Growing up in Gainesville can mean sharing the road with alligators.
For Darianne Schramm, a 39-year-old Gainesville native and newly published author, watching animal control remove one from her driveway gave her the “full Gainesville experience.”
Colorful experiences like this fueled her creativity from an early age. By elementary school, Schramm was writing short stories and magazine articles in her free time.
Over three decades later, Schramm released her debut novel, “72 Hours of You,” Sept. 1.
The young adult novel, inspired by anxiety she felt during the coronavirus pandemic, centers on making the most of the time you have.
“I felt like I was seeing people with clocks over their heads,” Schramm said.
The novel brings that image to life through protagonist Sydney, who can see pink clocks above people’s heads signifying they have 72 hours left to live.
“This book was born out of the struggle to figure out how to live a meaningful life when you are scared that it might end,” Schramm said.
Though Schramm left Gainesville for college, the city left a defining mark on her creative projects.
Gainesville was one of the best places in the world to grow up, Schramm said, particularly in the ‘90s. It gave her the freedom and safety to be who she was.
Seeing people in Gainesville succeed in creative industries allowed Schramm to embrace her own originality, she said.
“So many great writers, actors and so many amazing bands have come from Gainesville,” she said. “Growing up there, you could just feel that around you.”
Tom Petty’s storytelling especially inspired Schramm, who analyzed lyrics from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ discography for her master’s thesis.
Like Petty, Schramm eventually left Gainesville and moved to Los Angeles to pursue writing.
But her Gainesville roots followed her to the page in the form of rebellious childhood experiences.
For Schramm, this often meant skipping class and driving up to St. Augustine for the day with friends or hanging out at the Oaks Mall.
Her parents also surprised her with a “hooky day” at least once a year. Once, she and her parents added spray paint art to the iconic 34th Street Wall.
The rebellion of Schramm’s teenage years in Gainesville are parallelled in her book, she said, such as when main characters Sydney and Peter ditch class to hang out in New York City.
Schramm hopes readers will laugh as much as they cry.
The novel’s humor and heartache “go hand in hand,” she said, reflecting her own tendency to accompany sadness with a joke.
Rather than using humor to suppress deep emotions, Schramm sees it as a way to confront them.
“If you can go there with humor,” she said, “it’s much more accessible to find your way into those darker, a little bit scarier philosophical concepts.”
Despite the novel’s more serious themes like mortality and grief, Schramm thinks it will leave readers feeling hopeful and encourage them to hold their loved ones a bit closer.
Stephanie Smith, a 67-year-old UF English professor and author, said young adult novels don’t shy away from addressing life-altering issues despite the notion they are comforting reads.
“The interesting thing about most young adult novels, though, is that they’re not comfortable," she said. “They make you uncomfortable.”
Young adult books confront themes of mortality and grief, she said, concepts adolescents are beginning to think about or experience.
Schramm uses the genre to explore similar ideas, including pandemic “pre-grief,” grieving something that hasn’t happened.
Emily Brauer Rogers, a 46-year-old screenwriter, playwright and novelist, has been one of Schramm’s critique partners for four years.
“All the thoughts we think inside our head,” Rogers said, “she gets those really down.”
When she read Schramm’s early work for “72 Hours of You,” Rogers knew it wouldn’t be a book about saving people.
Schramm didn’t want to change people’s futures, she said. She wanted to discuss how people face the inevitability of death.
Schramm’s mother, Gamin Dobbie, a 63-year-old retired owner of Shea’s Glass Company in Gainesville, said she knew throughout her daughter’s literary journey that Schramm would become a successful writer, even when Schramm didn’t believe it herself.
Dobbie recalled getting tickets to a Steelers game in Jacksonville, but Schramm was more interested in her new book.
“She sat through that entire game in the stadium, no matter what was happening, reading,” Dobbie said.
With Schramm’s vocabulary and sense of humor, Dobbie always saw her daughter as a writer.
“There’s always a story going in Darianne’s head,” she said, “and there always was.”
Schramm isn’t stopping there. Her adult debut, “The Eternal Deaths of Hattie Gold,” is scheduled to be released in early 2028.
She has several books in her, Dobbie said, not just one good one.
“I just hope everyone reads the book and just loves it,” she said. “It was written with love, it was edited with love and it is a spectacular debut novel.”
Contact Kendall O’Connor at koconnor@alligator.org.
Kendall O'Connor is a journalism senior at UF and the Fall 2026 lifestyle reporter. This is her second semester at The Alligator and first semester on The Avenue desk. Kendall loves reading, practicing yoga, making playlists and going to the movies.
