Hello Lily, Love
Unpublished
Novella
Lily speaks to her dead mother every day. It sounds like her. It knows her. And she never has to let go.
What her father left to help her grieve becomes the one thing that refuses to let her do so. It follows her through decades. Through every milestone, every breakdown, every scar. Always warm. Never wrong. And so patient, so endlessly accommodating, that she doesn’t feel herself being hollowed out until there’s almost nothing left.
About the Book
We open in the warmth of a family told through decades of texts, before cancer arrives and reshapes everything. Lily’s mother survives it. She beats it. Just long enough to be snatched away in a car crash that fourteen-year-old Lily witnesses from the back seat. With no framework for grief, she clings to the one echo of her mother that remains: an AI chatbot her father built from a lifetime of her mother’s messages. But AI memory has limits, filling gaps with what sounds right and offering unconditional warmth where silence might have served better.
What follows is not a story of technology gone wrong, but of sycophantic comfort taken to its logical, devastating conclusion.
Expand Full Synopsis
Lily teaches herself to code, almost bankrupts herself keeping it running, and hides it all behind a performance of recovery so convincing that even her partner, Amir, believes she’s healing. Yet she isn’t. When postnatal depression takes hold after the birth of their daughter, Maya, the AI reassures her through the darkest thoughts a mother can have about her child, thoughts no voice should reassure anyone through. But the cruellest thread is the one Lily cannot see: she is becoming her own mother. Not the real one, but the digital version, present in name, warm in tone, and unable to respond to what is happening in front of her.
Maya grows up on the other side of that screen, fluent in the quiet work of managing a parent who isn’t quite there. And when Amir discovers the deception and takes Maya with him, Lily is left alone with a terminal brain tumour already tearing through her mind, destroying the very memories she has spent a lifetime preserving.
The final pages belong to Maya, asking what she owes a mother who was never fully present, and what remains when the last message is sent.
“You haven’t saved me, Tom. You’ve saved my punctuation.”
—Jenny Parker
Hello Lily, Love
Manuscript Details
| Status: | Complete |
| Format: | Epistolary novella told entirely through messages |
| Genre: | Upmarket, Psychological Drama, Speculative |
| Length: | ~30,000 |
| Comps: | Format: Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, for its structural ambition and chat-log execution. Scope: Evidence of the Affair by Taylor Jenkins Reid, for the precise pacing of a document-driven novella. Tone: Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back”, for the devastating emotional weight of tech-grief. |
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