PH: I’ve been trying to write a “group of friends” book for a long time, and I don’t really know why. I had a very tight, big group of friends in college, and then after college — and it was definitely a best-of-times, worst-of-times situation. I think groups of friends are the coolest, greatest little community. You know what to expect, you’ve got inside jokes. Even when they’re mean, it’s kind of fun. But there’s also a really bad toxicity to it. There’s so much gossip, so much drama, and there are often very hurt feelings. So part of me wanted to catharsize that — and I didn’t want to write it in a bad way. I wanted to write the fantasy. Millennials grew up wanting to be in the Friends apartment, getting brunch with the girls, and I wanted to find a way to create a nice group of friends. But there’s also this toxic streak I just couldn’t get away from.

ES: I mean, your book has to have conflict, unfortunately. They keep telling me. So this is your second novel.

PH: Second adult novel.

ES: Second adult novel. Did you experience the dreaded second-book syndrome?

PH: Oh yeah.

ES: Okay, good. I was like, are you better than the rest of us?

PH: No. God. I even wrote it into the main character, Didion — I gave her the yips, and I have Austin explain what that is. Because it was a lot of pressure. And it’s not like, oh my gosh, I wrote Eat Pray Love, how do I follow it up? It’s that I wrote a book that came easily, and the same thing happened with my first young adult book. I wrote a book that felt like a regurgitation of everything I’d ever consumed. It came fast and loose and I didn’t overthink it. And then this one was like, oh, I really want to get it right. And yeah, I doubted it a lot more. I’ve never written more drafts of a book. I hesitate to share the image on social media of the folder with all the different versions, because someone’s going to be like, “It shows.” And maybe it does. It was set in Provence for a while. I called them after writing it and I was like, “Wait.” And I think it was after our conversation with you — I was like, “Should it be in a winery, like The Parent Trap?” And I had to convince everybody. And then I was like, no. I don’t need to do that.

ES: I take no responsibility for that. Don’t have your editor call me. We’re all about self-praise here. If we can’t self-praise at your book launch today, when can we do it?

PH: Exactly. We’re all getting tattoos of me after.

ES: Yeah. I’m getting mine on my butt.

PH: There’s a character named Matt who’s kind of the voice of reason. Because whenever you’re doing magical realism, there’s this suspension of disbelief — at a certain point the characters have to suspend it. In my first book, I addressed that by having her say, “I feel like every time I see a movie or read a book, it’s either that they believe it too quickly, or you’re like, okay, catch on, main character.” So in this one, I just had Matt say at one point, “I haven’t been truly surprised by anything since 2016.” And I think that sums it up, because I really wanted to write something about how it’s felt for the last 10 years. It almost feels like the pandemic was a symptom of a pre-existing thing that was already going on. We were already isolating. We were already pulling back because of social media and everything. And now I feel like that’s changing. So it felt like a good time to write not only about “oh man, we’ve all fallen apart from each other,” but about finding your way back — because I do feel like people are joining mahjong clubs and going to Bravo watch parties and finding their way to be around each other again. I think everybody’s missed each other. And the main character’s really mad, which people are going to struggle with — she’s really angry. But that’s no excuse to be lonely for the rest of your life.

ES: Yeah. Unless you’re a guy.

PH: [laughs]

ES: Self-imposed isolation. The male loneliness epidemic. Bullshit. Anyway — I love that there’s a found-family aspect, but there’s also blood family mixed in with the found family. Can you talk about exploring those themes and how they mix together? Because there’s this thing, especially with mom and daughter and sisters — are we more friends? Are we peers? What is the relationship?

PH: Well, as some people here may know, because they’ve been on the podcast, I have a podcast with my mom and brother. Brother comes and goes, but mother’s there. I kind of reverse-engineered it — a lot of people find that family thing through found family, where a friend becomes family. My family is my friends too. So I have a lot of crossover. Like I said, I’ve had the friend group, the community. The one group of friends that was more recent, that wasn’t college — man, it’s tight. And they’re like a family that I have disowned. A family we’re no contact with. NC. So for me, writing the sister character — again, many versions — they were all just friends at one point, and it all changed a lot, but ultimately it didn’t really matter, because sisters at that age go through phases of being one or the other. And the mom not knowing her spot. I don’t want to have kids, I’m pretty sure. And part of it is because somebody — it might have been Charli XCX — somebody said, before the brat craze, “I don’t know how I’d ever give up being the brat.” And I get that. I feel like I’d never really know how to suddenly be the woman, be the adult. And that’s the mom, Babe — she’s kind of like, maybe I never should have been a mother, but also maybe I should have just met her where she was. I don’t know. So it’s a lot about expectation, and releasing expectation, and being like: she’s a person. All these people are people, whether they’re blood relatives or not.

ES: Can we just talk a little bit about eldest daughters —

PH: Can we ever?

ES: — and why they’re the best, and where their parade is? I’m also an eldest daughter.

PH: Are you? I feel like that’s why I don’t want to have kids.

ES: Yes. That’s why.

PH: I feel like I raised so much. No offense, Mommy {Beth Harbison is in the audience}

BH: None comprehended!

