What does love do to our imaginations? That was the question that preoccupied me for years as I was writing Open, Heaven. The other question was, what happens when we love someone who might not love us back?
Open, Heaven is narrated by James, who is looking back in time to one year, 2002, when he was fifteen, and when he fell in love. During that year, a series of events were set in motion that reverberated through his life, and changed its course.
I wanted to put the reader inside James’s head, because I think so much of love takes place in our heads. Our minds are re-wired by it. I’ve lost track of the number of friends who have told me about their first experience of falling in love, more often than not with a friend in school, or at college, or at work. And what followed was not usually a typical story of romance, but a story of sweet, tortuous uncertainty. And often, it was because what began as friendship seemed to simmer on the edge of love. Our friends hug us, think of us, lie close to us on the sofa watching TV, touch us. How can we know, for sure, what they are thinking?
We become codebreakers. Does the other person feel the same way? What did they mean when they touched my hand like that? Was it an accident, or a sign? And what about the way they phrased that text message – was there some hidden meaning in it?
Sometimes we are utterly convinced that that someone loves us back; other times we are completely embarrassed at our own capacity for self-deception. Love makes us all writers of fiction. But, then again, what is love if not a sort of dream that we fall into, a lovely untethering from reality? How many times have we met someone and, despite ourselves, imagined the way our life would change with them, pictured the house we might live in, the places we might go, the perfect bliss and simplicity of a romance?
Open, Heaven is a love story, but it’s a complicated one. I wanted to write a novel where all of love’s many forms – the love between friends, the love between members of a family, the love between lovers – overlapped and confused each other. Love also comes with responsibilities. There is a sort of terror in this, and also a sort of euphoria. It is true that love makes a fool of us, often more than once, but sometimes it is also the key to a new world.
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