What Happened to Goodbye

What's inside (9 sections)

1. Four moves in two years
2. The model in the room upstairs
3. Her mother's new house
4. Everything arrives at once
5. The Poseidon
6. The model with her in it
7. What holds up and what does not
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

The copy I ended up with was a paperback with a bent corner and somebody's name in blue ink on the inside cover. That felt right for a book about a girl who keeps changing hers. I read most of it in two nights, which says less about literary density than about Sarah Dessen's ability to keep a page moving when almost nothing is happening except a girl helping to glue tiny trees onto a model of a town.

I had skipped this one for years. Dessen has a reputation, among people who have not read her, for soft-focus beach books, and the title sounded like a country song. What Happened to Goodbye is softer than it needs to be in places, and the ending arrives with almost no resistance, but it is sharper about divorce than its cover suggests. The book came out in 2011 from Viking, runs 402 pages, and is a standalone.

Four moves in two years

Mclean Elizabeth Sweet is seventeen and has spent the last two years moving. Her father, Gus, is a restaurant consultant. A company buys failing restaurants, hires him to fix them, and then sells them once they look profitable again. The work is temporary by design, which means Mclean's life is temporary by design. Lakeview is the fourth town in two years.

The divorce is the reason. Mclean's mother, Katherine, had an affair with Peter Hamilton, the basketball coach at Defriese University, the college team Mclean and her father had followed religiously her whole childhood. Mclean was named after a coach her father loved. After the affair, she picked her dad, and she has been punishing her mother for it ever since, mostly by refusing to be in the same room with her.

Her coping mechanism is the best thing in the book. In every new town she renames herself, always some variation on her middle name, and builds a personality to match. In one town she was Eliza, perky and popular. In another she was Lizbet, dramatic and loud. Most recently she was Beth, student council secretary and joiner of clubs. When the family moves, she does not tell anyone. She just disappears, leaving behind a fake life and a boyfriend who sends a message she reads once and closes: "What happened to goodbye?"

That message is the whole book in five words, and Dessen knows it. She does not underline it. She lets it sit there while Mclean unpacks boxes in another rented house.

Lakeview is supposed to be the same routine. She introduces herself to Opal, the manager of Luna Blu, the failing Italian restaurant her father has been sent to rescue, under her real name, which is new. Then she goes to a party at the college rental house next door, the cops show up, and she runs. A boy grabs her in the dark and pulls her into an unused storm cellar until the police leave. When the light comes on, he turns out to be the neighbor, and she tells him her real name without deciding to. That is Dave Wade, and the fact that she cannot lie to him is the first crack in the whole system.

School is worse than she expected, because people already know her name. Deb, a relentlessly cheerful girl who introduces herself as a student ambassador, attaches herself to Mclean in the hallway. Riley and Heather, who sit with Dave at lunch, describe Deb as a spaz and advise avoidance. Mclean sits with them, but she notices Deb eating alone.

Then Gus cuts himself badly at Luna Blu and ends up in the emergency room, and Opal calls Mclean for the insurance card. Mclean has no car and no one else to ask, so she asks Deb. Deb drives her and confesses on the way that nobody has ever asked her for a favor before. At the hospital Gus is fine, embarrassed, and already arguing about the menu. Mclean comes away from the ride with a new friend and a suspicion that the people Riley and Heather dismiss are worth a second look. She invites Deb to the lunch table the next day. Riley and Heather are skeptical until Deb starts talking about tattoo art and then says something unexpectedly precise about Riley's boyfriend problems. After that the table rearranges itself.

The model in the room upstairs

Opal has a problem that has nothing to do with lasagna. She promised Lindsay, a town councilwoman and her rival since high school, that she would build a scale model of Lakeview for the town's centennial. The volunteers are mostly kids assigned community service who never show up. The one reliable helper is Dave, who is there because he got caught with a beer at a party and needs the hours.

Mclean gets pulled in, first to make the project look busy when Lindsay brings a reporter through, then because she keeps coming back. Deb takes over the scheduling and turns out to be ferociously good at it. The model lives in an unused room above the restaurant, and it becomes the book's best metaphor, though Dessen lets the characters joke about it rather than announce it.

Dave is the other reason she keeps coming back. He is a boy genius who skipped most of junior high and takes college classes, and he is also the least cool person in any room, which is why he works. He talks about zoning. He is earnest in a way that could be insufferable and instead comes off as kind. He also has a girlfriend for a while, and Mclean's awareness of him shifts slowly enough to be believable.

