Jessa Hastings delivers her most visceral and uncompromising work yet in Time of Your Life, a romance that burns like a flame held too close to skin. Following her compelling previous novel The Conditions of Will, Hastings demonstrates a remarkable evolution in her storytelling, crafting a narrative that feels both achingly familiar and utterly devastating. This is not merely another celebrity romance; it’s a surgical examination of what happens when two people who were never meant to survive love somehow find themselves drowning in it anyway.
Set against the electric backdrop of 1995 London, the novel follows Ysolde Featherstonhaugh, a supermodel whose beauty has become both her currency and her cage, and Joah Harrigan, the combustible frontman of Fallow, the biggest band in the world. Their collision is immediate, magnetic, and ultimately catastrophic—exactly as the author intended.
Character Studies in Self-Destruction
Ysolde: Beauty as Burden
Hastings crafts Ysolde with surgical precision, presenting a character who understands her beauty as “the skill set it is” while simultaneously being trapped by its power. The author’s own modeling background clearly informs this portrayal, lending authenticity to Ysolde’s internal landscape. She’s not the typical ingénue we’ve come to expect from celebrity romance; instead, she’s calculating, self-aware, and haunted by tragedy—her mother’s death from a cocaine overdose shadows every moment of vulnerability.
What makes Ysolde compelling is her fundamental contradiction. She craves normalcy—evidenced by her fixation on a simple house that represents a life she believes she can never have—while simultaneously thriving in the artificial world of fashion and celebrity. Her relationship with Joah becomes both an escape from and an amplification of this contradiction.
Joah: The Beautiful Monster
Joah Harrigan is Hastings’ most complex creation to date. Written entirely in his thick Mancunian dialect, his voice jumps off the page with startling authenticity. Hastings doesn’t shy away from his flaws; Joah is selfish, entitled, and prone to self-destruction. Yet she makes us understand why Ysolde falls for him anyway.
The author’s handling of Joah’s addiction issues is particularly nuanced. His cocaine use isn’t romanticized or excused—it’s presented as the thoughtless cruelty it is, especially given Ysolde’s history. Yet Hastings never allows him to become a simple villain. He’s a man struggling with fame he never asked for, love he didn’t expect, and a self-awareness that makes his failures all the more painful.
The Brutal Honesty of Toxic Love
This is where Hastings truly excels: in her unflinching portrayal of a relationship that is simultaneously beautiful and destructive. The chemistry between Ysolde and Joah is undeniable, crackling off every page, but Hastings refuses to let readers revel in it without consequence. Their love story reads like watching a car crash in slow motion—you know it’s going to end badly, but you cannot look away.
The novel’s most powerful moments come not from grand gestures or passionate reconciliations, but from the small cruelties and thoughtless wounds that accumulate over time. When Joah cheats with Meghan Miller, it’s not born of malice but of his inability to handle the intensity of loving someone as much as he loves Ysolde. The betrayal feels inevitable rather than shocking, which makes it all the more devastating.
Technical Mastery and Narrative Voice
Hastings’ decision to alternate between Ysolde’s polished, introspective voice and Joah’s raw Mancunian dialect is inspired. The contrast highlights their fundamental incompatibility while simultaneously showing how perfectly they understand each other. The author’s command of both voices is impressive—Joah’s sections in particular feel lived-in and authentic, never slipping into caricature despite the heavy use of regional dialect.
The pacing is deliberately uneven, mimicking the rhythms of the relationship itself. Moments of intense intimacy are followed by periods of tension and miscommunication. This structural choice keeps readers off-balance in the best way, never allowing them to settle into comfort.
Fame, Performance, and Authentic Self
One of the novel’s strongest themes is the exploration of how fame distorts authentic connection. Both Ysolde and Joah are professional performers—she in front of cameras, he on stage—and Hastings expertly shows how this performance anxiety bleeds into their private moments. They’re constantly aware of being watched, judged, consumed by others, which makes their rare moments of genuine vulnerability all the more precious.
The inclusion of actual magazine articles and interviews within the narrative is a clever device that shows how their private pain becomes public entertainment. The tabloid coverage of their relationship feels authentically intrusive and cruel, adding another layer of pressure to an already fraught situation.
Where the Novel Stumbles
While Time of Your Life is largely successful, it’s not without its issues. The secondary characters, particularly Richie Harrigan and Lala Caravella, occasionally feel more like plot devices than fully realized people. The ending, while thematically appropriate, may frustrate readers hoping for a more definitive resolution.
Additionally, some of Joah’s behavior crosses lines that make it difficult to maintain sympathy for him, particularly his drug use around Ysolde. While this is clearly intentional on Hastings’ part, it creates a challenging reading experience that won’t appeal to all romance readers.
A Worthy Successor to Literary Romance
Time of Your Life stands alongside works like Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life in its willingness to examine love’s capacity for destruction. This is literary fiction disguised as celebrity romance, using the familiar trappings of the genre to explore deeper questions about identity, performance, and the cost of connection.
Hastings has created something rare: a romance that acknowledges love’s power to both heal and harm, often simultaneously. It’s a difficult read emotionally, but an essential one for anyone interested in honest portrayals of human connection.
Similar Reads for Further Exploration
For readers captivated by this intense exploration of fame and love in “Time of Your Life”, consider:
- Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid – For similar ’70s music industry drama
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller – For another tragic love story told with lyrical precision
- Normal People by Sally Rooney – For complex relationship dynamics and authentic dialogue
- The Conditions of Will by Jessa Hastings – The author’s previous work exploring similar themes
- Beach Read by Emily Henry – For a lighter take on writers and complicated relationships
Final Verdict
Time of Your Life is Jessa Hastings at her most fearless and accomplished. It’s a novel that trusts its readers to handle complexity, contradiction, and heartbreak without neat resolutions. This isn’t escapist romance—it’s an unflinching examination of what happens when two people love each other more than they love themselves, and how that kind of love can be both salvation and destruction.
The novel succeeds because Hastings never apologizes for her characters’ flaws or attempts to sand down their rough edges. Ysolde and Joah are beautiful, damaged people who find in each other both their greatest joy and their ultimate undoing. In lesser hands, this might feel manipulative or tragic for tragedy’s sake. Instead, Hastings creates something that feels inevitable, necessary, and utterly real.
This is a book that will stay with readers long after the final page, not because it provides easy answers, but because it asks the hardest questions about love, fame, and what we’re willing to sacrifice for both. It’s Hastings’ finest work to date, and establishes her as a significant voice in contemporary literary romance.