PH:You did work too. It’s so funny, because now I’m kind of claiming it, but I did not write this to be an eldest-daughter book. Just like when I wrote my first young adult book — the one that also just came out of me — I did not write a book about bullying, but I sure did. And once this was completed... I was at Gabrielle’s {Korn} book launch the other day and I asked, did you learn a lesson when you wrote it? Because I find that every time I write, I learn the lesson afterwards. So I wrote it and then I was like, oh, eldest-daughter shit. And — sorry, do we swear at Barnes & Noble? Okay, we’re good. Thank you. So yeah, it ended up being really an ode to eldest daughters. And every time somebody loves this book in the reviews — which I only look at in the very beginning phase — they’re eldest daughters. They’re eldest daughters. And the people who don’t get it, I’m like, you freaking youngest-child brat. Ohhh was everything taken care of?

ES: Did everyone love you unconditionally?

PH: Yeah.

ES: Did you not feel the need to do all the work no one asked you to do?

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PH: Well, I’m an eldest daughter, but I also worked from a very young age. And millennials of our age group — I did not want to order off the kiddie menu. I wanted to grow up really fast. That, combined with being an eldest daughter and just having this personality — I do take care of things when I see them. And then I resent everyone for not saying anything. It’s not a martyr thing. I just do it. I just want to be seen. This character is very — I don’t want to say bitter, because that sounds petty. She’s just very angry. And the problem is, the only way to solve it — the reason the conflict still exists — is the conflict. Because they won’t step up and be the one to solve the problem, it doesn’t get solved unless she does it. So she’s resentful of that. And being thrown together by her mom — they’re thrown together for this funeral — she’s like, I can’t get mad at my mom about this, and I have to go spend time with them. Because what am I going to do? No, I’m the eldest daughter. I’m going to show up.

ES: Of course.

PH: But as you get to know her, throughout the book, you see — man, they’ve been hella selfish. She had to do a lot of things that were not her job. And if she hadn’t, they just wouldn’t have gotten done. So you kind of understand her by the end, hopefully. But yeah. She’s mad.

ES: We’re going to get into her being mad, because I love that. And it’s a nostalgic book in a lot of ways — you’re going back in time, tracing the roots of a lot of these relationships and friendships. Can you talk about what was fun about diving into nostalgia? And what were the things where you were like, I need to include this to feel like it’s a representation of time and space?

PH: Well my mom—I can’t stop talking about my mom {laughter}. My mom, New York Times bestselling author over there — her brand is very much nostalgia too. We’re just a melancholy bunch. I’m nostalgic for many eras I never lived. I’m just so moody — not moody like in a bad mood, just... oh man, when we went to New Orleans and sat at a bar having martinis and oysters and it started to rain, I wanted to die. It was just so wonderful. You remember life in that kind of way. And I really went back and forth — I’m just going to keep talking about everybody in the audience — but Gabrielle Korn and Sophia Benoit, both here, both wrote really solid millennial nostalgia that just hit hard, where I’m like, oh my God, I forgot about that. And part of me really wanted to do that. Even Saltburn was set in 2008, and I love that. But I ended up landing on not going into specifics. Maybe the specificity is the universality, but — I was always like a hundred years old. So I don’t know if I’d hit the right notes that way. I wanted to hit just the human memories. For me it’s like: I remember being tired from being on the beach all day, getting tossed around by waves, then coming in sunburned, taking a shower, putting on your t-shirt with your hair wet down the back, and someone’s cooking. That’s the shit I get off on.

ES: Well, well, well. That answers a question I have later on.

recording gap, ES asks about the magical realism element

PH: So when I originally wrote it, there was no time loop. I wrote it from both of their perspectives, but I found—I found, I was told—I was told it was too hard to differentiate between those two voices. When I was planning, my partner is so wonderful at helping plan, he said it would be so great if you could do third person and have the book feel like a camera floating around all these characters. Which I know some people would have really enjoyed about this more ensemble book; a lot of Big Chill-type books do that. But every time I start writing in third person as the main POV, I just sound like I’m writing home from war. It doesn’t feel as personal, I don’t have as much fun. So I couldn’t. I knocked that other perspective out. Flashback chapters are always easy for me — I could do those all day. And then the time loop... There is not a trope I loathe more than Groundhog Day. And I don’t think I’d even seen Groundhog Day when I wrote this. I watched it afterwards and I was like, I hated that movie. Because it gets so laborious. It’s the same thing in yoga, where I’m like, we’re going to do this all on the left side now? God. I don’t want it. But what I loved about this was — I liked the idea, not of time just repeating and the same person facing the same challenges until they finally get it, but of time slowing down. I even experimented with, what if time stopped altogether? What if there was no night? But then I got into, “but then are there turtles?” Is anything living? Is everything frozen? I couldn’t do that. And I was like, if they’re all in the same time loop together, then maybe it won’t feel as repetitive. I wanted it to be representative of island time — of what it feels like to be a teenager, where every day in the summer is the same. Getting them trapped in time was actually the perfect way to deal with that. So the thing that was missing from the book turned out to be the magical realism. Just having them get stuck in time worked. And to me it didn’t feel like labor to revisit the same people every day — the neighbor comes over, but they’re all having a different conversation with her. Different players are in the room. Some people are getting the basket this one day, whatever. It’s different every day, and it’s the same.

ES: It has that nostalgic quality throughout, which is great. I’d love to know, on a practical level, how you kept everything straight. Do you outline? Do you just go? I usually hate asking writerly questions, but I was very curious — first of all, why you did this to yourself, and then how.

