Summary of Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns

Below is a summary of Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns, a review, a character guide, and an explanation of the ending. Wait for Me is a dual-timeline historical fiction novel that explores the music industry’s duplicity and the sacrifices it takes to be a songwriter, as well as deeper themes of belonging and motherhood. I could get enough of this engaging story.

As soon as I started this book, I knew it was going to be a book club hit! I wanted to make sure that I did not miss any details, so I took notes on the plot and themes. I wanted to be able to provide you with a thorough summary and review – especially in case you listened to the story, which is how I would recommend it be consumed.

If you are thinking about picking this book for your next book club, you can check out my post Wait for Me Book Club Questions to help you out.

Summary of Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns

The story opens with an overview of Elle Harlow’s disappearance between her Nashville show and the concert she was supposed to perform in PA in 1973. It was said she drove off in her Studebaker in 1973 with her pink and white guitar and was never seen again. She was 21.

In 1991 a meteor strikes in Lenora, PA. 

Part 1 – The Last Night of the World, 1991

Marijohn works at her dad’s gas station, which is also home to his makeshift museum to Elle Harlow. She dreams of leaving to study music, but doesn’t want to leave her dad alone, and she can’t afford to leave anyway. Her best friend Lazarus is leaving in the morning and she wants to confess her love to him before he goes.

Her dad runs a makeshift museum, dedicated to Elle, because he believes he was the last person to see her alive. He gets cheated out of money often because he pays for trinkets linked to Elle, even though most are fakes. And he also believes Marijohn is Elle’s daughter, because around the time Elle disappeared, a woman Abe swore looked like her came to his gas station in Lenora. When he went inside the gas station to get a pen for her to sign the pump, she left a baby in a wicker trunk by the gas pump. But no one believes it was really Elle except Abe.

Lazarus goes to visit Marijohn an hour before the meteor hits. Laz and Marijohn write music together in the woods nearby. Laz is leaving for college in the morning to study accounting. He’s the son of the local preacher. Laz plays the guitar while she plays the mandolin.

Laz suggests they record Marijohn’s song, and she kisses him. He wipes his mouth and claims he doesn’t want to leave her as her mother did, so he doesn’t want to start anything. They are clinging together when the meteor strikes. They had it recorded on tape.

They venture into the swamp to try to retrieve the meteor, and they discover Elle Harlow’s guitar. On their way back to town, Marijohn begins to believe Elle really is her mother. She watches the footage Laz gave to the news over and over.

People descend on the town to hunt for the meteor, and Laz comes back after being made into a hero on the news. Marijohn is upset he gave her recording to the news, but he did it so the world would hear her music – something he thinks she’s too scared to have done on her own.

The next day, Lazarus is on the news singing Marijohn’s song. Marijohn and Abe head to the woods, and they find the Studebaker bumper from Elle’s car. Abe declares that he was building the museum so Marijohn had her history, and now he’s going to make sure she can get financial aid and go to college. 

Lazarus tells her a studio in Nashville wants him to come demo songs. He said no because they didn’t want her song; they just wanted him. She tells him to go to Nashville.

3 days after Laz leaves, Elle Harlow appears. She saw Marijohn on the news and demands to know where she got the mandolin. Marijohn tells her to explain where she’s been first.

Part 2 – What Happened to Elle Harlow 1964 – 1972

When she was little, Elle learned to sing from Merry, a mountain woman who couldn’t speak. People called Merry when they were sick. She lived in her car and played the mandolin.

Merry had found the mandolin broken, so she fixed it so she could learn to play it, and it was in 1964 that she met Elle. Elle was in the woods to find Merry because her brother had pneumonia. Merry is able to help her for a short time, but eventually Ruben dies, and Elle digs the grave herself. Elle begins to follow Merry. While watching Merry help others, and even Susannah, Elle’s mother. That’s when Elle’s first song comes to her.

Eventually, Merry beckons Elle in to help her with a patient. When she helps someone with her singing, his mother gives her a guitar. Elle and Merry work together for 5 years, during which Hosea, Elle’s dad, comes home looking different and angry in a way his family has never seen.

Elle flees to Merry, who she knows wants her company. And they work closely together, but one day Merry won’t let her come for a job, and Elle storms away angry. After a week, she goes to ask what she did wrong. But she realized something was wrong, and she went to help Merry who is in a secluded cabin with no windows.

Merry was tending a woman who looked just like Merry, and Elle realized it was Merry’s sister who was gravely ill. Elle feels that Merry didn’t need her because Merry never told Elle about her hidden sister. Merry knew Elle was there, and she is angry. Merry sends her home in the storm.

