What I Had Before I Had You

<p><strong>A woman must face the truth about her past in this luminous evocative novel of parents and children guilt and forgiveness memory and magical thinking.</strong></p><p>Olivia Reed was fifteen when she left her hometown of Ocean Vista on the coast of New Jersey. Two decades later divorced and unstrung she returns with her teenage daughter Carrie and nine-year-old son Daniel recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Distracted by thoughts of the past Olivia fails to notice when Daniel disappears from her side. Her frantic search for him sparks memories of the summer of 1987 when she exploded out of the cocoon of her mother's fierce smothering love and into a sudden full-throttle adolescence complete with dangerous new friends first love and a rebellion so intense that it utterly recharted the course of her life.</p><p>Olivia's mother Myla was a practicing psychic whose powers waxed and waned along with her mercurial moods. Myla raised Olivia to be a guarded child and also to believe in the ever-present infant ghosts of her twin sisters whom Myla took care of as if they were alive--diapers baby food an empty nursery kept like a shrine. At fifteen Olivia saw her sisters for the first time not as ghostly infants but as teenagers on the beach. But when Myla denied her vision Olivia set out to learn the truth--a journey that led to shattering discoveries about herself and her family.</p><p>Sarah Cornwell seamlessly weaves together the past and the present in this riveting debut novel as she examines the relationships between mothers and daughters and the powerful forces of loss family history and magical thinking.</p>