PH: I’ve been describing myself recently as sort of a jazzy writer. I do some outlining in the beginning to get major things in place, but then I riff from there and go with what it feels like. Without sounding too woo-woo — I sit down and these people have conversations, and I don’t feel in control of it. Sometimes the entire book changes based on, oh my God, no, those people are talking about that, that’s what would happen. So I didn’t outline so much as set out with something I wanted to hit. But I had Scrivener — I don’t know if you know it. I’d never used it before. I basically had a bunch of digital moving index cards with details so I could move them around and be like, okay, chapter 20 needs to move here. And it was constantly incorrect. It was so frustrating. I probably made it harder on myself. But my secret is really that I binge-write, all at once, because then I can keep it all in my brain. If I do too much other stuff, or take too much time off, then I go in and start editing and I’m like, oh, she should say this — and then two sentences later I’m like, oh yeah, because I’m consistent, she would always say that

ES: Story of my life.

PH: So I try to outline, because I know it’s the good-writer thing to do, but I hate it. Just enough of it to keep from going insane and having a bunch of continuity problems.

ES: So one of the things people say about women’s fiction is that it’s just light and fluffy. But anyone who’s read the genre knows that’s complete bullshit — the light, fluffy fare is mixed in with really serious, heavier topics. Can you talk about how you balance that, and find a way for it to be so infinitely readable but also have that weight?

PH: I think they’re having trouble with us women. I think they want to call it all rom-coms, and it’s not all rom-coms. As a person in my family — I’ve never laughed harder than at a funeral. Remember Cheesecake Factory? Our whole ghoulish family of women was just laughing our heads off.

ES: I mean, if you have a funeral at the Cheesecake Factory, I imagine it’s going to be pretty funny.

BETH: Your father’s funeral was hilarious.

PH: Oh my God. Yeah.

BETH: I had to stop you from going into the priest’s quarters.

PH: You were wasted.

BETH: I was drunk for a week. Go on.

PH: I never saw my dad’s side of the family much, but they’re funny — big Irish Catholic family. At my dad’s funeral, we were all somberly standing at the back of the church, and at one point one of my aunts that I don’t really know just goes, “Who the fuck goes first? I don’t know. Who goes first?” And I was like, I don’t know. And then everyone... and then we were all dying laughing. And then we marched down the aisle. Gallows humor is huge for me. I just try to laugh through all the pain. If there’s anything I don’t really take credit for, it’s the balance — because it’s getting talked about a lot with these books, since they’re about grief and heavy stuff, but they’re funny. The heartbreak and humor is something that’s emerged, and something I now want to make sure I can do consistently, because that’s just kind of who I am. When we went to Ireland — which is actually after I wrote my last book, which was set there — we got in a cab and the driver just started talking about how his sister died of an opioid overdose. And then, {irish accent} “oh, that’s the pub you’re going to want to go to, you’re going to have so much fun down there.” The whiplash between the two conversations... I turned to Richie and I was like, oh, that’s why I am the way I am.

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ES: It explains everything.

PH: Because I don’t think anything’s too heavy. And I don’t think there’s any situation you shouldn’t laugh at. So — I’m friendless. This book is really loud: please, someone be my friend. This is about the value of friendship, please.

ES: Exactly.

PH: What a good friend I’d be.

ES: Such a good friend. Why do you think books by women are usually considered women’s fiction, versus just fiction?

PH: Yeah, they just don’t know what to do with us. I think it partially has to do with where they put us initially — what we were allowed to write under our own names as women — and now nothing’s caught up. A lot of the biggest books, when they were coming out, it was chick lit, which is a cute name, but so dismissive.

ES: So dismissive.

PH: Chick lit. But it’s like —

ES: Let’s start calling the men’s books “dicklet.” And romance can be “clitlet.”

PH: I love clitlet.

ES: Wow.

PH: Is clitlet not taken? We need to put that on the Wet Network.

ES: There we go. The Wet Network. That’s right.

PH: She has a sex podcast, and we came up with a really great oxygen-adjacent network that was just really horny. Wet Work. Did we even get to Wet Work? Anyway.

ES: We should. Next time we get on the podcast.

PH: Exactly. So I don’t know why it’s so hard. I think if my books were rom-coms, they’d probably be selling better, because people would know what they were going into. A lot of people are feeling misled — some are like, “I thought it was going to be a rom-com,” just because it looked fun.

ES: It doesn’t look like a rom-com to me. It looks like —

PH: Yeah, I’m glad it wasn’t.

ES: — multiple people, because there are multiple hands in there. So that tells me there are more than two people in it. There are four people.

PH: A quadruple.

ES: Should we have any tissues on hand for this? How many boxes?

PH: I mean, there was one point in my last book, The Other Side of Now, where I was like, oh yeah, that’s the one where I get them. And this one too — I know exactly what point is going to make everybody cry, because it made me cry. There’s a letter in it at one point, and when I wrote it, when I read it out loud, when I edited it, when I did the narration, I was choked up every time. There’s a pinnacle of weepiness in it. I actually feel like my last one had a little more tearful moments than this one. But if you’re a crier, it’s a cry moment.

ES: You should tell me where it is so I can rip it out, because I don’t like human emotions.

PH: Sorry. It’s a surprise party.

BETH: Your last book had more tearful moments than the one about the dead mother?

PH: Yeah, who gives a shit?

{Laughter}

ES: There you go. We’re going to get into that. So — you were talking before about how Didion is angry.

PH: Tough. Tough cookie.

ES: So one might say she’s unlikable, which seems to just be the descriptor for female characters in general. Why do you think we value likability for female characters and don’t give a shit about it for male characters?

