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1-Page Summary of Me Before You
Overall Summary
The story begins as Will Traynor is leaving his girlfriend, Alicia, in bed and heading out the door for work. He decides not to take his motorbike because it’s raining hard outside. As he steps into the road to hail a cab, he is hit by another cyclist and left unconscious. The book then moves forward several years later to introduce Louisa Clark, a 26-year-old woman with outlandish fashion sense living in the tiny village of Bishop’s Stortford in Essex, England. She works at her family’s café called Buttered Bun that her mother owns and has worked there for six years. When she learns that they have to close down after failing financially, Lou goes home dejectedly where she tells this news to her long-term boyfriend Patrick who simply tells Lou to buck up and find another job like everyone else does when their jobs are lost or taken away from them.
Lou goes to the job center and finds only low-level jobs. Finally, she is left with a choice between a six month caretaking position for an elderly quadriplegic man or no job at all. She chooses to go ahead with the interview because of the pay and benefits offered by Camilla Traynor, who happens to be intimidating in her own right. Lou meets Will Traynor, who is angry that his mother has hired yet another person he does not want caring for him.
Lou does her best to help Will, but he doesn’t seem to appreciate it. He ignores her and sulks in his room while she does chores for him. The nurse Nathan helps with his physical needs, but Will never speaks to Lou or Nathan. Lou keeps at it because they need the money even more now that Treena wants to go back to school. Two weeks into this job, Alicia and Rupert visit Will’s house and awkwardly tell him that they are getting married after bonding in the wake of his accident. They also inform him that they’re going on a honeymoon around the world without him because he can’t travel due to his disability, which angers Will greatly as he smashes all of their pictures together from their previous relationship/friendship life before the accident occurred; however, Lou attempts to fix them for him despite being yelled at by Will for trying too hard (which is what she thought was happening). Lou shouts back at him saying “I’m not your maid”, which seems like something else entirely until later when we see how much respect came out of that moment where she stood up against someone who needed help but didn’t want it (Will).
Lou and Will are now on better terms, and Will even lets Lou drive him to a doctor’s appointment. At the doctor’s office, Lou sees the scars on Will’s wrists from when he tried to commit suicide. Soon after that trip, Lou gets stuck at Will’s house during a snowstorm while helping take care of him as he struggles with the flu. After that night together, they become true friends. They share more about their lives: Lou tells Will about her quiet life watching her family pursue their hobbies while she watches from afar; meanwhile, Will encourages her to stretch herself out of her comfort zone by trying new things like foreign films or classical music. Despite these promising moments between them both, it turns out that in six months is the date where they plan for an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland so that he can end his life there peacefully without causing any trouble for anyone else around him who might be affected by his death if it was done here in America instead
Camilla is a magistrate who lives with her husband and son. Her son has depression, which he feels will limit his life in the future. Camilla ignores this fact and focuses on her job instead. When Will attempts suicide, she realizes that she needs to let him go to Dignitas so that he can end his life without being tortured by it first.
