Once upon a time, I came across this magnificent cover for a soon-to-be-published book. I read the blurb.

“… the deaths of everyone she has ever loved … refusing to let anyone in for fear of losing them … until she meets Luke …”

It sounded intense. It sounded different from everything I’ve read so far. I was hooked. The author, Natalie Ward, then very kindly allowed me to read it before its release date and, as they say, the rest is history.

I. LOVED. THIS. BOOK. I loved everything about it. It carries a beautiful message of hope and love in the midst of such unthinkable sadness – it’s a story that will touch your heart and make you appreciate what you have just a little bit more.

Read my review HERE …

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The Story

When Ash loses her boyfriend, she is consumed by grief, loneliness and an overwhelming sense of guilt for her role in not only his death, but the deaths of everyone she has ever loved. Refusing to let anyone in for fear of losing them too, she becomes withdrawn, spending her days reliving the nightmares from her past.

Until she meets Luke.

Initially scared by his intensity and interest in her, Ash tries to push him away. But as Luke slowly starts to chip away at the walls she’s built, Ash finds herself doing the one thing she swore she’d never do again – falling in love.

When the familiar feelings Ash had hoped were long buried with her past begin to resurface, she is forced to ask herself if falling in love again is really worth the risk.

 

The Interview

NATASHA | Thank you so much, Natalie, for this interview! After all the correspondence we’ve exchanged before and after I read your AMAZING book, I feel like I know you a little bit. Let me start by saying this – WOW! I knew from the title and cover of the book this story wasn’t going to be chick-lit but, damn girl, you took my poor heart on a roller-coaster ride and I never got the snapshot to prove it! … If I’m not mistaken, this is your first (published) book. Was writing always part of the “master plan” or did it happen by accident?

NATALIE | Oh sorry about that, but I am really glad you enjoyed the book so much!! Yes, it’s definitely my first published book! It’s also the first piece of writing I have seriously committed to and actually finished! I have a heap of crazy ideas swirling around in my head and this is probably the main reason I don’t get a lot of sleep at night, but writing them down seemed like a good way of getting them out. Starting a story was never a problem, it’s the finishing part I struggled with. Lots of “just finish something” being thrown at me helped me to finally accomplish that. Of course when I actually started writing I Love You to Death with a goal to finishing it, then the characters, the plot, the deaths (!!), they all kept waking me up instead. It’s safe to say that book gave me a lot of sleep deprivation.

On the flip side, I have always been a huge reader too, and have been known to go without sleep because I want to finish a book. I get very invested in stories and the characters, probably too invested, so when my own started appearing in my head, it felt like a natural progression to try and write about them. I guess I’ve always liked to write and most of friends can tell you about the long-winded emails I used to send when me and hubby lived in the US. But writing fiction, for the most part, I kept that a secret from everyone, pretty much because I assumed it wasn’t going to go anywhere. It took me a really long time to show this story to people.

NATASHA | I applaud you for ‘taking the plunge’! I can’t even imagine what it would be like being woken up by parts of this story just coming to you in the middle of the night. I would have cried like a baby! And then I would have devoured my body weight in chocolate. Taking about hot messes, Ash is a very sad young woman and she has every right to be. Her story is a heavy one to read, let alone to write. My first thought was to put myself in her shoes, imagine losing what she lost and think how I would have coped afterwards. Let me tell you, it made me respect her choices even more. Was it hard writing those snippets from her past?

NATALIE | Thanks, it certainly taught me a lot about myself and overcoming my own fears! Being woken up was interesting….for a long time I had no idea how to actually end the story. I knew there was one thing that was definitely not going to happen, but apart from that I had no idea. So when that part finally woke me at 3am it was almost a relief, even if in the end it was the obvious path to take. But all the deaths, the things Ash had to go through, thinking about those, yeah it wasn’t always “a happy place” and writing about all of that was a strange process. There were times I surprised myself with tears as I typed the words out. But it was strange too, because the book never came to me in chronological order. The very first thing was Sam’s letter and I literally wrote it down as it appears in the book and then came their first meeting, at a funeral. That got me thinking about death and the five stages of grief and what it would be like to go through that over and over again and think you were responsible for it all. Then I had to come up with all the people she could lose and how they would die. That was tough, making it happen in ways that could be interpreted differently depending on who witnessed it – Ash or someone else. I’d say the most difficult parts to write were the stories of her Grandparents (and I still don’t know why that is) and pretty much all of chapter 5 – her interaction with Liam, the story of her Dad dying and the fight with Sam. I hated what was happening to Ash, I wanted her in a happy place too!