PH: Oh yeah. I’m sure Christopher Nolan is working really hard on that for The Odyssey. “Let’s make sure he’s charming in scene one.” Again, I think it’s the same thing as the whole genre issue. With my last book, I set out to — I wanted her to be likable, and I just thought she was. And then people said she wasn’t. And I was like, oh yeah, I forgot about this from my YA books, when everybody said all the girls I wrote were unlikable. The inherent thing you set out to do is give your characters somewhere to grow from. And when we look at women especially — it’s very wrapped up in the eldest-daughter stuff too — you give them somewhere to grow from, and they just seem like dicks. And she’s not, she’s really mad. People saying, “but you understand her” — yeah, it’s a book, man. That’s the point.

ES:It’s called character development. The point is you get to know her.

PH: And I do get it — if I have to read about one more hardened alcoholic journalist getting ripped out of retirement, I don’t want to read that either. I want them to be likable. I just think it’s enough that she knows she’s being a jerk. It’s enough that she’s funny. It’s enough that she’s good at her job and shows up every day. That’s all good enough for me. But not for some people. What they want is something different — they don’t want to be challenged at all. My social media presence took off a little when I started doing Hallmark movies in one minute, and that’s where our podcast started. I sure found a lot of people there, and I don’t think any of them wanted to be challenged. And I get it, because there’s a reason I was watching them too — during the pandemic it’s like, oh, I just want to have fun and make fun of something. So I think people don’t always want that out of their books, but I hate that. I don’t want the noble stoic girl who tears up the check rather than cashing it, who could never be with his brother.

ES: But people always say she’s unlikable too.

PH: Well, it’s true.

ES: We just can’t win.

PH: We can’t win.

ES: “I just didn’t get her. I didn’t understand that. She doesn’t act the way I think she should act.”

PH: Yeah. Warmth, to me, comes from self-awareness and joking around and just being pleasant to be around. I think she has that — more and more as it goes on.

ES: Should we talk about the sex scenes?

PH: Sure!

ES: I always find it interesting — there’s this dilemma: do I do a closed-door scene or an open-door scene? Closed door is where it fades to black, something you’d see in a movie. I’m really interested in hearing about your choice, why you felt they were important to portray the way you did.

PH: Yeah. Again, there’s an expectation thing. In my last book there were a lot of women who were like, “Just so you know, if you want to skip it” — there was a two-page sex scene, 400 pages in. So they didn’t want that. But then BookTok is obsessed with as stanky as it can get.

ES: Or not enough.

PH: Only two pages? You’re always going to piss somebody off. My last one didn’t call for a ton of romance, period — it was more a platonic love story between friends. And then this one... the guy was just so hot. I was like, oh, they’re going to have a beach hookup in his pickup truck, in his blue jeans and his backwards hat. That is not going to not happen.

ES: I love the acknowledgements of your book — they’re so sweet. So a question I always ask: will your mom adopt me?

BETH: You’re adopted!

recording gap - talking about grudges and the inspiration behind the book

PH: And when I wrote it, I was taking all that in. We did not ever make up, and I don’t have any intention to. So it’s not that “you’ve got to forgive everybody eventually, even if they wronged you.” It’s more that I understand how mad you can be at somebody, and how they can not deserve it — how they can not deserve your friendship. That friendship was such a huge loss, I look back on it like a death. That’s some of the grief in this book. It’s not about just forgiving people and getting past it and being the bigger person. It’s not about taking the high road. It’s about community mattering, period. Just — how mad are you? Would you rather be right, or would you rather have this again? And that’s coming into play a lot as people find their way back to friendships that aren’t parasocial, back to in-real-life, or get older and go, I should really do more about that friendship. It’s not that the person you’re still mad at from 10 years ago — you can still be mad at them, let them go, you don’t have to be the bigger person. But if you do miss them, and you do like them, care and try, because they’ll probably try back. You might just be the person who always has to go first. And that’s often me, and I get it, and I’m pissed off about it too. But you’ll find other people who are the ones who go first, and you’ll talk shit with them.

ES: I would prefer to be right.

PH: [laughs]

ES: Can you talk a little bit about the narration process — and did you learn anything about yourself as a writer by reading your book out loud?

PH: That’s a good question. I always read my books aloud more than once. I was a theater major and did plays all growing up, and then when I got published at 19, I dropped theatre, because you couldn’t do both. When we were young they told us, you can be anything, but only one thing. And now it’s like you have to be everything. I would’ve liked “you can do whatever.” So I really missed performing, and I’ve always been confident performing — my dad was a musician, I was on stage from a really young age. Narrating wasn’t on my mind at first. I narrated my last one too. Then I heard the auditions, and they were really lacking the comedy sensibility. And again, this book is both. Somebody the other day was talking about how they found the book so heavy — “it’s so crazy you’re saying it’s funny.” One of them had listened to it and one hadn’t. And I was like, yeah, it matters that it’s funny, and I’m definitely going to know the comedic beats, because I wrote it. So when I heard those auditions I was like, these are great, but I wonder if I should take a stab at it. They probably thought I was being a precious author, but I was like, just let me try. They were like, you can record it on your phone, and if you mess up just keep going. And I was like — yeah, right. As if I, an eldest daughter and podcast host, am not going to send back —

ES: “I’ve got the equipment, let’s go.”

