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Full Synopsis Example (Novel: Pictures of You)

• Full Synopsis: Pictures of You (2013–Algonquin Books)
• Type: Novel (New York Times, USA Today bestseller)
• Author: Caroline Leavitt

(Note: SPOILERS—this synopsis does give away the story if you intend to read the book. Also, a novel synopsis almost always sounds unfinished or even sometimes cheesy, but that is because the real magic happens in the writing of the novel; the actual book is always more multi-layered than any synopsis.)

Pictures of You asks the question: How do we forgive the unforgivable?

The novel begins with Isabelle, a thirtyish, unhappily childless children’s photographer, running from a cheating husband (a guy she ran off with when she was 16 only because her mother locked her out of the house) and an awful town, about to start a new life. The fog is covering everything, and she gets lost, and in the fog, she sees a car turned the wrong way, a woman in a red dress standing there as if she is waiting for something, and a boy running into the woods. She locks eyes with the boy. She can’t stop, and the cars crash. Only Isabelle and the boy survive.

When cops come to tell Charlie Nash there’s been an accident, he’s decimated. He had argued with his wife April that morning, and in fact, although he adored her, he had snapped at her, “I wish you were just out of my sight.” To compound his guilt and grief, the car was three hours away from his home. Charlie thinks April was running off with their very asthmatic son, Sam, leaving him. When Charlie tries to talk to Sam, though, Sam refuses to talk about any of it, and acts as if he is harboring a secret about what happened the day of the accident. Charlie looks for clues and finds a suitcase in the home is missing.

Isabelle, too, is wracked with guilt. Her car is totaled, and she’s too phobic to drive. She stays in town to recuperate and she is found innocent (April’s car was turned the wrong way). Wanting to make sure the father and son are okay, she begins to bike past their house, to watch them in the small town, and she becomes obsessed with the family she’s torn asunder. Her therapist tells her to write a letter to Charlie asking forgiveness and not to mail it, but by mistake, she does.

Throughout the novel, two secrets about the crash are revealed. The first is Sam’s version. His mother, trying to give him the things his asthma takes away, makes life as much of an adventure for him as she can. They pretend to be other people and drive everywhere. She fights for him when he is at the ER with asthma or in the hospital, right up until she annoys the nurses so much, they begin to dislike her and wonder if she is making Sam worse in order to drum up attention for herself. One day, Sam comes home and finds her car and an overnight bag. He thinks it’s another surprise, so he hides under a blanket in the back and falls asleep. When he wakes, it’s hours later, and the blanket makes him wheeze. April is stunned he’s in the car. She tells him they are going on a great adventure. Then the asthma attack turns terrible, she can’t find a hospital, and they get lost in the fog. She calls 911, he thinks, and she tells him to stay in the car, the ambulance is coming. They both hear the car. He runs out, she runs to stop him, and he gets a huge gash across his arm, which will be a scar he carries all his life, but she is killed. At that moment, he looks at the other car and he sees Isabelle, surrounded with light, and he thinks she is an angel, like one of the pictures in his books. He convinces himself that she is there, like any angel, to give him a message and to help bring his mother back home.

Sam sees Isabelle around town and follows her, so he knows where she lives. He even shows up at her house one night when he doesn’t have his key. She has to call Charlie, who is torn. The worst possible person is now the best possible person for his child in this instance, so he talks with Isabelle. Sam goes over there more and more. Isabelle teaches him about photography, which opens up a magical world for Sam.

Slowly, Charlie and Isabelle get to know one another, fall in love, first out of a common need. (They both shared the accident.) Then because of who they are. They keep it from Sam, who isn’t ready to know there is another woman in his father’s life. Charlie is also still wounded and not really ready for a new relationship because he hasn’t made sense of the mystery of the old one. Isabelle falls in love with the child and all her long-buried maternal instincts come up. She starts to feel Sam and Charlie are hers. Her job, though, is becoming increasingly unsatisfying, and she’s about to be laid off. She sees a pamphlet for a photography program in NYC, where you can study with real photographers and it doesn’t matter that all you have is a GED, and she applies on a whim.