Merry gets ready to drive Elle home, but then Merry fell at a bad angle, hitting her head, and dying instantly. Elle tries to drive Merry home, but she floods the engine. She leaves her body and runs home.

Elle blames herself for her friend’s death. She buries her at the river, singing a song for her, and she takes the mandolin. Elle becomes a medicine woman for a short time, but when a fire sweeps through, and rescue workers come, she goes home to wallow in grief. 

Elle writes music and tells her mom she wants to leave to get a job, but will come home on weekends to heal people, but her mom tells her not to come back. She wants her to go to Nashville, sell her music, and not look back.

The whole hillside helps Elle gather what she needs to leave, including getting her the Studebaker. Elle tries a few ways to be discovered in Nashville. Leo helps her find a boarding house. Eventually, Josie, a secretary at a recording studio, helps her get seen by Arlo, but when she performs for the executives, it doesn’t go well. Josie and Elle begin playing music together.

Elle learns Josie needs help with her songwriting. Together they write songs that they know will be hits. Josie knows Elle is homesick, so she invited Elle to Thanksgiving with her family. Elle finds out Josie comes from a wealthy family that doesn’t approve of her lifestyle choices. Elle decides to camp outside for the night until she hears a scream. 

She finds Jaqueline in a tub, bleeding from her wrists, and Josie’s mother trying to stop the bleeding. She uses Merry’s yarrow root to try to help. Jaqueline is kept in the back of the house for being “dour.” 

While she is able to help Jaqueline with Merry’s remedy, she also reveals that she’s a mountaineer, and in doing so, Josie changes her feelings about Elle. She claims there is something off about Elle. Elle leaves to go back to Nashville and never sees Josie.

At Christmas she heads home but lays in bed for days. Susannah is able to help her talk through the pain. While Elle is at home, she hears Josie on the radio singing her songs. Josie claims the album Elle wrote about losing Merry, was about Luke, a boy she loved who’d gone to war. The album is a sensation.

Elle heads back to Nashville and confronts Arlo about Josie stealing her songs. He offers Elle a record deal of her own. Elle initially turns him down, but Leo convinces her to accept.

Elle undergoes a transformation to sell records, but she’s not sure she likes who she is on the cover. Arlo gives her a pink gingham guitar that she hates, the same one Marijohn found a piece of earlier in the story. As she’s touring in her new state, she wipes off her lipstick, goes on stage barefoot, and sings. The crowd loves the real her even when she sings a song Josie stole from her.

Arlo wants Elle to record her own version of the song, but Elle would have to pay royalties to Josie for the music Josie stole. She refuses. She wants to write her own music, but nothing will come. She gets advice to “live a little” and then the inspiration will strike. Arlo says she has too much Nashville in her, and he sends her to Lenora, PA.

In Lenora, Elle stumbles upon the workshop of a mandolin maker. She is instantly reminded of Merry, and she falls asleep. She awakens to a stranger holding a gun to her face. Elle explains that Arlo sent her, and he says Arlo is his cousin. He realizes that Elle has been sent there like others before, to write music. Elle falls asleep wondering his name and wakes up with a song in her head.

Elle called him Weston in her head. Over time, they strike up a friendship, and he helps her with suggestions on her music. She begins to fall in love with herself again. She tells him the story of what happened to her album. She and Weston sleep together. She finishes the album and wakes to see Weston gone, without a note, and he took Merry’s mandolin. Merry’s mandolin appeared 20 years later in Marijohn’s hands on the news of the meteor.

Part 3 – Third Outlaw (1973-1991)

When Elle showed up on the porch, she demanded the mandolin. But Marijohn wants answers. She quickly realizes that Elle has been in Lenora before. Marijohn plays the mandolin for Elle. They spend the night playing Elle’s music together. Elle explains that the mandolin has been cleaned up since she last saw it.

Back in 1972, Elle returns to Arlo, telling him about what she saw in the woods. She plays him the album, and he says, “This is the album you will be known for,” cementing that she’ll never get to claim the music Josie stole from her. Wounds From a Lover is an overnight hit. 

This time around, Ellen refused to change her image, going back to the woman she was at heart. She finds success but looks for Weston in every crowd. And she hasn’t written more music or seen Josie, who is away overseas. With Josie set to return to Nashville, a performance is planned at the Ryman Theatre for the Grand Ole Opry. Elle says she will be delighted to perform to welcome Josie home, but Arlo senses trouble. They ask her to perform one of her songs that Josie had stolen, and she readily agrees.

