Mia essentially arrived in Forman 's mind fully formed. 'I wanted to explore the choice-whether or not you would choose, if you could choose, and that was the only way I could tell the story. 'It wasn 't that I had any interest in exploring a coma or exploring the out of body experience, ' Forman said. In her story, Mia took the place of the little boy, realizing that her family is gone while her body lies in a coma but her mind is fully alive, outside of her physical self. 'The only way that she would be in this position to contemplate her choice would be out of body, ' Forman said.

In the story, a car accident kills Mia 's parents and brother, and she must decide whether she 'll die and join her family, or live on in a difficult and unpredictable future. This character eventually blossomed into Mia Hall, the protagonist of If I Stay. And I knew she was going to answer this question as it pertained to her.

'She had dark hair and dark eyes and she played the cello, which was also kind of a shock. 'Then I woke up one morning, seven years after the accident, and there was this character in my head, ' she said. At the time of the incident, she wasn 't even a novelist. It followed her around for seven years, but she never considered writing about it. 'Did he have some way of knowing and did he choose to go with them? ' 'I was really close to this little boy and I always wondered if he knew what had happened to his family, ' she said. 'įorman said the event tormented her for a while. When we got the news that they had all died, we learned that one of the little boys had lived longer and been medevaced to a trauma center. 'It was a family of four and they were all killed. 'About 14 years ago, we lost friends of ours in a car crash, much like the one Mia and her family are in, ' she explained. The idea was born from a tragic incident. 'What would you do if you knew that something catastrophic happened to your family? And you, yourself, were in this pre-state, aware of what happened to them? ' 'There had been this question spinning around in my head, ' Forman explained. Stay tuned for more from Gayle Forman later in the week! In a recent interview, we spoke with Forman about the inspiration behind If I Stay.

The book was made into a film of the same name, which releases on DVD and Blu-ray today. Gayle Forman is the author of If I Stay, a novel that tells the story of a teen named Mia and choice between life or death after an accident that kills the rest of her family.

If i stay forman