Isabelle finally starts to feel the possibility of forgiveness. Isabelle knows that Charlie loves her, but he is still haunted by his past. He doesn’t tell Isabelle, but there are certain moments—at the diner where they used to go for donuts, at the soccer field, in the garden out back—where he senses April there, as if she’s watching how he’s raising their son. Isabelle is there every night, but she can’t move in, which bothers her. One night, Isabelle can’t figure out why. She’s lying in bed with Charlie and she asks him what he talks about in therapy, and she realizes, in conversation, that he doesn’t talk about her there at all. He talks about April and Sam.

Sam’s photography allows him to finally be more popular at school and even make a friend, but it’s a thuggy boy, Teddy. Teddy keeps asking about Isabelle, who she is, and Sam doesn’t want to say he thinks she’s an angel for fear of being made fun of, but when Teddy suggests they jimmy open Isabelle’s apartment and see who she really is, Sam goes along with it, sure they will find angel stuff or maybe things about his mother.

They break in, see Isabelle’s tortoise, see the bed unmade, and Sam is freaked because the room smells like his mother. He’s sure now Isabelle is an angel and his mother is there. But then he sees a bottle of scent and a note. It’s in his father’s hand to Isabelle; Sam realizes that Isabelle isn’t an angel and she isn’t bringing his mother back but is taking his dad away from him. Teddy finds a condom on the floor. Sam drops the tortoise, and runs out into a storm.

Sam’s missing. Charlie and Isabelle go to her apartment, and see it’s been opened. They spot Sam’s inhaler and figure out what happened. They both go to search for him.

Sam’s arm is broken in the storm lightning, and so on. His asthma is a thousand times worse because of the emotional component: Sam now knows that not only is Isabelle not an angel, but she is a flawed human, and she’s having sex with his father. He knows his mother is never coming back. Charlie fears Sam is going to die; he can’t do anything but be there for his son, and he shuts Isabelle out. He wonders if he has brought in another woman who will bring harm to his son.

Isabelle’s lowest point: She’s not family so she can’t find out how Sam is in the hospital, can’t get in to see him. Charlie seems to be shutting her out because he’s so worried about Sam. She goes home to find a letter: she’s been accepted to a photography program in NYC. This is her shot. She can be someone. She can leave the Cape, a place she has always loathed. She wants Charlie and Sam to go with her.

Isabelle goes to see Charlie; he says he can’t leave to move to NYC. He can’t risk his son’s life and health and can’t trust that things will work out enough to do so. This is their home. He built the house. Plus, Sam can’t live in a city with smog, and his doctors are all here. However, the real reason is he can’t leave a place where he thinks April still is present. He can’t let go until he figures out why she would leave with Sam. Sam is so angry, he can’t hear her name without wheezing. He doesn’t know how to handle any of this. Isabelle says she will give this opportunity up—she’ll stay if she thinks they have a chance of a life together. She’s not asking for marriage, just to be a part of their life. Charlie can’t answer, which of course, is an answer.

Isabelle, heartbroken, leaves. She goes to the house in the early morning, to leave Sam her camera and a note, and then raps on his window. She tells him that even though he is acting mad, she knows he loves her—she knows he will forgive her. She’ll write him; she’ll keep in touch.

Isabelle in New York: loves the city, loves her classes, starts eating at a little café with a friendly chef. She calls Sam and he gets upset. Charlie wants to protect Sam, is angry with Isabelle for leaving, but Sam keeps the camera near him all the time, takes picture after picture of the road Isabelle left on. Charlie’s moral choice—is Isabelle making his son worse? Is it better to make a clean break? He asks her not to call anymore, tells her Sam was in the hospital, and when she doesn’t, Sam seems better, and he thinks this was the right call. When Isabelle writes Sam a letter, hating himself, Charlie opens it and never gives it to Sam.

