thinking and wondering if their life is even worthy anymore.

For obvious reasons this story can really help save someone’s life. Like Gottschall’s theory of storytelling, it is a form of practice for real life situations. You can reflect on how Mia went through this process of deciding her fate and use it to compare to your own life. Doing so may help some people evaluate things in their life or see things in ways they may not have seen or even realized before.  I think it is very meaningful and shows a bigger purpose than just telling a story about a teenager who loses her parents in a car accident and deciding if she wants to live or die. The ending of this book truly warmed my heart and I was so glad that through all the troubles of weighing her pros and cons of living or dying, the one thing that was able to push her to wake up was not only her dream of music, but the dream life she could have missed out on if she joined her family in heaven. I highly recommend reading this book and reading the second book in this series, Where She Went, to see how Mia continues her life after waking up and how she will pursue this new life without her family.