PH: — a perfectly executed full chapter. Because they also had people audition with a chapter that had accents, kids’ voices — which drive me insane — men’s voices. The problem was, most of the people auditioning had this really classic narrator voice, and I’m like, you sound like you’re late to pick your kids up from soccer. I don’t want to hang out with you for 16 hours. I wanted it to be more normal and natural, and it’s a perfect thing for me to read my own books. It certainly wasn’t because I love my voice — everybody hates their own voice, and I feel like the book sounds like that, and I’m glad people don’t all think that. Although — I saw one review, I don’t read them all on purpose, but I saw one review where I was like, “I’m sorry, did the mare from my nightmares write this?” She was like, “Why is she so annoying? She literally sounds like Kermit.” And that is exactly what I’m afraid of. Everybody’s going to feel like that. But I loved narrating. I fell in love with it. I’m actually narrating a Genevieve Wheeler book now, because I told everyone on any team of mine, find me more audiobook work. I could just sit in a booth Monday through Friday, drinking hot tea, acting my little heart out by myself all day long. It was so fun. If an author can do it and wants to do it, they should — knowing exactly what an author means is so fun.

ES: Yeah. I guess you should do my next book.

PH: Oh, I’m happy to.

ES: Got some accents in there. Lotsa accents.

PH: A lot more sex.

ES: A lot more. Can you talk about some of the research you did for this book? I always love if there was something really weird you had to Google. Are you probably on a list somewhere?

PH: Somebody else asked me this recently, and I don’t remember having to Google anything in particular. It’s a food book, and — I was a bartender, I worked in restaurants a long time, so I funneled a lot of knowledge I have into it. The questions I ask are normally just the stupidest things. If I’m on a list, it’s the biggest-idiots list, because I’m like, wait, did this take place on Earth? My questions are so dumb that I have to Google them. Oh — tennis. I looked into a lot of tennis stuff, but cursory: what’s the fastest a tennis ball was ever hit? He did it one mile per hour faster, because he’s that hot. But yeah, dumb stuff. There wasn’t a ton of research. There’s a talk of physician-assisted suicide, and I wanted to make sure I got the tone right on all that, that I didn’t say anything horrible.

ES: That’s the punchline, too. Assisted suicide.

{laughter}

PH: Exactly. And I wanted to make sure the tennis thing wasn’t off — I didn’t want stupid things to be called out on. But not a ton of research for this one.

ES: You want to talk about dumb stuff — I once called One Direction Four Directions. Because there are four directions.

PH: North, South, East, and Harry Styles.

ES: There you go. If your book had a theme song, what would it be? Was there a song or an album... do you listen to music when you write?

PH: I’m very inspired by music, and I hyper-fixate on songs. There’s a song by an artist I don’t know — a song in French called “Zero,” by Johnnie Jane, I think. For some reason I was driving to Palm Springs, where my mom lives, and I drove all the way there listening to it over and over. It was the breeding ground for brainstorming, for some reason. And then my sister-in-law, who speaks French, I asked her what it means, and it was all about a group of friends. I was like, wait — I speak French? That was a fun discovery.

{laughter}

ES: She was like, “You don’t, but...”

PH: So that was a song I used to... and, speaking of Harry Styles, I went on a lot of walks listening to ‘As it Was.’ It’s not even, oh my God, my favorite song, but there was something about it. I made a playlist — there’s a playlist in the back of the book. I did the same thing for my last book. Music is super important to me. There was one song in particular... I’ve kind of felt like these two books are going to be part of a trilogy, and there’s this particular version of Benny Goodman — again, I’m a hundred — this Benny Goodman version of the song “Where or When.” All three of these books are kind of built around this “where or when” theme. And the song “Reunion” by Bobbie Gentry was really inspiring. The playlist has a lot of really summery songs, things that felt atmospheric — “Southern Nights.” The songs are about time, the old songs about time, because I’m remembering another life.

ES: That’s right. Nostalgia. I’m going to ask one more question, then we’ll open it up. I’m always curious how authors name their characters, and how they decide their professions. Didion is an unusual name — how’d you come up with it?

PH: It was one of those — the same way I named my dog. I was looking around the room and I was like, that’s a cool name. The White Album — when I moved to California I read that book and I loved it. I saw the name while I was just thinking, and I was like, how is Didion not a more normalized woman’s name? It’s a solid name. And then I started thinking about Joan Didion — talk about unlikable women who are just brilliant and really cool and difficult, and have also gone through hell. So she kind of just is that. And it ended up making sense that her mom, Babe, would love Joan Didion. Originally her sister was going to be the chef — Sammie was going to be the chef. There are just names I always come back to, like Kate and Nic and Sam. So I finally got to use a Sammie. Sometimes they’re not really thought out, they just come to me. Or sometimes Didion found it, and then I was like, oh yeah, that really fits. And Babe — that character’s been rattling around in my head for a long time. When I was a bartender and I opened the InterContinental at The Wharf in DC, I opened the rooftop pool bar, and I named a cocktail The Babe — a hot pink cocktail, an Arnold Palmer / John Daly-inspired thing with passion tea. And that was a woman to me. A person in my head. So she’s always been in there. A little bit of Babe from Crimes of the Heart, too.

ES: Is she still in your head?

PH: She’s still in my head. She will not get out. That’s probably why I’m so insane.

ES: Okay. Do you guys have any questions?

to audience

PH: I hate this moment. Everyone’s like, I hope someone does.

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ES: Come on, writers.

SOPHIA BENOIT: I was going to ask — since you said you don’t like doing time loops, and you don’t like that trope, is there a trope you do really like that you haven’t done yet, that you’d potentially do for another book?