The scene that made me trust the book happens in Dave's car. He tells her about Eva, Riley's grandmother, who used to babysit him. Eva had a large, ugly wart on her wrist and used to tell the kids that if they loved her, they loved the wart too. She died of cancer a year earlier, and Dave and Riley both got small circle tattoos in her memory. Mclean listens and then says she does not think it is possible to love all of a person, the good and the bad. She is talking about herself. She admits that she likes moving because nobody gets to know her well enough to see the bad parts. Dave does not argue her out of it. He just listens, and the silence does more work than a speech would have.

There is also a basketball game. Mclean has agreed to meet her mother and Peter at the Defriese game, and she is so nervous about telling her father that she waits until the last minute. Gus surprises her by saying she should never feel guilty for wanting to see her mom. Then Mclean invites Dave, who has no ticket, and ends up sitting with him in a box while he teases her about being basketball royalty.

Her mother's new house

Katherine is the weak spot in the novel, and I do not think Dessen fully solves her. In the years since the divorce she has married Peter, had twins named Maddie and Connor, and turned into someone Mclean does not recognize. The old Katie Sweet was a restaurant accountant with no patience for nonsense. The new Katherine Hamilton has a large house, expensive clothes, and a beach house in Colby. Mclean resents the transformation more than the affair, because it means the mother she remembers is gone too.

She avoids her mother's calls and dodges invitations. When Katherine pushes for more time, Mclean agrees to a spring break visit mostly to get the lawyers off her back. The custody arrangement is being revisited, and Mclean would rather promise a week at the beach than sit through another conversation about loyalty.

What the book gets right is that Mclean's anger is not irrational. She is a teenager who watched her family detonate and decided that the parent who stayed was the one who deserved her. What the book gets wrong, or at least softens, is how little Katherine has to answer for. The affair is treated as ancient history by the end. Mclean's fury gets diagnosed as grief, which it is, but nobody in the novel stays angry at Katherine for very long, and the reconciliation is arranged so that Katherine gets to be generous at exactly the moment it costs her least.

Everything arrives at once

Just before spring break, three things hit Mclean in the same week. Her father learns that the company may sell Luna Blu and send him to Hawaii, which means a fifth move. Dave asks her to be his girlfriend, and she freezes, because saying yes would mean admitting she is staying. And her friends find the old Ume profiles she made for Eliza, Lizbet, and Beth. Heather asks whether she is a split personality or something. The others are quieter.

Mclean does what she has always done. She runs. She tells her father she wants to go to Hawaii, climbs into her mother's car, and leaves without explaining anything to Deb or Dave. It is a genuinely ugly moment, and Dessen does not let her off the hook. The people she leaves behind are not props. Deb has been organizing a model town and a social life around her. Dave has been falling for someone who was already halfway out the door.

The beach house is a four-story mansion, and Mclean wanders through it feeling like a guest at a hotel where she cannot check out. Then she overhears her mother on the phone saying she is not feeling good about the whole thing. Mclean assumes her mother means the visit, or her, or the entire failed experiment of having a daughter. She does not wait to find out. She takes the car and drives to the Poseidon, the cheap motel where she and her mother used to stay on their spontaneous trips, back when they bought silly bracelets and were themselves.

The Poseidon

This is the part of the book that earns its title. Mclean calls Dave from the motel and tells him she wants to be his girlfriend, which is a strange order of operations and completely believable. She tells him where she is. He says he will come. Then she sits in a room with a bad lamp and writes in a notebook about all the girls she has been, trying to keep herself awake.

Her parents show up instead. They have been driving around looking for her. There is knocking, and then the two of them are in the doorway together for the first time in years, and Mclean cries until she falls asleep. In the morning they tell her they read the notebook. They did not know how hard the divorce had been on her, which could be infuriating in a lesser book and lands here because both parents look genuinely shaken.

Her mother explains the phone call. She was talking about a party she throws every year, not about Mclean. It is a cheap misunderstanding, the kind that exists to force a conversation, and I could feel the machinery creaking. But the conversation that follows is worth it. Mclean admits what she has been doing with the names. Her parents admit that they have been so careful about their own wounds that they did not notice hers.