But then of course along came Luke and he changed EVERYTHING! All of a sudden I was writing about him and Ash and their relationship and all the wonderful stages of love and let me tell you, that was easy! That fell on to the page and became the first part of the story I finished. It even got to the point that I had to tell Luke to shut up just so I could go back and finish the stories of Sam and her past. He didn’t like that and made me write a lot of the book from his POV too, which is still sitting on my computer.

NATASHA | What do you think made Ash move forward and not want to just give up on life, happiness, love?

NATALIE | Something had to change for her because there was no way she could continue to live like that, who could!? Luke being the way he was, choosing to live his life how he wanted, fighting for what he believed in, possibly being a little stubborn about it all, was a huge part of her realising she could also try this. I think in the past she had always just accepted and allowed everything that had happened to her, but meeting him showed her that there were other ways to live and that it was always worth fighting for. When she finally realised that, she grew a lot stronger. It also let her step in and finally make a choice about what was going to happen. Plus, in her past she had been surrounded by so many amazing people, who all loved her unconditionally. She never wanted to give that up, she only thought she had to.

NATASHA | Let’s go back to… LUKE. Ahem, I know you mentioned to me once that he wasn’t based on a real-life person (I still don’t believe you, just so you know, and I believe you are selfishly keeping us apart!). He is just as complex a character as Ash is. Tell us more about Luke and what he represents in the story.

NATALIE | Ah Luke, yes I really do wish he was a real life person, although I know I’d be fighting a few people for him! There were definitely several parts to Luke, the most obvious one being that he was the change that was going to drive Asha to start living again. Making him a chef was kind of a cheeky way of doing that, because he feeds her – with cupcakes, the lunches, the breakfast menu etc. – I wanted it to be as though he was nourishing her, literally bringing her back to life. But I also wanted him to have a reason for doing this, I wanted him to recognise all the pain he saw in Ash, which is why he got the crappy family background, it drove his personality. At the same time, Luke needed to be someone Asha could feel comfortable with and so something I tried to do, although I didn’t want to make it too obvious, was have Luke have something in common with each of the people Ash had lost from her life. If you look for it, when you read the story of a death in a particular chapter and relate it to what is happening with Luke in the present, you’ll see both stories have commonalities. He essentially becomes the epitome of everyone Ash has lost, all of their good traits, but especially the ones that related to her – the protecting her, the standing up for her, someone for her to talk to, etc etc. By the end, Ash herself even gets one of his traits and that’s the final step in her growth/change. Plus I mean come on, he’s a sexy freaking rock star… there had to be something good in it for her!

NATASHA | Music is a huge component of this story. Each chapter starts with a small playlist. If you know the songs in there, you can pretty much guess the tone of the chapter to come. Let me first thank you now, in case I forget in the future, for all the 30 Seconds to Mars songs and hence visuals of Jared Leto. Thank you! … Why was music so important in this story? Why did you decide to make it an almost-character of the story itself?

NATALIE | The music most definitely is an important part of the story! In fact the whole reason Luke came to life, is because of music. It was all around the time of Adele and Christina Perri and their amazing power ballads about having your heart ripped out by some guy. A friend of mine was saying how it’s a shame no songs sung by men are like that. I begged to differ and set about making her a “mixed tape” to prove it. Oh boy….in walks Luke! Like I said, that boy is stubborn and when he came along with the music he pretty much dictated what was going to happen in his part of the story – in fact one of his songs woke me up one night! Then I just thought, why not include a playlist for each chapter. I listen to so much music when I write anyway and the music is a huge part of the story, being an escape for Ash and a form of expression for Luke as well as a big part of how and why they connected, that giving each chapter a set of songs to set the tone could actually work. And yes, both the title and the lyrics to that song tell you so much about what is to come, although I will say, they only relate to the present and what is going on with Ash and Luke. So I guess in the end, by doing that, it just naturally became its own character in the story and to be honest, I kinda liked that after it helped me out so much.