PH: That’s a great question. I love a fake relationship. A lot of the tropes I love are the rom-com tropes. Forced proximity — I love when they just... and this kind of had forced proximity in it, but it wasn’t just the rom-com. I love the fake-relationship thing. It’d be fun to do that sometime. Anything where people are like, “oops, we have to love each other now, and we can’t hook up.” Those are always good.

ES: Yeah. You can just kiss to see how it goes. For the act. “We’ve got to kiss.” Okay. I’m going to go behind you first, and then, mother. Mommy.

IVA-MARIE PALMER: In your first book, and it looks like in this one — I think it’s four hands reaching for food — food plays a role. You think about what they’re eating. In the first book she’s in Hollywood, she’s got a very different diet than she does in Avalon. Can you talk about the role food plays for your characters? How and why they eat — do you ever think about that?

PH: Yeah. I’m so hungry all the time.

IVA-MARIE PALMER: Me too.

PH: My mom has several cookbooks published. Food has been in a lot of her fiction. I just grew up eating —

ES: Unlike the rest of us.

PH: Yeah, I know, sorry. Some of us are special and interesting. {laughter} But I grew up actively eating and thinking about food — going on vacations, every activity was defined around what we were having for dinner. And then I worked in restaurants a really long time, so a lot of my knowledge is there. Originally it was going to be the sister, Sammie, who was going to be a Molly Baz-type social-media huge... not like Molly Baz, but very vapid, sort of a dick. And I was like, people are just going to hate her. But having her be a chef — all my characters start as bartenders, because that’s what I spent the most time doing, and then none of them end up being bartenders. Every time I do it I’m like, oh my God, I’m always doing this, they’re never bartenders by the end. But chef — I cook all the time. My partner and I both cook all the time, talk about food, love nerding out about it. And in this book there’s a conversation where she and her mom really connect over food. There’s a scene when she’s really upset — she comes home after a breakup and her mom makes her all her favorite food. Comfort — I’m like a puppy, and food is comfort to me. When I went to Colombia and had a horrible time and got drugged and had to come home, like an emergency — it was horrible. I traveled for 24 straight hours, I was exhausted, totally depleted. And then I get myself to my car in Baltimore and drive to my mom’s house, where she’d made me macaroni and cheese and chicken tenders. That scene was very much inspired by that night, because I got there and it was like, “here’s champagne, a Xanax in every carb”

ES: Hell yeah.

PH: And then just so many episodes of Survivor. So to me — Richie, my partner, knows: if you just want to maybe burst into tears of relief and joy, you just say, “do you want to order dinner tonight?” It’s very sensory. It’s a big part of my life, it’s been a big part of my jobs, it’s been a big part of who raised me. So there’s going to be food in everything.

IVA-MARIE PALMER: Characters never eat.

PH: Oh, I know. My characters have to pee, they’ve got to eat. Mommy, you had questions?

BETH: I was going to ask you the question I always got the most. Do you know where the bathroom is?

{laughter}

BETH: I was going to say — where is Neil? What happens when you have a great character with a bunch of great lines, and everyone around him, and you just have to make the painful choice to take it out because it’s not furthering what you need to further?

PH: So I had a character in there — the main character, Didion, originally showed up with the guy she was seeing, and she got the ick as soon as they got there. And he was the only one not in the time loop, so the entire time he’s repeating things — “how do you do?” to you every morning. And it was —

ES: You gave me the ick right there.

PH: I know. It also reminded me of — the line always coming to my mind is the scene in Sex and the City when she’s like, “How you doing? Where you been?” when Carrie’s living with Aidan. I think about that a lot, because I got chills. Ick chills. So this character, Neil, was really funny to me — he could not stop putting his foot in it. He said the wrong thing every time. He was so nice, but such an idiot. And we decided — somebody told me it was going to come off like they were making fun of somebody. And it was like, you’ve got a lot of balance here, maybe don’t exhaust yourself doing that too. And I was like, I’m just going to get him his own book sometime, because that character was so funny.

BETH: He was so funny. She reads them out loud, because it’s the best way to find where the wording is funny. She’ll read it out loud to me. I made you repeat a couple of scenes one more time, all in a row. It was so funny.

PH: Oh my God, I loved it. I gave a few of those lines to the character Harrison. But yeah, Neil is not alive and well in this book, unfortunately. But he will be. And I’ll name him Neil. So keep your eyes peeled for Neil. Howdy-doody.

ES: Yes.

GABRIELLE KORN: Do you remember the first thing you wrote when you started working on it?

PH: Oh my gosh. The first thing I wrote... well, it’s become a big inside joke. I wrote a lot of random little things, because my mom was published, and both my aunts were also writers — there was just always writing going on. So in one way it seemed really accessible, and in another way I just didn’t appreciate getting published so young until later. I was like, what? You were a child. And it’s so funny, because my writing was just so bad — so bad. And then suddenly that book hit. I remember being in my Aunt Jacqueline’s house, and I remember writing this story, this book, about a hard-boiled detective. It was called The Dead Ringer. It was about this woman — this child, I’m sure — this girl whose dad had been a detective, and then she took over for him. And God knows where I got this, because I know I didn’t invent it, but I thought I did then. She’s at a bar — I’m writing this, I’m like 14 — and she orders a whiskey and says, “Leave the bottle.”

{laughter}

PH: And we just can’t stop saying it, because it’s the funniest, worst thing. I wrote that, and then four years later I was like, “I’ll sign a contract for three books.” Oh yeah. She’s definitely got it in her.

