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GUILFORD — Reconnecting with a long-lost love online is not a new story — but it’s one that still captures the imagination of many people.
What if? — that’s the big question that Branford writer Jen Payne aims to answer in her new novel, “Water Under The Bridge: A Sort-Of Love Story.”
Set in the early 2000s, the story is told through a series of emails between two former loves who find each other online after years of leading separate lives. And it’s a story readers can relate to, the author said.
“I think it’s one of these things where people reconnect after however many years,” and think, “‘Well, what’s going to happen?’” Payne said.
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The epistolary novel is reminiscent of the hit ’90s rom-com “You’ve Got Mail” with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, produced nearly a decade before social media popped up on anyone’s radar or screen. Long before smart phones and tablets, people communicated online via their home computer. In the movie, Hanks and Ryan fall in love through email.
An epistolary novel is one written as a series of letters, in this case emails, Payne said.
Payne’s novel is a personal story which she calls “creative nonfiction.” She describes the book as part “conversation, a memoir, a love story.”
While Payne was going through this email exchange in real time, she knew it would make a good book — whichever way it turned out. So she saved all the emails all these years.
When she started to write the novel, “it had a life of its own,” Payne said.
In the book, Payne captures the first ripples of excitement, her fear of embarrassment and the emotional rush of what it might be like to reconnect with someone special from the past.
Payne wanted readers to see themselves and recognize “those moments when you fall in love — either you fall in love with a person, you fall in love with a situation, you may fall in love...