YA master Gayle Forman, author ofIf I Stay,will release her first book for adultson Sept. 6.
CalledLeave Me, the novel follows a seemingly perfect magazine editor Maribeth Klein who suffers a heart attack.
It felt like the time to write a novel starring people my own age.
Credit: Writer Pictures via AP Images
Now, EW has your first look at the coverandan exclusive excerpt right here.
Shed left her cell phone, her computer pretty much everything else at home.
None of that felt necessary anymore.
She had e-mailed Jason.
By the time she was in the cab, the details of her note had already begun to fade.
Penn Station, she told the driver.
She had not known that would be her destination until the words came out of her mouth.
Twenty minutes later, she was at the train station.
Across the street was a branch of her bank.
Twenty-five thousand dollars turned out to be surprisingly portable.
It fit snugly into her duffel bag.
When she entered the mildewy cavern of Penn Station, she still hadnt known where she was going.
Shed thought maybe some quaint coastal New England town.
And then she saw the departure board.
The clerk handed her a pay-as-you-go flip phone with a 646 number.
She paid for one hundred minutes of talk time.
Then she boarded the train.
Which was how it had felt.
Like something happening to some actor on a screen.
She was not Maribeth Klein, mother, leaving her two young children.
She was a woman in a movie going somewhere normal, perhaps a business trip.
It was the floppy satisfying tiredness one gets after a long day of doing nothing in the sun.
Using her duffel bag as a pillow, she went to sleep.
who told her the apartment was available, and not only that, it was furnished.
The rent was eight hundred dollars a month.
For an extra fifty bucks, she could move in a few days before the first of the month.
She took it sight unseen.
She spent her first night in Pittsburgh in a janky motel near the train station.
There was no FBI-level background check required of a New York City rental.
No broker free amounting to 15 percent of a years rent.
Just sixteen hundred dollars.
When she paid in cash, Mr. Giulio did not bat an eye.
A task assigned to others, falling back to her.
In some ways it was comforting.
So leaving them was not exactly easy.
But it was something she already knew how to do.
