The following is a guest post from Karen Rivers that explores the inspiration behind her latest novel, All That Was.

My son is learning about love in school. It’s broken down into categories: platonic love, familial love, fanatic love. He keeps asking me for help. “What does it mean when you have intimacy but no friendship? Which love is which?”

I shrug. “I don’t know, honey. Love is love.” 

I look at his list and it’s all broken down into math. Intimacy plus friendship equals this. Friendship plus respect equals that. 

“I love you,” I tell him. “But love is just love.”

“Mom,” he says. “Thanks a lot. Now I’m going to fail.” 

I don’t want my son to fail. I love him. But explaining love is hard. 

I don’t know love.

I do know love.

When I wrote All That Was, I thought I was writing a love story about Sloane and Soup, and about Soup and Piper, and about the love triangle the three made which was shattered by a death. But the book turned out to not be about romantic love, at least not primarily. It turns out that it is Piper and Sloane’s love story.

In a way, it was also my love story. 

When I was six, I fell in love for the first time. 

I fell in love with a girl with perfect curls in her hair. “All natural,” she told me, but when I stayed the night at her house for the first time, I watched her mother tie her hair into rags so it would curl while she slept. 

“You lied,” I thought, but never said. I took her lie and made it mine.

We were friends, best friends, fiercely, intensely, on and off for most of our childhoods. We loved each other and hated each other. I remember tumbling down a grassy slope at recess, our fists and fingernails lashing into each others’ hair and skin. 

We were eight. The class was divided. Who was right? Who was wrong? Who could question the immutable power of us? 

We were us, until we weren’t.

I see us at 12, in the woods. “Let’s walk across the island,” we said. “Why not?” Our ideas were terrible and we loved them. Even as we got increasingly lost in those woods, we told each other confidently, “We’re not lost. We’ll look for clearings. Once we find the beach, we’ll find our way home.” 

One day when we were 20, something happened. 

Something terrible.

The police were called. In the back of the cruiser, the constable asked my friend, “Are you a student? What do you do? Where do you work?” 

She answered him in a voice I’d never heard before. 

Coy, flirtatious.

She said her name was Karen. She said she went to UBC. She said she worked at a hospital.

But those were my answers.

My name. My school. My job. 

The line between us had forever been blurry but now it was gone. It was at that moment that I knew it wasn’t right. It had gone too far. For her there wasn’t a line between us at all. She held my hand tightly while she spoke. She leaned her head on my shoulder. 

For fourteen years, we had spoken every day and shared everything. 

And then we didn’t.

I wrote All That Was as a way of working it all out, as a way of understanding how lines between straight girls can shift and blur until one day they disappear altogether. There is no one we can be more cruel to than ourselves, after all. But what happens when your best friend is so much a part of you that you can no longer tell the difference? 

All That Was by Karen Rivers

Piper and Sloane were best friends.

They grew up together, from childhood to first love, and in spite of how different they were, their friendship was supposed to last forever. That is, until Piper caught Sloane kissing her boyfriend—and just days later, Piper was found dead, washed ashore on a beach.

Sloane was torn with grief and guilt. How do you make amends for hurting someone you love if that person is no longer around? And how can you ever move on and love again? Told from alternating perspectives, this is a story about the complexity of friendships, forgiveness, and growing up.

Start reading now.