Laura Dave Finally Used The Ending She Saved

At the height of the pandemic, Laura Dave logged onto a Zoom call with Reese Witherspoon waiting on the other side — the first in a series of career milestones that would unfold over the next five years. The two, alongside Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine producing partner Lauren Neustadter, were there to discuss the adaptation of her No. 1 New York Times bestseller, The Last Thing He Told Me, which would later star Jennifer Garner, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Angourie Rice.

“It was very surreal,” Dave tells Bustle. “The world is shut down, and we’re over Zoom talking about this book that I’ve spent a decade with.”

Season 1 became one of Apple TV+’s most-watched series, and now, the show is returning on Feb. 20, this time based on Dave’s sequel, The First Time I Saw Him. Bringing in new characters, portrayed by Judy Greer and Rita Wilson, Season 2 follows Hannah Hall (Garner) and stepdaughter Bailey (Rice) to France when Hannah’s husband Owen (Coster-Waldau) suddenly reemerges from hiding.

For Dave, who wrote the sequel after Season 1 aired, watching Garner play Hannah shaped the way she imagined the character on the page. “At this point, Hannah and Jen are merged for me, often because some of their strengths are quite similar,” she says, noting Garner’s physicality as an actor. “I don't know that it would've occurred to me that Hannah could run. So then the second book opens with this running scene, which is a very specific tribute to what Jen has infused into her.”

In Season 2, Dave is excited to see Owen, who existed largely in flashbacks in Season 1, in the present tense. “It was very fun to watch him kind of be a badass and be awesome, but also to see him step into who [Hannah and Bailey] believed him to be and who they needed,” she says.

Below, Dave, who’s also adapting her novel The Night We Lost Him for the screen and writing a new book, opens up about translating The Last Thing He Told Me for TV, ruining the manuscript of her first-ever novel, and the best advice she’s received as a writer.

You mentioned that The Last Thing He Told Me took you ten years to write. How did the idea for Hannah Hall first come to you?

I was really interested in the Enron trial and the hubris of those men and how it all happened. Then, Linda Lay, the wife of Kenneth Lay, the CEO, did an interview on the Today show in which she said, “My husband’s done nothing wrong.” What was compelling to me was, what if a woman did believe that? What if she found herself in a position where the world was telling her that her partner was one thing, but she knew, or she thought she knew, that he was something else — and she was living in that paradox? At the same time, I only wanted to tell that story if I could figure out how to make her the hero of her own life.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau has said that the second book was written concurrently with filming Season 2. How did you navigate adapting something that hadn’t yet been written?

I'm superstitious and I don't show anyone anything until it feels really, really done. So I sat down with the showrunners, and everyone had 100 pages, and I walked them through — this is the story, this is where it's going, these are the things that happen. And then I went into my corner to edit and do all of that, and they went into their corner to write the show. I had some bright-line rules that were really important to me. For example, you can't kill Owen.

When I was writing the book, I had three words above my table: redemption, salvation, and forgiveness, and a fourth emerged later — reunification. And if the show wasn't also moving toward those things — even if it was going to hit in different ways — I don't think they would've spoken to each other the way they did.

I trusted that they were going to be able to do that. And part of it really was Jen — she understood Hannah so well that if there was ever a false beat, she would be the first to raise her hand and say, “That's not Hannah.”

Was there a moment this season when you saw Garner really embody Hannah?

A beautiful thing happened in the eighth episode, which is one of my favorites of the season. There’s a great scene between her and Judy Greer where they arrive at a realization that actually mirrors a plot point I had already written in the book, even though the actors hadn’t read that part yet. I was like, “Oh my God!” I don't think Jen could bring that unless Hannah lived in her body in the way she does.

Garner has also said in interviews that the role of Hannah has “shaped her” and “given her purpose” — how does it feel as an author to have people connecting to your work on that level?

When I started writing in my 20s and I wrote my first book, I spilled water on it and it was gone. After I finished grad school and started writing again, I saw Nicole Krauss giving a talk in Brooklyn, and she said something about if five people read her novel, it was an exercise worth doing. I remember thinking, “That's how I am approaching this.” If five people's lives are made better in some way, if they found some joy, if I got them through a hard time, it’s worth it.

So for every book I write, I save the first five notes I get, however they reach me, and put them in a scrapbook. And with The Last Thing He Told Me, there were so many more. I still read every note I get.

You spoke about including Easter eggs in The Last Thing He Told Me. Are there any in The First Time I Saw Him worth looking out for?

In all the years of writing that first book, I had an original ending that I put in a drawer, but I couldn’t let it go, even though I knew it wasn't the end of the story. I knew the end of that first book was really the primal story of a woman becoming a mom to someone who didn't have a mother — and, on the flip side of it, the daughter finding a mother.

This is an Easter egg: The end of the second book is the original ending of the first book. I think I was always writing two books, I just didn't know it.

Your novel The Night We Lost Him is headed toward the screen, and you’re co-writing with your husband Josh Singer. I know you two have also collaborated on the TV adaptation of The Last Thing He Told Me. What has it been like working with your husband?

The best thing is we're really each other's biggest fan, and we have a shorthand. We've always been each other's first reader, so that's lovely. Adapting a show during COVID with no child care — not as easy. But I really am loving the process of writing this movie. It's joyful.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.