Charlie then gets a letter addressed to April from someone named Bill that says only “I’m sorry.” He leaves Sam with his parents and goes to find out the truth about April. Shocked, he realizes everything he thought was wrong. He learns that April was going to Boston every week just to feel like she was slipping into another life. While there, she met Bill. She had begun a relationship with Bill, who was also married and going to leave his wife, and they had planned to run away together, but she had never told the man she had a child. He was shocked to hear it from Charlie and appalled that she would leave her child. In any case, he had decided not to go with her, to stay with his wife, so he hadn’t shown up that day of the accident when he was supposed to meet April and they would fly to California. When he hadn’t heard from April, he assumed she hadn’t shown up either or that she had called it off. Bill also tells Charlie that April had told him that she never felt loved by Charlie and always suspected he would leave her. She falls for Bill because he is all over her, emotionally and physically. Stunned, Charlie doubts his ability to really know a woman. He remembers how she used to ask him if he loved her. Why hadn’t she known?

Knowing the truth about why April left, Charlie steps up to the plate. He tells Sam how he’s been feeling that April leaving was his fault and Sam reveals that he thought it was his fault and Charlie says now they know it was neither one of their faults, that it was an accident. Charlie has kept April’s ashes, unable to do anything with them, and now Charlie and Sam set the ashes free in the garden April loved. Charlie lets her go. He realizes that you cannot forgive someone for their actions but you can still love them, and that week, for the first time, he doesn’t feel her anywhere anymore. She’s really gone.

Charlie misses Isabelle and decides to go see her even after all this silence. He vows not to do what he did with April, which was to hide his feelings and assume she knew them, but to risk himself. When he finally goes to see her, she is happy to see him. She tells him she started seeing the chef. She’s getting married. He’s shocked; he keeps probing, and she finally tells him. She’s pregnant. This is a big deal. She was told she could never have kids. She won’t leave her fiancé, won’t let this child have anything but two parents. On the way home, they are really quiet. Charlie kisses her. She tells him she’s five months pregnant and the child hasn’t kicked yet, which worries her. Then she kisses him, and they end up sleeping together, but it’s the last time. After he leaves, Isabelle cries in the middle of NYC for what might have been, but she goes home to her fiancé, and we see he’s a good man, he loves her, he’s kind. There isn’t the passion she felt for Charlie, but there is something stable and good here. That night, she wakes in the middle of the night, and her baby kicks for the first time. She has what she needs—not Charlie or Sam, but work she loves, a man who loves her, a baby.

Charlie gets Sam, comes home, and doesn’t tell him where he’s been. Sam seems happy, has had a great time with his grandparents, etc. Charlie doesn’t have April or Isabelle, but he has his son, and he tells him, “I love you,” a thousand times a day.

Flash forward twenty years. Sam is in his late 30s, saying goodbye to the woman he loves, Lisa, whom he doesn’t live with, and going to see Isabelle, who has become a famous photographer. In scenes, we find out that Sam’s asthma miraculously disappeared when he was 15, and he has become a doctor: an obstetrician because it’s the most hopeful kind of doctor of all to be. He brings babies into the world, makes sure they are safe. He hasn’t had a real relationship (obviously he can’t trust women since both April and Isabelle left him) but he is beloved by his women patients. He and Lisa argue because she wants to know where their relationship is going, why can’t they live together, or have more of a commitment.

We find out Charlie keeps busy, loves his son, dates a woman. Sam goes to see Isabelle after all these years—she’s got two kids, and he sees how Frank is a doting, terrific husband. Isabelle is happy. He finally asks her: why did you leave? How could you do that to me? And she’s stunned. She tells him that is not what happened. Reveals the truth, that Charlie asked her not to contact him, that he kept getting terrible, dangerous asthma attacks from the stress and the emotion. She tells him she felt he was hers, that she was going to adopt him—things he didn’t know. Sam is stunned. Isabelle feels horrible, she thought he knew—but Sam is elated because he realizes he didn’t drive Isabelle away. Isabelle didn’t really leave him—his father had stopped her from contacting him—and his father did it to protect him.

Sam thinks about all that has happened, about how you can never really know some things about a person. He thinks about Isabelle being happy with a man who is so good to her. He thinks about his father, who never found anyone—not for want of trying now—and then he drives home, and he stops at a diner and calls Lisa. He says, “Let’s,” his heart pounding because he is scared. And she says, “Let’s what?” And he says, “Let’s get married,” and then he holds his breath, and we don’t hear her answer.

(Note: The published novel departed from this synopsis, but the author used this as her guide to write the first draft.)