The night of the performance, it breaks her heart to hear country’s greatest musicians singing her songs and attributing them to Josie. Weston showed up backstage in the dark, pleading for her, and she just asks for her mandolin back. He asks if that’s all she has to say to him, and she ignores him and prepares to go out on stage. From her place on stage, she can see Josie sitting in the front row with Weston’s arm entwined in hers. He’s in an army uniform. 

Elle understood everything at once. Weston had been hiding in the woods because he was supposed to be at war. Elle sang with all her heart, thinking about how if Josie had never betrayed her, she never would have fallen in love with Weston in the woods.  When she opens her eyes from singing, the audience is silent. Josie is on stage next to her asking for help. Josie leaned toward Elle and kisses her cheek. Elle responds by punching her in the nose.

Elle flees the theater before Arlo can get to her, already knowing the headlines of the morning would paint Elle as a villain and Josie as a victim. Elle doesn’t regret it. She heads immediately to her solo gig in PA, hoping to reset herself. She thought she heard a baby cry – the echo of her brother Ruben – and she sang as she drove towards Lenora. She pulls into a gas station and falls asleep.

She awakens to a young Abe calling her name. He goes to get a pen for her to sign the gas pump when she discovers the baby in her trunk. She leaves it next to the gas pump. As she drives away, she realizes that Josie saw her presence at the show as an olive branch.

When she was distracted, Elle drove off the side of the road, crashing her car into the swamp. As the car goes under the water, a strong arm pulls her out. Elle thinks it’s Merry she sees, and she realizes she was unconscious and dreaming of her. The vision gives her the strength to free herself.

She takes the bus home to the mountain. She asks Susannah if she blames her for what happened to Merry. Susannah says everyone on the mountain knows it was an accident and that Merry and Elle loved each other. She then tells Elle that if she’s done with Nashville, that’s fine, but she can’t use Merry or Josie as a reason to quit. Elle gave herself amnesty and headed home to live with her mom.

For 18 years, she lived undisturbed on the mountains with her neighbors denying her presence to strangers, protecting her anonymity. In 1989, Hosea passed. In 1991, she saw the meteor on the news and noticed the mandolin Marijohn was playing.

After all this time, seeing the mandolin reignited Elle’s passion for music and brought the memories flooding back. She leaves to find the mandolin and Marijohn. Now, she realizes that fate wants her to help this girl, so she brings Marijohn to a bar so she can play for her first audience. When Marijohn panics on stage, Elle comes up to help her, stepping back when Marijohn comes into her own. That’s when Elle realizes that Marijohn is Josie’s kid.

Elle realizes that Marijohn and the mandolin were together, and she wants to get answers. Marijohn confronts her, believing Elle knows her mother. Determined to get to the bottom of it all, Elle heads to Arlo’s house.

Arlo opens the door, and Elle announces she’s ready to come back. He doesn’t want her back – Elle is the bestselling Folk singer of all time because she disappeared. He wants to keep her that way. He says he’s protecting her by not letting her bring herself down. He says no one wants an album from a 40-year-old past her prime. He won’t help her.

She takes one of her Grammys and leaves. She heads to Josie’s house and confronts her. Josie says she took the songs because they were raw and equally hers as they worked on them together. That Elle botched her audition, so it was Josie’s turn. Josie says they are the same. Elle says Josie fed on her good parts and wouldn’t accept her darkness. Elle says she’s there with news of Josie’s daughter. Josie asks how she’s seen her, and Elle said she left her in the backseat of her car at the Ryman, which Josie denies. They realize Arlo did it when Josie asked for his help.

Elle tells her that Abe kept the name for her daughter that she wished for. Elle does see some of herself in Josie. She asks after Jaqueline and learns she died shortly after Marijohn was born. That’s why she felt she couldn’t keep the baby. Josie doesn’t know who the father is. Elle says she thinks Marijohn would like to hear from Josie.

Josie gives Elle a choice – Josie can contact her daughter, or Josie can sign back the rights to Elle’s music. It’s her choice. Elle wants to know why it has to be either or, but she makes her choice to help. She tells Josie to talk to her daughter. Josie, frustrated, signs over the rights to the music instead, and Elle realizes they are both miserable.

Elle doesn’t know what to do, realizing 20 years ago she would have shouted from the rooftops with excitement, but she didn’t want her music rights like this.

Susannah advises her daughter on what to do. Elle admits she wishes Marijohn were her daughter. She drives to the recording studio and asks Arlo why he left the baby in her car. He thought Elle would care for the baby for a week, and then they would get it back. He tells her he didn’t think she would disappear; he looked for her before giving up, but Luke Weston hunted all over the mountains for her. Arlo says he now lives on his property, but she needs to stay away from him.

