Gemma Donoghue

If I Fall Gemma Donoghue

Love is scary.
It changes you. It can come in and out of your life. And one day it can go away forever. Charles is broken. He's already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime. His parents, his friends, and now his boyfriend John to a heart attack at twenty-six.
But Charles has learned how to hide his emotions. How to pretend that everything is okay. How to forget, long enough for his to pick up a razor blade, a knife, or a pair of scissors. Cutting washes the pain away until there is nothing left. He didn't have to think about John, who has left him forever. Or the world, he feels has nothing left to give him. Every cut, every scar hardens Charles's heart.
After a failed suicide attempt Charles was given a choice, psychiatrist treatment in a Group home or the morgue. Charles's pain and fear were so deep that it takes years to break through his walls and unravel each layer of pain and secrets like gauze being peeled away from a wound with the help of Dr. Henry Schultz whom Charles comes to see as a friend, and later something more.
Layer after layer we see why Charles has been so afraid. Why Charles hides the shame of his scars. And his fear of never being loved because of them. and yet the only thing he has, the thing that he cannot stop doing, the thing he keeps close to his heart is his scars.
Donoghue doesn't shy away from exploring the mind of a cutter, the portrayal of self-harm, the physical and emotional act of cutting, and the emotional residue of loss and depression. If I Fall tells a story of people falling in love, falling out of love, being kind and being cruel to themselves and to each other. It's a book about emotional survival, and a piercing desire for its characters to improve themselves to work through the pain of loss, abandonment, and grief. If I Fall is a beautiful, emotional, intense and passionate love story filled with raw emotions and a hero who wears his heart on his sleeve learns how to deal with the scars that his family, his friends, and John have left on his heart.