Adam Silvera: the Joy of Witnessing a Friend's Rise

Some people exist like gravity wells of goodness, drawing others into their orbit not through effort or design, but through some inexplicable magnetism of being. Adam was “tall for no reason,” which seemed fitting for someone whose very presence defied easy explanation. He laughed as if laughter were a form of meditation, loved as if love were the only currency that mattered, and reminded me of versions of myself I had forgotten existed. The ones that lived before the sediment of compromise settled over my aspirations like dust on neglected books.

I remember him in fragments that coalesce into something whole: the way he moved through the narrow aisles of Barnes & Noble on 86th and Lexington like he was dancing to music only he could hear, always with a book tucked under his arm, always mid-conversation with someone about something that made their eyes brighten. Everyone wanted to orbit around him. It wasn’t calculated, it was elemental, like the way flowers turn toward the sun.

Years later, standing in a bookstore in San Antonio, I found myself drifting toward the YA section with the aimlessness that sometimes precedes revelation. I wasn’t hunting for anything in particular, just letting the familiar architecture of spines and stories guide me through the maze of my own restlessness. I had left New York reluctantly, first bleeding into Santa Fe, where I spent years trying to heal from wounds, I was more earnest to forget, then trickling back to Texas like water finding its level.

And there it was: Adam’s name on a spine, stark and impossible. More Happy Than Not.

I snatched the book with the desperation of someone recognizing their own reflection in a stranger’s face and whispered, “No fucking way!” to the fluorescent-lit silence. The author’s photo on the back cover stared back at me. Adam, but different, older, wearing success like a comfortable sweater. The thrill that coursed through me was electric, the kind of joy that arrives unannounced and reminds you that the universe occasionally conspires in your favor.

Adam and I had lived together in that cramped Bronx apartment, a small constellation of writers orbiting our shared delusions of literary grandeur. Adam had mentioned he was working on something “big,” a word that hung in the air between us like incense, heavy with possibility. And now we’re here, nine novels and eight years later, that word matured into something tangible, something that could be held and read and loved by strangers across the world.

I think Adam was always reading YA and children’s books because those genres remind us of something the rest of us forget: life is worth celebrating, that wonder isn’t naive, that hope isn’t a luxury but a necessity. He embodied that philosophy in the way he stepped into rooms. As if only good things were possible, as if disappointment was just weather that would eventually pass.

I needed someone like him then, raw as I was from the emotional archaeology of ending a marriage, I’d never been ready to begin. I’d fled to New York partly to escape the debris of that decision, but also because I believed that geography could heal what geography had helped to break. We make mistakes when we’re vulnerable, terrible, beautiful, necessary mistakes. If we’re fortunate, we learn to navigate our own fragility with more grace. Being around Adam made that navigation feel less like drowning and more like swimming.

Adam carried his own weight, his own darkness, depression that moved through him like weather systems, self-doubt that shadowed even his brightest moments. But he never let those internal storms interfere with his capacity to create, to connect, to believe in the possibility that his words might matter to someone, somewhere, who needed them.

Watching his trajectory from those early New York days through interviews and panels now, I see the same essential Adam, perhaps more confident, though confidence was never something he lacked. He’s merely grown into himself the way trees grow toward light, naturally and without apology. After More Happy Than Not came History Is All You Left Me, then They Both Die at the End, which carved out permanent residence on bestseller lists like it had always belonged there. By the time I was managing Barnes & Noble in Bozeman, Montana, watching copies of The First to Die at the End disappear from our shelves faster than we could shelve them, I found myself bragging to my employees about knowing him, showing them grainy photos of us at Carlow East, grinning like we owned the city.

Adam and I lost touch the way people do when distance becomes an excuse and life becomes complicated. I was drowning in a relationship that demanded I abandon everyone who knew me before it began. I let myself disappear, let connections atrophy like unused muscles. However, some people leave indelible marks: not through effort, but through the simple fact of having been genuinely themselves in a world that often rewards the opposite.

Adam’s story is the kind that doesn’t happen often enough to the people who most deserve it. But it happened to him, and he seems to carry that success with the same easy grace he carried everything else: lightly, generously, as if good fortune were meant to be shared rather than hoarded.

I’m proud of you, Adam. Proud to have witnessed the early chapters of a story that keeps getting better, proud to have known you when we were both still becoming whoever we were meant to be. Some people are gifts to the world; you’ve always been one of them.