Me Before You Summary: Jojo Moyes's Story of Love, Choice and a Life Reconsidered
What it is about
Jojo Moyes published Me Before You in 2012. It is set in contemporary England, in the fictional town of Stokebridge, and it begins with a job. Louisa Clark, known as Lou, is hired as a caretaker for Will Traynor. Will was a successful banker and a keen sportsman until a motorcycle hit him two years earlier. He is now tetraplegic. His mother hires Lou in the hope that someone cheerful and ordinary might lift a son who has become depressed and cynical.
It does not go well at first. Will is cold towards Lou, and Lou has no training for any of this. She comes from a small life, lived with her parents and her boyfriend Patrick, and Will has seen most of the world. What changes is slow and unglamorous. She keeps turning up. He starts to talk. She discovers he is cultured and curious rather than simply bitter, and he starts to notice how little she has allowed herself to want.
Then Lou overhears an argument between Will's parents and the shape of the book changes. In six months, Will intends to travel to Dignitas in Switzerland for an assisted suicide. Lou decides to change his mind. She starts organising trips and adventures, small ones and then larger ones, all built around a single argument: that life is still worth having. The novel runs on that clock. Everything Lou plans has a deadline attached to it.
The main characters
Louisa Clark is the heart of the book. She is funny, awkward about her own ambitions and used to making herself small for other people. The job with Will is the first thing she has done that is entirely her own, and the novel tracks how far that one decision carries her.
Will Traynor is harder to warm to, deliberately so. He is intelligent, sharp-tongued and refuses to be handled gently. His past arrives in person when his ex-girlfriend Alicia visits and reveals she is marrying Rupert, Will's former best friend. It is a neat and brutal illustration of the life that carried on without him.
Around them sit Will's parents, who disagree about what their son is entitled to decide, and Patrick, Lou's boyfriend, whose jealousy grows as Lou's working life takes over. Lou's father also matters, quietly, at a point late in the story when she needs pushing.
The themes
Love is the obvious one, and the book handles it unusually. The romance is real, but it is never offered as a cure. Will's position is that loving Lou does not change what he wants, which is the hardest thing the novel asks a reader to sit with.
Freedom runs underneath everything. Will has lost his physical freedom and holds onto the one choice he believes is still his. Lou has full use of her body and almost no freedom at all, bound by habit, family and a boyfriend who assumes she will stay put. The book keeps placing those two kinds of confinement side by side.
Identity follows from that. Will was defined by what he did, and when the doing stopped he struggled to recognise what remained. Lou has never defined herself by anything. Each of them forces the other to answer a question they have been avoiding.
Death is handled directly rather than hinted at. The novel is about assisted dying, and it does not resolve the argument tidily. Readers have disagreed about it ever since, which is part of why it has stayed in conversation.
How it ends (spoilers)
Will asks Lou to come with him to Alicia's wedding, and they begin to fall in love. On a luxurious trip to Mauritius, Will tells her he still intends to die. He says he wants her to live a full life rather than what he calls "half a life" with him. Lou is heartbroken, quits as his caregiver and cuts off contact.
Her father persuades her to go and see him. By then Will has already left for Switzerland. Lou follows and is with him at the end. A few weeks after his death, sitting in his favourite cafe in Paris, she reads a letter he left for her. He has left her enough money to follow her dreams, and the letter urges her to live abundantly.
Why it still matters
The novel began a series and reached a very wide audience. In 2016 it became a film directed by Thea Sharrock in her directorial debut, adapted by Moyes herself, starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin alongside Janet McTeer, Charles Dance and Brendan Coyle. Shot across historic British locations including Pembroke Castle in Wales and Chenies Manor House in Buckinghamshire, it was released on 3 June 2016 and grossed $208.4 million worldwide despite mixed reviews.
It suits readers who want a love story with real stakes and are willing to be argued with. It is a book people finish and then want to discuss, usually loudly.
