How did Jackie's family die in My Life with the Walter Boys? The backstory was first written by a 15-year-old on Wattpad

But every so often someone new comes in and asks the question the show answers in the first ten minutes and then mostly leaves alone: wait, what happened to her family?

The short, awful version

Jackie Howard's mother, father, and older sister Lucy all died in a car accident. In the pilot, Jackie is at a school event in New York during spring break, waiting for her parents to arrive with Lucy, whom they've just picked up early from college at Bennington. She keeps texting her sister. Her sister doesn't answer.

Then her Uncle Richard shows up instead, and the look on his face is the whole exposition. Everyone in the car is gone.

The show never explains what caused the crash. No drunk driver, no ice, no mechanical failure. It just happened, which is arguably the more honest choice and definitely the more devastating one. Jackie's mother, Angelica, was a fashion designer, and the dresses she left behind become a whole subplot in season 2 when Jackie can't bring herself to sell them.

The pilot needle-drops Dua Lipa's "Hallucinate" right before Jackie's world ends. The season 3 finale plays "Don't Start Now" at a party Jackie planned herself. Halsall says the callback is "absolutely deliberate." I did not need to know that and now I cannot un-know it.

Where the story actually came from

The bones of all this were laid down in 2010 by a 15-year-old in Wisconsin named Ali Novak, who posted the story on Wattpad under the username fallzswimmer. She's said the original was Vampire Diaries-inspired, which explains a lot about the Cole/Alex situation.

In the book, Jackie is 16 (the show made her 15), and her family dies in what the blurb cheerfully calls a "freak car accident," which is a very 2010 Wattpad way to phrase a triple fatality. The novel racked up more than 20 million reads before Sourcebooks published it in 2014.

The person who found it was Melanie Halsall, then head of development at iGeneration Studios, the company behind The Kissing Booth. "I could see straight away that it could be a TV series," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "I could immediately see how you could expand that world exponentially." Reader, she did.

Novak on writing Jackie at 15 and revisiting her at 33

Novak finally wrote the sequel, My Return to the Walter Boys, which came out in 2025. Getting back into a voice she created as a sophomore was, by her own account, a strange experience.

"I was 15 when I wrote the first book. I'm about to turn 33. I'm not even close to being a teenager anymore," Novak told TODAY. "It was almost like I needed to scrape off years of rust to get Jackie's voice."

She also confirmed there was an earlier, abandoned sequel called My Life as a Walter Boy that "will never see the light of day." Respect. We all have a Google Doc like that.

Why it still matters three seasons in

A few reasons the accident keeps echoing:

• It's the reason Jackie is in Colorado at all. Katherine Walter was her mother's best friend and became her guardian.
• It's why she copes by overachieving. Princeton is the plan because the plan is the only thing she can control.
• It sets up the series' recurring nightmare: people Jackie loves getting into cars. Season 3 ends with Cole run off the road by Danvers, and Nikki Rodriguez, who plays Jackie, has said the season is basically "all of her worst fears" coming true.

So no, the show isn't going to give you a forensic report on the Howard family car. But it's going to keep reminding you that Jackie's whole personality is a grief response with good hair. That's the show. That's why we're here.