What the two stories share in their different contexts is a fascination with how relationships begin and build over time.
As a journalist, Sue Halpern specializes in technology and politics. In her frequent assignments for the New York Times, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, Halpern has covered events and phenomena that many people find weirder than fiction: Silicon Valley, corporate intrusions into our privacy, cyber weapons and the neurological impacts of online immersion.
But she has hasn’t abandoned imaginative writing. Her third novel, What We Leave Behind, scrutinizes not the big superstructures of modern existence but family life and the interior experience of personal crisis.
Halpern, who received her doctorate in political theory from Oxford University, has been a Rhodes Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow. She is scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and lives in Ripton with her husband, the writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben.
Halpern is the author of four nonfiction books, including the best-selling human-and-labradoodle memoir A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home (2013) and Four Wings and a Prayer (2001), about monarch butterflies, which was adapted into a documentary film. Her previous novels are Summer Hours at the Robbers Library (2018) and The Book of Hard Things (2003).
What We Leave Behind has an unusual structure, with two almost entirely self-contained sets of characters and plots — either of which, in a simpler novel, would suffice to make a story.
Melody Marcus is a high school student whose adoptive mother, Delia, has been killed by a boulder falling onto a highway. Melody’s sense of being an adopted child is fundamental to her self-perception and her closeness with an also-adopted best friend, Lily; they share a kinship as castaways, abandoned by anonymous birth parents. While she was close to Delia, Melody is sullen and withdrawn with her father, Eddie, who’s been shattered by the loss of his wife and copes with his grief by submerging himself in work instead of parenting.
In a second plotline — not really secondary, since it’s effectively equal in emphasis and duration — Candace Milton is an HR executive in her mid-forties, working in a hyperactive tech firm. She has never married, which she attributes to her own parents’ conjugal nightmare. Candace’s best friend is a gay personal trainer named Paul. Candace and Paul witness a near-drowning, and they help rescue a stranger named Tom, who falls through thin ice while chasing a dog. In the weeks that follow, with the avid encouragement of Paul, Candace warily considers the possibility of romance with the likable Tom.
These parallel plots overlap, though only slightly, through a few encounters between Candace and Melody’s father. Halpern’s alternating storylines are certainly enjoyable to follow. Her characters are well realized and appealing. But does the dual narrative cohere?
The sections told from Melody’s point of view read like young adult fiction. This isn’t necessarily a problem, though the continual references to brand-name products and celebrities can be tiresome; the youth-y slang of Melody and her chums may sound, at times, like how an adult novelist thinks teenagers talk now. But importantly, Halpern shows how her younger characters have only a partial grasp of the longer-term repercussions of what they’re going through. Of course that’s true: Tragedies such as the death of a parent can only be understood in breadth and depth retrospectively. Isn’t this one of the reasons we read novels, which convey us through time?
The Candace sections have more gravitas; this grown-up character’s weariness with her vacuous corporate job and the strain of her largely solitary daily life call forth Halpern’s most graceful and insightful writing.
By the time we reach the novel’s conclusion, which is momentous for Melody and less so for Candace, the connection between their two stories seems more incidental than profound.
And yet all of us, all the time, are living in parallel to one another, only meeting in glancing moments. In the middle of What We Leave Behind, it seems probable that the two plots will become one: Surely Candace will turn out to be Melody’s biological mother, with the inevitability of a Hollywood tearjerker. Yet this isn’t the choice Halpern makes. What Melody learns, due to an accidental discovery by her friend Lily, is stranger and thornier.
What the two stories share in their different contexts (the trials of high school for Melody, the corporate hustle for Candace) is a fascination with how relationships begin and build over time. For both Melody and Candace, present-day friendships help them understand their pasts. We carry what came before in every step we take. In a twist on this novel’s title, the stories of Melody and Candace are testaments to what we never leave behind.
From What We Leave Behind
The original print version of this article was headlined “Parallel Lives | Book review: What We Leave Behind, Sue Halpern”
This article appears in Oct 1-7 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!