What I Had Before I Had You

This is a deeply poignant story that captures the joys and sorrows of growing up and learning to let go. Returning home to Ocean Vista on the Jersey Shore with her teenage daughter and her nine-year-old son Daniel, who has bipolar disorder, Olivia must finally embrace the birthright inherited from her mother, Myla, a beautiful and erratic psychic, when Daniel disappears. Olivia Reed was fifteen when she left her hometown of Ocean Vista on the Jersey Shore. 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. 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 with 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. In this novel the author seamlessly weaves together the past and the present, as she examines the relationships between mothers and daughters, and the powerful forces of loss, family history, and magical thinking.--Book jacket.