The plan they arrive at is that Mclean will go back to Tyler with her mother for the rest of the year. Nobody asks her what she wants. That is the book's honest stroke: the adults mean well and still arrange her life around their own guilt.

Dave never makes it to the motel. When Mclean gets back to Lakeview, Deb tells her he is grounded indefinitely for sneaking out. Deb is furious with her, and the anger is the most useful thing anyone says to her in the entire novel:

"I'm not like you, okay? I don't have that many friends. So you need to say goodbye, and you need to stay in touch, wherever you go."

That is the correction Mclean needs. Not a boy telling her she is special. A friend telling her that disappearing has a cost that other people pay.

The model with her in it

The last stretch is the part Dessen fans come for, and it works even when you can see every beat coming. Mclean and Deb finish the model. Dave has arranged the tiny figures so that they tell Mclean's story, with little versions of her placed at the places they shared. On the roof of the abandoned house behind his, he has written one word: stay.

Then the confession. Dave did drive to the Poseidon that night. He got there, saw her parents' car, and understood that she needed them more than she needed him, so he turned around. His parents caught him coming back in, which is why he was grounded. It is a small, good reversal, because it makes his absence a choice instead of a failure.

They kiss. Mclean also walks in on her father and Opal, which is gross in the way that only a parent's new relationship can be, and learns that this one is serious. Gus is going to Hawaii for the job, but he plans to come back. Opal is buying Luna Blu and will run it herself. For once, he is not cutting and running. That detail matters more than the romance, because Mclean's fear was never that she would be alone. It was that she had learned to leave from an expert.

The ending belongs to Katherine, which surprised me. She drives Mclean toward Tyler, then pulls over and says she cannot do it. She has spent years arguing that Mclean should not be uprooted, and uprooting her now, in the last months of senior year, would be hypocritical. She calls Opal, who offers her spare room. Mclean stays in Lakeview, graduates with Deb and Riley and Heather, takes a summer job at Opal's restaurant, and plans to start at the local university in the fall. Dave is still Dave. The last note is not a triumph. It is relief at not having to pack.

What holds up and what does not

The honesty of the central idea is what makes the book last. Mclean's aliases are not a quirky device. They are a kid's survival strategy, and Dessen shows the cost without turning it into a lesson. The scene where her friends find the profiles is painful because it is so ordinary. Nobody screams. They just look at her differently, and that is enough.

The supporting cast is stronger than the plot. Deb is the best character in the book, a girl who is too much for everyone until someone finally needs her, and whose anger at being left is treated as legitimate. Opal is allowed to be difficult without being a villain. Riley and Heather are not interchangeable, and even Lindsay gets a scene that suggests a life beyond her function.

The weaknesses are real. The arc is visible from the first chapter, and Kirkus said as much in its review, noting that Mclean's path is clear from the get-go. The parents are let off lightly. Gus has moved his daughter four times in two years and used her as a de facto roommate, and the book treats this as an eccentricity rather than neglect. Katherine's affair is the original sin, but her redemption costs her almost nothing. The town model is a metaphor so tidy that a reader with a low tolerance for symbolism will see it coming from the title page. The middle sags under restaurant business and council business, and the romance has almost no conflict once Dave is available; he is less a character with flaws than a set of admirable qualities in a hoodie.

Who will not like it: readers who want plot propulsion, readers who find Dessen's brand of gentle realism too gentle, and anyone who wants a divorce novel that stays angry. Who will: the people who read Dessen in high school and want to know whether the books hold up. They mostly do, in the way that a good conversation with an old friend holds up. You notice the seams. You stay for the voice.

What I keep thinking about is the title. It is not a question Mclean asks. It is a question asked of her, by a boy she ghosted, and she spends 402 pages learning how to answer it. The answer turns out to be small and unglamorous. You say goodbye. You give someone your real name. You let them see the wart.

FAQ

Who are the personas Mclean uses before Lakeview?

She has been Eliza, a perky cheerleader; Lizbet, a dramatic type; and Beth, a student council secretary and club joiner. Each name is a variation on her middle name, Elizabeth.

Why does Mclean end up staying in Lakeview?

Her mother decides at the last minute that uprooting her again during senior year would be hypocritical, and Opal offers her a spare room.

What happens between Mclean and Dave at the end?

Dave places figurines of Mclean around the finished town model and writes "stay" on the roof of the abandoned house. He admits he drove to the Poseidon but turned back when he saw her parents' car, and they get together.