ES: She’s got to leave the bottle.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The book is set in Georgia. You’re an East Coast girl — how’d you pick Georgia? Do you have any connection there?

PH: Yes. I’m from the DC area, but I lived in Florida twice. I went to college in St. Augustine, then I lived in Naples, Florida. I drove up and down that coast a lot — we went on vacation to Florida a lot, but I also lived there. When I lived in Florida I was 23, had a car, and was like, I want to hang out with my friends in Baltimore tomorrow, I’ll drive up now — and just set up for a 16-hour drive. So I drove up and down a lot, and I always stopped in Georgia. I always stopped in Savannah, but I was always struck by the vibe, the mood. I pulled off at one point just because there was this beautiful — it was like nothing, you look at the pictures and it’s not the most shockingly stunning thing, but I felt like I’d lived another life there, maybe been killed in this spot. It was just so beautiful — Spanish moss and live oaks and the setting sun. I took that picture, and I’ve thought about it a lot as inspiration. I always loved the atmosphere of the South. I really wanted to set something there, so I set it on a fictional island off the coast of Georgia, so as not to make anyone particularly angry — like there’s something wrong with the actual place I picked. So I set it in a fictional place called Mercy Island. I love the moody South, so I had to.

ES: I have one more question, and then we’re going to let you sign your books. What are you working on next? Can you tell us anything?

PH: Well — again, it’s become this trilogy, this “where or when” trilogy. There’s always the chance — this is how it’s been for me, I write really fast, so people usually let me pivot if I want to. It could very well be that a month from now I’m like, I’ve got a totally different idea, and everybody loves that and I write that. But right now I’m working on a time-travel thing — an actual time-travel thing. Speaking of About Time — a girl did a fun thing. I loved About Time. Midnight in Paris. What would be great is somebody who’s not Woody Allen making one that has that same feel. I’ve never seen a time-travel movie that has the wish fulfillment I want. And it’s set in New Orleans — moody, the South, rain. I don’t want to go into too many specifics, because I haven’t figured them out yet. But it’s basically — this one’s going to be much more of a romance, because I feel like I gave friends the first time, friends and family the second time, and it was going to be sisters again this time, and I’m like, oh my God, who cares, I don’t even know. And then I was like, no, I want a big, sweeping, huge, time-worn romance. So this one’s going to be more of a romance, and I feel like it fits the little trilogy.

ES: You can’t change your mind. Nope.

PH: You’ll be one of the first to read it.

ES: Yessss. Well, congratulations!

PH: Thank you!

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Paige Harbison

• Instagram: @pharbeaux

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Elissa Sussman

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And Buy Our Books:

Elissa, Paige, and the other authors who came!

Paige Harbison

Destination Funeral (2026) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

The Other Side of Now (2025) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Here Lies Bridget, New Girl, and Anything to Have You are out of print as PH has just gotten the rights back! Hold tight!

Elissa Sussman

Funny You Should Ask (2022) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Once More with Feeling (2023) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Totally and Completely Fine (2023) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Sophia Benoit

The Very Definition of Love (2026) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Well, This Is Exhausting (2021) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Gabrielle Korn

Long Island Girls (2026) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

The Shutouts (2024) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Yours for the Taking (2023) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Everybody (Else) Is Perfect (2021) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Iva-Marie Palmer

Christmas People (2025) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible

Gimme Everything You Got (YA) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

The End of the World As We Know It (YA) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Gabby Garcia’s Ultimate Playbook (middle grade series) Amazon · Bookshop.org

Beth Harbison

Confessions of the Other Sister (2022) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

The Cookbook Club (2020) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Every Time You Go Away (2019) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

If I Could Turn Back Time (2015) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

When in Doubt, Add Butter (2012) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Shoe Addicts Anonymous (2007) Amazon · Bookshop.org · Audible · Libro.fm

Beth’s full backlist (~15+ novels + cookbooks): Amazon author page

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I mean we don’t ALWAYS have to take the high road, right? Sometimes you’re pissed and you stay pissed and you’re always pissed and you never unpiss. As a writer, maybe it should bother me. Because when you introduce a big problem, narratively, it should always be leading to a resolution. But this bitch! NOPE

When I was in college, I was a little restless. I went to college for a year at Flagler, wrote a book over the summer, got published in the fall when I started at Salisbury University, then by the Spring semester, I had transferred to Towson University, where I would graduate early from a year and a half later. I can make excuses for why I ended up at Towson, but I truly think I was just chasing this one guy and this one group of friends. I have always been completely intoxicated by the “friend group.” Aren’t we all, kind of? It’s always depicted as such fun.

I had been rejected by this guy in high school, or at least felt rejected, but always had a crush on him when we worked together at Starbucks. When I got to Towson, I hung out with my friend in this group, reconnected with him, and lo and behold, we ended up dating for years after. And he came with this group of friends.

It was truly a blast. There were so many of them that it was always a built-in party. They were deeply funny people. Everyone wanted to party all the time. Many of them were hot. As I became a girlfriend to one of its main members (because there are always main members) I became part of this group.

The dramas in that time and with those people stretched far, far beyond college, and I won’t get into them all now, but the grudge we’re talking about today (and there are several in this group) is about one person. The ride-or-die BFF I made during that time.

She was briefly seeing one of my boyfriend’s roommates, and because there were more than one girl with her first name, he called her by her last name, and so we all did, and I did the entire time we were friends. Let’s call her Michelle Connolly.

