Just One Year Blog Tour with Gayle Forman!

Welcome to the Just One Year blog tour! After spending an amazing day and night together in Paris, Just One Year is Willem’s story, picking up where Allyson’s journey in Just One Day ended. In honor of the world-spanning romance, we asked author Gayle Forman to share her memories for 12 different cities, each of which is featured in either Just One Day or Just One Year (or both!). Follow along on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout September as Gayle tells her story in anticipation of the October release of Just One Year!

Here's Gayle!

Stratford-upon-Avon

I’ve been to Stratford-upon-Avon exactly once in my life. I was sixteen and at the start of my junior year abroad in England. The week before the entire class of exchange students were to settle in with our respective host families, we had a week of orientation, staying in Nottingham and taking daytrips to touristy places. (Sound a little familiar?)

In Stratford, we of course saw the Royal Shakespeare Company put on a play. Not Hamlet, though. We saw The Winter’s Tale, starring a young (and hot) Jeremy Irons as Leontes. After the play, there was a discussion with the actors and someone asked Jeremy whether he preferred acting in a large venue, or in a smaller, more intimate, theater in the round, which was where the Q&A was taking place. He gave an explanation about how each had its benefits, but then to point out the plusses of the smaller space, he right turned to me and looked me dead in the eye and in his sonorous voice declared: “You have brown eyes.” As I melted into a puddle, he explained: “That is what I like performing in this theater.”

It’s funny how small moments like this, they lodge in your brain, and when you’re a novelist, they emerge in the strangest of ways decades later. Me and Jer, we had a moment—okay, I had a moment. But I remembered it. And twenty-five years later, I gave Allyson a different kind of moment with a different actor in Stratford-upon-Avon. And that moment became a book, a book with quite a bit of Shakespeare in it. Willem would call that one of those accidents of life. I suspect Jeremy might, too.

More about Just One Day:

After spending an amazing day and night together in Paris, Just One Year is Willem's story, picking up where Just One Day ended. His story of their year of quiet longing and near misses is a perfect counterpoint to Allyson's own as Willem undergoes a transformative journey, questioning his path, finding love, and ultimately, redefining himself.

Read my review here.

More about Gayle:

Gayle Forman (www.gayleforman.com) is an award-winning, international bestselling author and journalist whose articles have appeared in numerous publications. She is the author of the companion title Just One Day, as well as New York Times bestsellers If I Stay and Where She Went, and Sisters in Sanity (HarperTeen). Follow Gayle on Twitter @gayleforman.

Follow the Just One Year blog tour to see all of Gayle’s posts!

9/2: I Am A Reader, Not A Writer
9/4: The Compulsive Reader
9/6: Alice Marvels
9/9: Yareads
9/11: The Flyleaf Review
9/13: The Young Folks
9/16: The Story Siren
9/18: Cuddlebuggery
9/20: Books With Bite
9/23: Forever Young Adult
9/25: Once Upon a Twilight
9/27: Me, My Shelf, and I