I'll Stay by Karen Day

Full Disclosure: Karen Day is a dear friend and I read several versions of this novel before publication.

Karen Day‘s compelling and psychologically nuanced novel explores the complex dynamic of two college friends Lee Sumner and Clare Michaels. Clare and Lee, along with their sorority sisters Sara and Ducky, travel from Indiana University to Florida for their spring break. Due to adolescent groupthink and poor decision-making, they change their plans to include a stay in Daytona Beach. They arrive in the middle of the night at the dingy, dilapidated rented home of one of Sara’s childhood friends where a party is in progress. With no room to sleep, Lee and Clare stay a few blocks away with a friend of the friend and a horrific event happens. Lee sacrifices herself to let Clare escape.

Set in the 1980’s, this novel takes place decades before the #MeToo Movement and the crime goes unreported. The girls head back to their sorority and each deal differently with the aftermath of the experience. Lee’s state of shock diminishes her drive to become a documentary filmmaker and she sputters through a series of menial jobs and ramshackle rentals. Clare’s guilt about her split-second decision to jump out the window and escape at Lee’s direction undermines her self-identity as a reliable caretaker. Exacerbating Clare’s guilt is her decision not to tell anyone that Lee had said, “Let her go, I’ll Stay.” Clare feels ashamed. “But how could they forgive me when they didn’t even know what I had done.”

Clare and Lee had met during the first exciting year of college. While Lee is intellectually gifted, her family offers Lee few emotional or financial resources. Lee is thrilled to meet Clare whose empathy and care comforts her. Clare is entranced by Lee’s enthusiasm and curiosity and feels rewarded for being a good listener. However, over the course of college, Clare feels weighted down by the drama of Lee’s dysfunctional family and Lee’s related need for Clare’s reassurance and support. Clare says, “….I felt her intensity sucking in the life out of everything.” But in fact, Clare’s resentment derives more from a lifetime of taking care of her mother - the famous author of the bestseller, Listen, Before You Go. Clare feels confused about whether or not Phoebe, the protagonist in her mother’s novel, is based on her or not. Had Clare’s mother prescribed who she should be and how should act? No wonder Clare sometimes feels hollow.

Simultaneously, Lee has transferred her fear of emotional abandonment onto Clare. After the Florida trip, college graduation and marriage to her college boyfriend, Clare, too, feels stuck in her own life. Her guilt about leaving Lee at that dreary house in Florida compels her to routinely visit Lee in New York City and call her every day.

One of the indicators of a successful novel is if the reader witnesses change, growth and connection to the characters. Karen Day’s I’ll Stay achieves this goal. Though the opening chapters are gripping and set the novel’s tone, the later chapters equally captivated me. That is where Day unravels the family dynamics and psychological interiors of both Clare and Lee and their transference and countertransference with one another. Day shows her readers the powerful unconscious forces inside Lee and Clare that shaped the choices they made before and after the Florida trip. She captures the ways in which people seek to replace and replicate unhealthy and healthy family dynamics in friendships and relationships especially in early adulthood. With a light touch, Day shows the benefits of working with a therapist to unpack and understand feelings and experiences especially if trauma is involved.

At the novel’s end, Clare and Lee are ten years out of college and have begun to examine not only what happened on that fateful night in Florida but also the factors that had been propelling them in their pre-college lives. It seems that Clare and Lee will be able to move on with their lives with greater understanding, insight, and hope for their futures. Though they will each carry this trauma with them, it will not define who they are.