After You

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental health conditions, death, death by medically assisted suicide, and sexual content.

After You picks up where its prequel Me Before You ends, thus tracing how Louisa Clark processes and heals from Will Traynor’s death. Because Louisa is the novel’s main character and first-person narrator, Moyes contextualizes its explorations of grief and healing within Louisa’s distinct experience. While 18 months have passed since Will’s passing, Louisa still feels unmoored by her sorrow at the novel’s start. She feels that Will “smashed up” her old life “into little pieces” and left her alone to figure out what “to do with what’s left” (7). Without Will, Louisa has lost not only the man she loved but also her sense of meaning, purpose, grounding, and identity. Death, the novel therefore underscores, can disrupt the individual’s entire sense of reality and self.

For Louisa, life without Will has effectively trapped her in an interstice between the past and the present. She no longer dresses the way she did (now clad in drab jeans and t-shirts instead of her usual flamboyant outfits); she is working a dead-end job (now tending bar instead of pursuing her caretaking passion); she is disconnected from her family (now living on her own in a London flat and barely communicating with her parents and sister in her hometown).