High school senior Corinne Parker has a secret: she’s dating fellow runner Maggie Bailey, the captain of a rival cross-country team. No one knows — but that doesn’t mean that Corinne and Maggie aren’t serious; in fact, they’ve been together for a full year. They’re even trying to coordinate their college plans.
Or they were trying, at least until Maggie died in a car accident. Alone and grieving her secret relationship, Corinne must begin to plan a future that no longer includes Maggie. She’ll have to face senior year, the cross-country season, college recruitment, and managing her divorced parents on her own. Published in 2020, Who I Was with Her is a sapphic YA novel that addresses themes of sexuality, grief, and coming of age as Corinne struggles to figure out who she wants to be now that Maggie is gone.
Right from the book jacket, readers know that Corinne is bi. Her struggle to come to terms with her bisexuality, and then to share this identity with others, is a critical part of the novel, and though the book jacket makes it sound like a done deal (much like the book jacket for Jennifer Dugan’s Some Girls Do), Corinne spends much of the novel tiptoeing around her bisexuality. The label itself conjures shame for her, more so than the fact that she’s loved multiple genders. She’s less afraid of her feelings and more afraid of how other people will react to them: What if her classmates treat her differently? What if she becomes the talk of her small town?
This makes Who I Was with Her primarily a coming-out novel. Much of Corinne’s character arc focuses on her grappling with her sexuality against varying backdrops, such as with her cross-country team; her friend group at lunch, which includes one of Corinne’s (male) exes; her alcoholic mother; her distant but well-meaning father, who wants Corrine to go to the best school possible; and Maggie’s ex Elissa. Readers even get Maggie’s perspective through flashback chapters that show the two girls trying to coordinate their college plans, so that they can be together publicly and without fear.
I was drawn to this title in particular as a former competitive athlete myself. Though my sport was tennis, and though my own coming out was later than Corinne’s, I emphasized with her shame — it was something I felt too when I first realized I was bi. What I feared, like Corinne, was not my bisexuality itself but other people’s reactions: What if people treated me differently? What if I lost friends and family when I came out?
I can see, now, that if people disliked me for being bi, those people probably weren’t the best for me anyway, but at the time, I was too scared to see the truth in that. Like Corinne, I wanted to run away — sometimes literally, as I’d started running 5Ks as an adult, and sometimes figuratively, by keeping myself so busy with grad school and multiple jobs that I didn’t have time to think about my sexuality. I buried it under assignments and emails.
Shame used to be MO — I’ve shamed myself for everything, from big things like my bisexuality to small things like my casual video game habits. Seeing some of this shame reflected in Corinne’s character might’ve been powerful for a younger me. I wish I’d had this book some 15 years ago when I was trying to be perfect so that everyone would love me. It might’ve helped me see that there was a way to honor my truths instead of hiding from them!
In addition to Corinne’s bisexuality, the novel also discusses asexuality as part of another character’s arc (I won’t spoil whose!). This was an authorial move that I really appreciated, being bi and demi myself, the latter of which is on the ace spectrum; other media with both bi and ace representation include Claire Kahn’s novel Let’s Talk About Love (2018) and Isaac in season 2 of the Netflix series Heartstopper (2022).
On a structural level, I really enjoyed the fragmented narrative in Who I Was with Her. The novel moves around in time in clearly marked chapters (using titles such as “Five Days Gone” and “Seven Months Before” to ground the reader); this lets us see both Corinne’s life after Maggie’s death, which is most of the novel, while also giving us powerful glimpses into what their relationship was like. It lets us see who Maggie was and, maybe more importantly, who Corinne was with her — title drop! — and how they navigated the world together. The structure felt as fragmented as Corinne’s life, now that Maggie has been cut out of it; form beautifully matched function, in this way.
Overall, Who I Was with Her tackles huge subjects like grief, coming out, and coming of age and packages them into a nuanced story about a girl coming to terms with her various truths, including the fact that she can’t rely on other people to decide her life for her — if she wants to be happy, then she has to make those decisions for herself. I’ve had this novel in my TBR pile forever, and I’m so glad that I finally read it; I can’t wait to read more from Tyndall in the future.