I KNOW MOST of you are in my reader group or subscribers of my newsletter, so you’ve heard me talk about where the idea for Cable and Affton’s story came from, but for anyone who was waiting until publication day for this book, I want to go ahead and catch you up.
Cable is based entirely on a real person. He is based on the boy who taught me all about love and loss. My first love. My first crush. My first taste of disaster and heartbreak. Pretty much everything about the way Cable acts and reacts to things is 100% taken directly from my actual experience dealing with my own broken boy. I throw that out there as a qualifier, because I want readers to understand this isn’t a book dealing with addiction and depression from a researched and documented place. This book deals with those things from the point of view of someone who was watching a train wreck happen right in front of her and was helpless to stop the crash or the carnage.
I know there are no simple textbook symptoms for dealing with things like depression and anxiety, so I want to be clear that all the symptoms, outbursts, reactions, and emotions in this particular book are ones that I witnessed with my own two eyes and felt with my own young heart. I would never want to misrepresent the struggle associated with these issues, so this book is singular and unique to my own life experience.
I’m writing fiction here folks. I will freely admit to taking creative liberty with some of the medical help Cable seeks along the way. I wanted a connection between my characters that I felt was important to Cable’s journey, so the representation of his relationship with his therapist is not the standard! I am aware. It was done on purpose to enhance the story, please don’t send me angry emails. (I put this declaimer in after all Beth, my copyeditor’s many-many notes about Dr. Howard’s unethical conversations about Cable’s mental health with characters who were not Cable. Lol. I know therapy is a safe space and this doesn’t happen in the really-real world.)
I met my Cable when I was sixteen and had been living a pretty sheltered, quiet life as a small-town mountain girl. A mutual friend introduced us about a week after he was released from a court-ordered rehab program. The friend thought we’d be good for each other; he would get me to loosen up, and I was clean and uninterested in all the things that got him in trouble before. It was a terrible plan. We hated each other on sight. I was terrified of the way he lived his life like there were no consequences and no remorse. He hated that I wasn’t impressed by him, that I didn’t automatically think he was the coolest guy in the room. There was a lot of animosity between us for around a year, until he got in trouble again, did a stint in juvie, and was ordered back into a rehab program.
When he got out the second time, he realized he was going nowhere fast and contacted me out of the blue one night to ask if we could give being friends a shot. All of his friends used drugs, drank, partied, and lived just as wildly as he did. He told me he needed someone around who would keep him on the straight and narrow, someone who wasn’t afraid of him. I was terrified of him, but I was even more afraid of what would happen to him if I turned my back on him. I was young enough at the time to believe that if I told him no and he overdosed or did something even more drastic like attempt to take his own life, it would be my fault. So, I agreed.
It was ugly for the first three months. We didn’t like each other, and we weren’t very good at being friends. There was so much temptation around all the time, and it was a struggle to try and help someone who wasn’t exactly sure he wanted the help. Just when I was getting ready to bail, to tell him it was too hard─ I had my own life, my friends, my future to worry about─ something changed.
Maybe he realized I had one foot out the door and I was the only person still fighting for him.
Maybe it was the fact one of his friends died in a drunk driving accident.
Maybe it was the night he got into a fight with a skinhead over something stupid and ended-up with a sawed-off shotgun shoved in his face.
I don’t know what flipped the switch, but he went from night to day. He ditched the friends who were always urging him to jump back off the cliff. He went from pushing against me to actively trying to pull me deeper into his life. He got his GED and blew through his first year of college like it was a piece of cake. He woke the fuck up. He realized there was a whole lot of life to live . . . all he had to do was start showing up for it.
Things changed with us as well. We went from always fighting to something else. I knew I was the center of his entire world and that his obsessive-compulsive tendencies had switched from drugs to me. It was never healthy. But when you’re young and this guy with all the charisma and all the right words tells you he needs you, that he can’t make it without you . . . man, it’s impossible not to fall in love with that feeling and get swept up in all that emotion.
We were together on and off for a little over five years. We called it quits for good when he moved to New York and then Scotland after 9–11. He’s still the most enigmatic, complex, and compelling man I’ve ever known. More than a couple of decades later, I still compare every man who enters my life romantically to him.
We weren’t meant to be in so many ways. But when I think about that all-consuming, overriding need to be with someone when it comes to first love, I wouldn’t give any of that time up for the world. I love that I get to write stories about that kind of love and passion.
So, that’s it, that’s where Cable came from, and Affton . . . well, let’s just say she’s the person I wish I could have been back then. She does everything right, whereas I did everything very wrong . . . that’s about the only similarity between the two of us.
This is the place where I make it clear that my mother is nothing like Affton’s mom. Affton actually has to deal with the loss of a family member to addiction in her life, so she’s very empathetic and compassionate when it comes to dealing with this particular disease. My mom is great, one day I’ll write her into a story, so I don’t have to put a disclaimer that all the terrible moms I write about are nothing like her.
My mom is awesome. No doubt about it.
This love story has history and memories on every single page. I sure hope you enjoy my first love as much as I enjoyed sharing him with you.
(Yes, I’m going to email Ry—my Cable—and tell him I wrote a book loosely based on him. He already knows he’s the physical inspiration for Rule. I doubt he’ll be surprised.