And speaking of 30 Seconds to Mars and Jared Leto – you’re welcome! I may as well admit it now, I have a HUGE crush on them, both the band and their gorgeous lead singer. Man, the number of times I listened to Alibi as I was writing certain scenes in Chapter 10…..ahhh, that man has a voice that causes your knickers to spontaneously fall off, and look, I may as well just keep going and say he is exactly how I imagine Luke to sound….a voice like liquid sex…..

NATASHA | I even say his name “L-eu-k” in my head to make it sound even sexier (just picture Meg Ryan in French Kiss trying to pronounce ‘Luc’ in French) … This is one of those books that I think people shouldn’t know in advance whether it has a HEA or not. I felt that not knowing that enhanced the story for me. How many endings did you initially have in mind and why did you choose the one that ended up in the book?

NATALIE | Ha ha – I like that! He is a sexy man, definitely fun to have inside my head. Yeah the ending….like I said, initially I didn’t know how to end it, I just knew for certain there was the one thing I definitely wouldn’t do. When I finally worked out how to end it, then it became a matter of doing it in a way that wasn’t too shocking and would turn readers off, but at the same time wasn’t too nicely tied up in a bow. In the end I had three different endings. The first was too much, the second was too neat and the third is the one that’s in the book. I hope it’s the right one, but based on what early readers have said, I think so and I’m happy with it. Either way, what I definitely wanted to do was create tension in the journey to the ending, so you were never really sure about what had happened to Sam and what was going to happen to Luke or Ash.

NATASHA | About Sam, I have to ask one tiny detail that has been bugging me ever since I read this book and I promise I am not spoiling the story for anyone as this is something that happens very early on in the book and you’ve already mentioned it before – How did Sam, Ash’s previous boyfriend, know to write that letter for her if he never believed her?

NATALIE | Yeah, it’s true, Sam didn’t believe her, he never did and you learn that very early on in the book, the first few pages. But he also knew how Ash felt about it all, how she honestly believed she thought this was all because of her and because he loved her as much as he did, he wanted to do something in the event that he did die. So he wrote her a letter, leaving it where he knew she’d find it if the inevitable happened and also knowing it was a tiny little thing he could do to make her feel better if he was in fact gone. But no, he never believed her, he simply loved her.

NATASHA | What are you plans for the future as an author? What are you currently writing? Is there going to be a sequel? Say yes! (Does Luke have a single brother? SAY YES!)

NATALIE | Ultimately I’d love to keep writing and to be honest, it feels like I have to at times, I just have to get the stuff out. My initial thought for the next book was more of a companion novel, not strictly a sequel as it would probably cover some of the same timeline and feature two side characters from this book – Jared and Mia. But a few people have already asked me about telling Luke’s story and as I already have a heap of stuff written on him, that’s a tempting idea too!

NATASHA | One last question, book junkie to book junkie, what are some of your favourite books?

NATALIE | Oh definite fellow book junkie! There are so many fantastic authors out there and I read loads of different stuff, but to name a couple of books that have really resonated with me would be:

• Before I Die by Jenny Downham – un-put-downable, will absolutely break your heart.
• Come Back to Me by Sara Foster – read it in a day, ending affected me so badly I actually wrote to Sara begging her to change it! We’ve since become friends!
• Slammed and Point of Retreat by Colleen Hoover – quite honestly some of the most beautifully written books out there, the slam poetry is AMAZING!
• The Fifty Shades Trilogy by EL James – because it’s Fifty and it’s frikkin HOT!
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – because it’s dark, it’s naughty and it’s fantastically disturbing!
• What Remains by Denise Leith
• The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson – two of the most amazing pieces of writing I’ve ever read.

Of course there are a heap more… I could go on and on and on.

NATASHA | THANK YOU, Natalie, I hope everyone LOVES this book as much as I did. It is so rare to come across such a different story and such an original ‘voice’. I enjoyed every moment of this incredibly touching tale and I hope to read many more from you in the future. Thank you for allowing me to be one of your first readers. ♥

NATALIE | THANK YOU Natasha for loving it as much as you did! It kinda scared me at first, putting it out there because it was so different, not your main stream “love story” – but it was in my head begging to be told, so I just went for it. I’m glad it’s found an audience! x

The Giveaway 

To celebrate the release of I Love You to Death on September 30, 2012, we are giving away ONE of …

• Two Kindle e-copies of I Love You to Death by Natalie Ward
• One signed paperback of I Love You to Death by Natalie Ward

This giveaway is now closed.

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