My Loneliness is Killing Me, a guest post by Amelia Diane Coombs

“Unlike many other illnesses, what I find profoundly empowering about addressing loneliness is that the ultimate solution to loneliness lies in each of us. We can be the medicine that each other needs. We can be the solution other people crave. We are all doctors and we are all healers.” —Vivek H. Murthy, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World

As a teenager, and even as a young adult, I lost countless friends due to my mental health struggles. Depression and anxiety aren’t exactly the most conductive combination for friendship. Eloise, the main character in my upcoming YA novel, All Alone With You, struggles similarly. She’s a self-proclaimed loner with social anxiety and depression, and she blames herself (and her mental health) for why all of her previous friendships have fallen apart. At the start of the book, Eloise is convinced that her loneliness is a choice. She’s a loner—not lonely. But when she’s forced to volunteer at LifeCare, a nonprofit that pairs volunteers with the elderly, Eloise’s worldview is challenged by Marianne, the dynamic former frontwoman to whom she’s assigned, and her chronically positive volunteer partner, Austin. Unlike Eloise, it took me another decade and a global pandemic to challenge my own world view.

When I picked up Vivek H. Murthy’s Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World in April of 2020, I was intrigued, but deeply skeptical. Murthy’s book was all about how socialization was healing, how people needed people, and how loneliness could negatively impact your health. Yeah, right, I thought, as I hit Play on my audiobook. At the time, I still considered myself a loner, a title I proudly claimed in middle school and had represented ever since. Because being a loner was a choice. Being lonely was pathetic. And I did not want to be pathetic. I fully embraced the “breaking up with you before you break up with me” mentality, but for friendship. For nearly thirty years of my life, I would’ve gladly died on the hill of not needing friends. But then I read Murthy’s book and wondered, in horror: wait a second, have I actually been lonely this entire time? Not a loner?

Murthy, who is the US Surgeon General, believes that loneliness is an illness—an invisible epidemic—and there’s a frightening amount of data to back up his concerns. While I read Together, I started worrying about my own lack-of-a-social life and its consequences for the first time in my life, but strangely, an idea began to take root. Murthy talked in length about how the elderly are the most vulnerable to the ill health effects that loneliness can cause, especially in America where many elderly live in care homes, with little to no interaction with family or friends. When Murthy mentioned that certain programs exist to socialize the elderly, I wondered what might happen if a girl who is hell-bent on maintaining her loner status is forced to socialize with an elderly woman, and what might happen to both of their physical and mental health as a result of their connection. That “what if” lead to the very first draft of what would eventually become All Alone With You.

All Alone With You was both my favorite book to write and the most difficult. When I first drafted the book, way back in 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was still grappling with my own loneliness and the vulnerability of accepting that people need people. That I needed people. While I had my amazing spouse and our equally amazing cat, I didn’t have many friends. I’d moved to Seattle from Northern California mere months before the pandemic, and I knew virtually no one in the city. In a way, I almost felt fraudulent, writing about the power of socialization—which I’d begrudgingly begun to believe in as the pandemic wore on—when I myself was deeply lonely. As much as I loved the book, I struggled with it, and shoved it into the virtual drawer for over a year.

When my publisher decided that All Alone With You would be the last book in my contract, I returned to Eloise, Austin, and Marianne with trepidation. Despite the time away from the book, I still loved it, but I was worried I couldn’t make it… work. But as I dove into revisions, I approached Eloise’s story with experience, not aspiration. In the year since I’d drafted the initial manuscript, I’d made several new friends. I had, unintentionally, gone on to experience the very situation I’d been writing about. Not befriending a snarky older woman (although that would’ve been awesome) but finding friends who appreciated me as I was. Maybe it’s because of my kinship with Eloise, and how I shed my loner status as she shed hers, but All Alone With You will always hold a special place in my heart as an author, and I’m so excited for readers to get to know Eloise, Marianne, and Austin this July.

Meet the author

Amelia Diane Coombs is the author of Keep My Heart in San Francisco; Between You, Me, and the Honeybees; Exactly Where You Need to Be; and All Alone With You. She’s a Northern California transplant living in Seattle, Washington, with her spouse and their Siberian cat. When she isn’t writing or reading, Amelia spends her time playing video and tabletop games, road-tripping, and hiking the Pacific Northwest.

Links:

Book purchase link
Author Website

Instagram: @sincerely_amelia

About All Alone with You

HBO Max’s Hacks gets a romantic twist in the vein of Jenn Bennett in this swoon-worthy novel about a standoffish teen girl whose loner status gets challenged by a dynamic elderly woman and a perpetually cheerful boy.

Eloise Deane is the worst and doesn’t care who knows it. She’s grumpy, prefers to be alone, and is just slogging through senior year with one goal: get accepted to USC and move to California. So when her guidance counselor drops the bombshell that to score a scholarship she’ll desperately need, her applications require volunteer hours, Eloise is up for the challenge. Until she’s paired with LifeCare, a volunteer agency that offers social support to lonely seniors through phone calls and visits. Basically, it’s a total nightmare for Eloise’s anxiety.

Eloise realizes she’s made a huge mistake—especially when she’s paired with Austin, the fellow volunteer who’s the sunshine to her cloudy day. But as Eloise and Austin work together to keep Marianne Landis—the mysterious former frontwoman of the 1970s band the Laundromats—company, something strange happens. She actually…likes Marianne and Austin? Eloise isn’t sure what to do with that, especially when her feelings toward Austin begin to blur into more-than-friends territory.

And when ex-girlfriends, long-buried wounds, and insecurities reappear, Eloise will have a choice to make: go all in with Marianne and Austin or get out before she gets hurt.

ISBN-13: 9781534493575
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date: 07/25/2023
Age Range: 14 – 18 Years

Filed under: Guest Post