If He Had Been With Me Dream Cast & Guest Blog

Fantasy Cast List for If He Had Been With Me:

So this is a fantasy right? I get to pick whomever I want without the restraints of reality getting in the way of my fun? 

Excellent. 

Let’s roll the credits of my fantasy If He had Been with Me movie.

Teenage Kiera Knightly as Autumn Rose Davis

I’m not going to let that whole time/space continuum get in the way of my fantasy movie! Knightly has the sort of classically beautiful that face that stuns even the most jaded, and she has more than enough talent to play six Angsty Autumns! I can just hear her voice intoning “I know, I know, I know, I know. If he had been with me everything would have been different.” She was acting as a teenage, so a simple time machine will do the trick.

HRH Prince William of Wales (Circa 2001) as Phineas “Finny” Smith.

Yes, you read that right. As a teenager I had a massively ridiculous crush on His Royal Highness, and it’s his adolescent self that I was imagining as I wrote this novel. So we must again use time my machine to go back and Prince-nap Wills when he had a full head of hair, give him some acting lessons, shoot the movie, and then return him before Scotland Yard notices.

Dakota Fanning as Sylvie Whitehouse

Fanning isn't just an incredible actress for her age, she's an incredible actress period. Sylvie is a complex character; on the outside she seems to have it all together, but on the inside there is a lot of pain and turmoil. Fanning has the subtly and talent to convey the storm below the surface. In real life I could even dream of having an actress of her caliber agree to a role with so little screen time, but this is my fantasy, and the distinction of being the first and only actress to play the love interest of a time traveling Prince has enticed her.

Laura Linney and Nicole Kidman as Angelina Smith and Claire Davis

“The Mothers” as they are often referred to in the book, have a yin and yang quality about them that I think these two actresses would achieve together. Kidman has a delicate beauty that makes her seem about to shatter at any moment, while Linney seems to have an inner strength she keeps in reserve. Once again, the historical nature of my fantasy movie is what made these accomplished actresses agree to portray a couple of suburban Moms. 

There it is, my perfect and perfectly unachievable cast list. If anyone would like to do some Photoshop magic and create this movie poster for me, that would be awesome. Or you could maybe invent that time machine for me. Either way, I'd really appreciate it.

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Top Ten Things I Wish I Could Change about my High School Years

I wish smart phones had existed, and that I'd had one.

This seems frivolous, I know, but when I was in high school only the rich kids had cell phones at all, and wi-fi was a rare and wondrous thing. I can only imagine how cool it must be to get into hilarious hijinks with your friends, and be able to post pics of your shananigins in real time. If we did something cool, we had to tell people about it later, and we probably didn't have photographic proof, because pictures were these paper things you had to pay to have made.

I wish I had broken up with my boyfriend.

Now, my high school sweetheart was not a bad guy by any means, but looking back I see how I only dated him for my entire high school career because I liked the idea of only having one boyfriend ever. If I had really been following my heart, I would have admitted to myself that he wasn't the one and only guy for me, and I could have possibly had a wider range of romantic experience.

I wish I had broken more rules.

I was a good kid. A really, really good kid. Sometimes as an adult I wish I had some of the when-I-was-a-crazy-teen stories that other people have.

I wish I had learned to drive.

In If He had Been with Me, Autumn manages to graduate high school without learning to drive. I managed to graduate from college and get married without a driver's license. I let a small anxiety grow into a massive mental block, and I wonder what the ego-boost of conquering my fear would have done for teenage me.

I wish I had admitted to others that I needed help.

As an adult I have been diagnosed with clinical depression, but as a teenager I hid my depressive episodes from my loved ones. I can only imagine how different those years would have been if I would have admitted my to struggle  and gotten the help I needed.

I wish I had worked harder in Spanish class, and gone to Spain on the class trip.

I ended up minoring in Spanish, but I never did get the experience of full immersion, and now my skills are so rusty that I'll probably never be fluent.

I wish our exchange student had lived with us all four years

Swantje lived with my family for ten months. She challenged and inspired me, and ultimately changed me forever. To this day I keep a picture of her by my writing desk.

I wish I had cared less about what other people thought.

I think everyone feels this way about their high school years. At the time, I claimed that I didn’t care what others thought, but when I compare that to how much I really don’t care now...

I wish I’d been less critical of my body

When I look at pictures of my teenage self, I just want to grab that girl by the shoulders and scream, “Your stomach IS  flat! It is! It really is! And you are not appcreiating how high your breast are! Your stomach is flat and your breats are perky! Go put on a string bikini and feel fabulous! Right Now!”

I wish I had written more.

To be fair, I think this is something I will always say about any time in my life. I guess it's nice to know that some things will never change.