“There had been this question spinning around in my head,” said Gayle Forman the author of If  I Stay. “What would you do if you knew that something catastrophic happened to your family? And you, yourself, were in this pre-state, aware of what happened to them?”Welcome to crash course literature where we will be talking about If I Stay by Gayle FormanThe idea for the book was born from a tragic incident. Around 18 years ago, Forman lost friends of hers in a car crash. “It was a family of four and they were all killed. When we got the news that they had all died, we learned that one of the little boys had lived longer and been taken to a trauma center.”she said that the thought of the event tormented her for a while. “I was really close to this little boy and I always wondered if he knew what had happened to his family,” she said. “Did he have some way of knowing and did he choose to go with them?””Then I woke up one morning, seven years after the accident, and there was this character in my head,” she said.This character over time eventually blossomed into Mia Hall, the protagonist of If I Stay. The novel starts off with Mia and her family eating breakfast when they get the news that school is cancelled because of snow. They decide to go to a friends house when they get into a car accident which kills Mia’s parents and little brother,Teddy, while she is put into a coma. She is put into a position to decide whether she’ll die and join her family, or live on in a difficult and unpredictable future with her boyfriend Adam and her best friend Kim.In Forman’s book, If I Stay, Mia took the place of the little boy that passed away, realizing that her family is gone while her body lies in a coma but her mind is fully alive, outside of her physical self.The characters Teddy, Kat and Mia’s father were all based on the friends that Forman had lost in the accident, while Adam, was inspired by Forman’s husband.If I Stay is a story that focuses on the love we have in our lives and the importance of pursuing our dreams and passions.