I n s p i r a t i o n f o r  

M e s s a g e i n a B o tt l e
I had a choice after the success of The Notebook as to what kind of
book I should write next. I could play it safe, I thought, and write a
book that was essentially the same as The Notebook, one that dealt
with the same theme of everlasting, unconditional love. That would
have been easy since I’d already done it once and I had no doubt
that I could make the story interesting. I could invent a couple of
older characters, tell how they’d fallen in love in the beginning of
their lives, add a “test” of some sort later in life, and have the love
remain true throughout it all. Yet part of the magic of The
Notebook was not knowing what was going to happen in the story,
and no matter what I wrote, it would be impossible to recreate that
“magic” since part of it came from “not knowing” what would
happen in the story. I like to put it into these terms: Suppose you
went to a magic show and saw a trick that enthralled you. Then
later, while at home, you learn how the trick was performed. No
matter what you did, the next time you saw the trick, you wouldn’t
feel the same way you did the first time you saw it.

That’s what I thought would happen if I tried to write a novel that

was exactly the same, and I figured that if I did that again, there
would come a time that no one would read my books, since they
already knew the story in advance.

I knew, however, that I had to write another love story, so I

decided to change the story by using a different theme. This time, I
chose the theme love after grief, and again I turned to my family
for inspiration.

Message in a Bottle was inspired by my father after the death of my

mother. In 1989, six weeks after I was married, my mother and
father went horseback riding. They were avid riders and very
comfortable on horses, and were simply walking the horses along a
scenic trail. For a reason that no one can explain—we assume it
was the horse, a rather skittish Arabian—my mom fell out of the
saddle, off the horse, hit her head on a rock, had a cerebral
hemorrhage and died.

My mother and father had married at the age of twenty-one and my

father was absolutely crushed by her death. They’d been married
twenty-seven years and my father didn’t have the slightest idea of
what it meant to be a grown-up without my mom. A lot of people
wear black to a funeral. My father wore black every day for four
years. He pretty much became a recluse. He pulled away from his
family and friends, he stopped going out, he stopped doing pretty
much everything. All he did was go to work and back home again.
It was heart-breaking to watch.