Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut novel, Without You Here, confronts the complexities of suicide with compassionate attention. In suicide’s aftermath, angels and ghosts converge. Those left behind must reconcile love with loss as they grieve what cannot be fully understood. Everything is haunted. 

Precocious and sensitive, Noreen grows up in the shadow of her beloved aunt Nonie’s death. The tragedy of Noreen’s namesake becomes an emotional lodestar, a ruler against which everything else is measured:

If she hadn’t died, Noreen might have grown away from her, might have matured to a point where Nonie even seemed silly, or as reckless as the rest of the family insists she was. As it is, Noreen’s Nonie never has to exist as anything but that magical, whimsical person who loved her best in the world. Even if she also hurt her most.

How to come to terms with such a sudden and total abandonment? A nagging sense of lack hounds Noreen into adulthood, through her marriage and the birth of her daughter. Over nineteen years, Noreen is visited by Nonie’s ghost-angel, who arrives in the form of intrusive thoughts, panic episodes, and the unshakeable pull-push dynamic of craving a connection she knows must eventually collapse. Viewed in the light of Noreen’s early loss, a warm embrace may be a chokehold; a train hurtling towards darkness, a signal of freedom. Is her marriage a safety net or an elaborate cage? The emotional disorientation engendered by Nonie’s absence becomes its own character, rendered in vivid and striking detail:

The jitters, the shivers, the shudders are a secret Noreen keeps for herself. They come with sparkling lights behind her eyelids, her heart beating like a hummingbird, the smell of rust. The feel of Nonie’s presence shimmering in the air beside her. It’s impossible to separate the nervous tremors from the physical pull of connection. 

Hesler masterfully delineates the nuances of relationships in all their messy ambiguity. Though it is painful to witness the family’s distant treatment of a young, grief-stricken Noreen, readers sense the broader context: this is a family grappling imperfectly with tragedy. They are doing their best despite generational trauma, deeply rooted and unspeakable heartbreak. They fear what they can’t comprehend—including, tragically, their own daughters. 

Noreen and Nonie represent women who do not fit the mold cut out for them. They might be mentally ill, “wired differently,” or just too sensitive. The labels and diagnoses aren’t important. What is salient is the sense that they would be better off if they were tolerated and understood through all their bad days, their contradictions and complexities, their failures to conform. Instead, they are at odds with a world that refuses to make space for them. 

Noreen’s mother gets it. She explains that her late sister, Nonie, was “ruined by the roughness of the world.” Noreen inherits her aunt’s legacy of haunting words and heavy expectations:

When her mother calls her Nonie by mistake, her face freeze-frames, hoping Noreen hasn’t noticed or at least that she won’t take a deeper meaning from the slip, but Noreen always notices, and that deeper meaning has hung between them like a wraith since Nonie died. Will you become her?

Her family’s well-intentioned attempts to cope with their trauma—shadowy admonitions, thinly veiled warnings, unhelpful cliches—take on a spectral nature. Absence becomes a presence in its own right. 

Noreen struggles to forge her own path, one not defined solely by Nonie’s absence, or by what she should not become. This struggle against annihilation is reflected in the structure of the novel. The novel jumps through time, the point of view shifting between Nonie and Noreen, underscoring the linked fate of the two characters. Narrative time, tracked by chapter headings, is measured against the date of Nonie’s suicide. Hesler’s structure mirrors her central consideration: how a traumatic event informs the present moment.

Without You Here explores how to live with duality—how to move forward when the angels are ghosts and the ghosts are angels. In a world where “[j]oy doesn’t cancel grief as much as complicate it,” this novel chronicles its central characters’ lives with empathy and tenderness. By allowing space for nuance, both terrible and beautiful, Hesler reminds readers of the possibility for honest acceptance—angels, ghosts, and all. 

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Jody Hobbs Hesler lives, writes, and teaches in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She is the author of What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press, 2023). Her words also appear in Necessary Fiction, Gargoyle, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Atticus Review, Writer’s Digest, Electric Literature, CRAFT, Arts & Letters, and many other journals. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia; writes and copy edits for Virginia Wine & Country Life and Charlottesville Family Magazine; and serves as assistant fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review.

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Brittany Micka-Foos is the author of the poetry chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her short story collection It’s No Fun Anymore is forthcoming from Apprentice House in 2025. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Witness, NonBinary Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. Read more at her website.