Grief and Mourning
The storyline of this novel is built upon a foundation of tragedy. The narrative follows the trek of love, loss, grief, mourning, and acceptance. The premise is that after losing her boyfriend, a woman is unable to move on for what is apparently a socially unacceptable long period of time. In an effort to meet those expectations as well as finally reconcile her love and loss so she can become primed for romantic happiness again, she begins sending texts to her dead boyfriend's cell phone. The novel explores themes related to the difficulty of personal mourning as well as societal expectations of normalcy.
Technological Advancement
The premise of this novel is not exactly original. Even though it is not technically structured as such, this is essentially an epistolary novel. That is a term describing a novel which is told in the form of letters. This story could have been told in the 1800s with the female protagonist writing letters to an address formerly occupied by her boyfriend without knowing somebody new had moved in. The use of text messaging is narratively central to the storytelling structure. Thematically, however, the adoption of the text messaging conceit can also be read as commentary on the modern romance which has overcome former problems related to time and distance between lovers. The distance between life and death is juxtaposed against the geographical distance of a brand-new couple falling in love.
Falling In Love Again
The idealism of each person having a single soulmate somewhere out there is mostly a fantasy if not completely a mass delusion. And yet, it can be very difficult to convince oneself that it can ever be possible to fall in love after losing that supposed soulmate. One of the criticisms of the novel by many readers is that the overwhelming bulk of the story takes place before the text sender and the text receiver ever actually physically meet. Ironically, however, this same criticism is often paired with complaints about the couple falling in love too unrealistically fast. The narrative explores the theme of the emotional difficulty of simply believing that one can ever find love again through this paradox of a story taking too long to have a couple fall instantly in love. Ultimately, it is not really about the couple falling in love, but about the protagonist accepting that there can be such a thing as two soulmates for one person.