She shows him her new music rights, and he tells her it will never hold up in court.  He tells her he still owns Josie’s music and the rights to her next album, which he won’t publish. She says she will bury him. He laughs and walks away.

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Wait for Me Review

Wait for Me Ending Explained (With Spoilers)

2 months later, Marijohn still hasn’t heard from Elle. One day, she hears Lazarus’s new song on the radio. She gets a package from him, saying he loves her and he wants to come home. She didn’t want to wait for him anymore.

Then Elle comes back. Elle gives Marijohn a birth certificate that confirms Josie as her mother. Elle wants Marijohn to perform with her as she re-records her stolen album live. Elle arranges to play a concert on Arlo’s lawn without telling him. Marijohn listens to Lazarus song over and over. Elle warned her that he is going to steal her music someday.

Lazarus overheard that Elle was back while recording in Nashville. He comes home to tell Marijohn. He says he’s been staying with Arlo, recording for his studio. Marijohn heads to Nashville. Lazarus and Marijohn get into a huge fight on the way. They kiss.

Marijohn finds Weston and shows him the mandolin. Marijohn wants Weston to convince Arlo to let them play the concert. Then Lazarus and Marijohn head to Josie’s house. Josie thinks Elle told Marijohn to punish her. She says Marijohn looks like Jacqueline. Then Josie runs away.

On the drive back to Lenora, Lazarus confesses his love, but knows he’s gonna hurt her because he can’t stay in Lenora. Marijohn goes home and writes a song for her mother.

Together, Marijohn and Elle perform the stolen album at the big concert. Then Marijohn sings her original music. Elle sees Josie in the audience watching her daughter. The concert ends, and Elle goes to a cabin in the distance and then jumps into the river. Weston finds her there.

They have it out. Elle doesn’t understand how she could tell him all about Merry, and he still did what he did. Arlo is Luke’s family, so he laid low in the woods for the summer to help him out so Josie’s album could be tied to a real person. But when Elle showed up, their love was real, and he never got a chance to explain it all. He took her mandolin because it was rotting, and he needed to fix it to save it.

He put the mandolin in her trunk that night in 1973. He came to tell her what happened, and all she cared about was the instrument, and he got upset. Elle then tells him about the baby, too. He tells her he never had a romantic connection to Josie; he actually played back-up on her album and knew when he was recording that she couldn’t have written those songs. He tells her he wishes he had left with her all those years ago.

Elle disappears again. The Opry does a tribute song to all three of her albums. And the live recording of the concert at Arlo’s is a success. Marijohn is then hounded by people begging to work with her. She heads home. She sees Lazarus on the night of the Opry tribute. They go to the ravine where they find the meteor. Lazarus says he’s sorry about Elle, but he wanted to show Marijohn that sometimes lost things aren’t lost at all. They leave the meteor. 

Lazarus says he thinks the reason she hasn’t agreed to work with anyone yet is that her recordings won’t be as good as when they were just singing to each other, or she was singing with Elle. He says she’s right, but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t make the music. She heads back to Nashville to make music with other women, hoping to see Elle again someday. Her dad comes with her and Lazarus heads to college to study accounting, because someone is going to need to help Marijohn manage the money she will make some day.

Before she leaves Lenora, she finds Weston’s old cottage and finds a note from Elle saying, “I’m coming back. Marijohn recalls Elle saying, “Love has to die so music can live,” and she realizes that wasn’t true.

Character Guide for Wait for Me

Main Characters

• Elle Harlow – Singer, disappeared at age 21 in 1973
• Marijohn Shaw – possible daughter of Elle
• Merry – Silent medicine woman from Elle’s youth 
• Josie – Arlo’s secretary/ Singer-songwriter

Family/ Friends

• Abe Shaw – Marijohn’s adopted dad
• Lazarus – Marijohn’s best friend/ love-interest
• Arlo – record executive
• Leo – a man from Nashville who helps Elle when she needs it.
• Jacqueline – Josie’s twin sister
• Weston – Elle’s lover 
• Luke – Josie’s army boyfriend
• Susannah – Elle’s mom
• Hosea – Elle’s dad
• Rueben – Elle’s younger brother 

What to Read After Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns: Book Recommendations

Frequently Asked Questions

Epilogue

I hope you enjoyed this summary of Wait for Me as much as I enjoyed writing it up. Did you find this helpful for preparing for book club? Did you like this book as much as I did?