After You

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, mental health conditions, death, sexual harassment and violence, graphic violence, substance use, and death by medically assisted suicide.

Louisa Clark is the main character and first-person narrator of the novel. Her distinct experience and means of processing the world thus guides the narrative from beginning to end. The Complicated Process of Grieving and Healing Louisa experiences from Will Traynor’s death also dictates the novel’s overarching plot line and its explorations of loss, transformation, and renewal.

Louisa is a self-possessed individual whose life has changed since her former lover and employer Will died 18 months prior. Because Louisa was Will’s caretaker, she feels guilty for his death by assisted suicide. She did everything in her power to remind Will of life’s value, but even her love wasn’t enough to convince him to stay alive. At the novel’s start, Louisa is thus reeling. She is living alone in a London apartment she secured with the money Will left her, but she’s working a job she hates (bartending at an airport bar), isn’t in communication with her family (who are all back in her Stortfold hometown), and doesn’t have friends outside of Nathan (Will’s former physiotherapist who lives in New York).