Connolly and I hit it off right away. It did not work out with the guy she was seeing, but she’d done a summer abroad in Rome with another friend we had, and basically she became part of the group anyway.

We were a specific brand of annoying. I wouldn’t be able to STAND spending time with me/us during that time. My other best friend and I had a beer pong team name (already omg) “Team Belligerence” and another girl and I were “Titty Citty” so really I was just really living a Kesha lifestyle to the core. Lots of screaming, lots of photo shoots in bathtubs with bottles of Hypnotiq taken directly to the face.

This girl and I were so obsessed with each other. We were just so sure we’d be best friends for life. Every other word was an inside joke. We were constantly buying matching outfits or dressing in tandem (neon night, for example). You could NEVER have told me what was going to happen.

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I love Bravo. I love it. Bravo Bravo f*cking Bravo. Plus one at a wedding where you know absolutely no one, the bride seems weird, and your date is a groomsmen? Keep your eyes peeled and you will find another Bravo fan amidst the guests. I’m not the first one to say it, but it truly is for women and cool men what sports is for the mainstream man. While John Cisgender is off talking to Ryan Homophobe about the chances the Chiefs have these year and why, you and I are debating the odds Summer House has of making it past Season 11. When they discuss the gold old days, when the Ravens were crushing it in their college days, we are discussing the golden era of Vanderpump Rules when Jax Taylor (genuine monster) was on our screens and unfortunately providing us with some of the best television ever made.

I have also ghostwritten for three Bravolebrities in my life so far. All of them are Housewives. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that that shit is real. Yes, things are orchestrated or arranged, but sometimes when the Housewife is describing to me the way in which they got screwed by editing, or by talking about the other Housewives, they almost seem to let slip just how real it is. The producers are working with truth that even the castmembers can’t seem to see. It’s fascinating. (Unfortunately, being sick to death of certain Housewives IRL is why I can no longer happily watch their shows.)

So the first and most boring way Bravo has made me a better writer is actually because I wrote in that world. Because ghostwriting is a pain in the ass sometimes, but it has been crucial in my career as an author as I learn and unlearn and learn again how to be less precious with my writing and how to release the pressure of it being the next great book. Ghostwriting is a way of sitting down every day with real stakes and having to write, but with the freedom of it not being about what you want your own legacy to be. It’s freeing. If exhausting.

But what Bravo really taught me about writing is all in the shows themselves.

#1 - the friend group

My favorite of the shows are Southern Charm and Vanderpump Rules (rip), and then a few years ago I finally got through the torturous first few seasons of Summer House and fell in love with that (just skip to season 3 when Paige and Hannah arrive and when the Wirkus twins are gone, please god). What I loved about these shows is that they originally started with people who were in real friend groups. It’s hard to get new shows with that same magic because everyone wants a brand deal, everyone wants to be an influencer. In the old days, they wanted to be actors and reality was the consolation prize. Now Bravolebrities are almost the celebrity’s celebrity, and everyone wants a piece.

They reminded me of my own friend groups. I’ve had two in my life, both fraught with past hookups, simmering resentments, explosive arguments, and also the intoxicating allure of a micro-community, of being known and anticipated (oh she would hate that), inside jokes, group trips. The toxic ego stroke of being 22 and not letting the new girl into the group. I’ve been on both sides of that, TRUST me. These shows really showed that, but with the heightened stakes of what it feels like to be in it. So many people could watch early VPR and be like, that would never happen. They’re so dramatic. They’re playing it up. But I’m sorry, you vet a bunch of wannabe actors settling for the service industry, you get them drunk off of caffeinated Four Loko (and whatever, uh, else they may have been imbibing) and make it Stassi Schroeder’s birthday? YOU WILL GET FIREWORKS AND THEY CAN START A FIRE.

Writing fiction has to have high stakes and it has to have obstacles. As I said in a recent post, obstacles also have to be internal. It has to be their own shit getting in the way. In fiction, you have to write recognizable issues and problems that remind the reader of their own experiences, but the issue is that in real life, sometimes the dramas aren’t that big from the outside. They just feel that way. It’s why so many books (my own included) have flashbacks. You need context. You need to know the past and why it matters. You can say “Kristen slept with Jax when she was with Sandoval and he was with Stassi” and it’s like…okay, sounds like she cheated, that’s not good. But when you get to see it play out, when you get to watch them lie, when you get to see how broken the couples were, when you see the insecurities that lead a Doute to bang a Jax, then you feel it. And on (vintage) reality TV, you get slaps, drinks thrown, screaming, shirts being ripped off in strip mall parking lots, you get to see what maybe doesn’t happen in real life, but which does happen in reality TV and which (maybe through different means) it has to feel in a book.

One of my favorite books of the last few years is The Rachel Incident.

It’s about small choices that lead to huge ripple effects. It’s deeply human and tragically familiar.

Readers are always vacillating between the criticisms: that would never happen in real life and I just wanted the conflict to be about something bigger. It’s in the reviews for this book, it will be in the reviews of my next one, too.

In my upcoming book, Destination Funeral, I wrote about a friend group splintered by the things from the past. It’s not one big misunderstanding or one huge soap opera betrayal (spoiler alert, it’s not a murder, for example). It’s deeply human and time did the opposite of what it’s famous for, and it festered deep wounds. There are flashbacks which show the depth of expectation, the deep grooves of the dynamics, and the pain in feeling what the main character has felt over and over. I have seen a few reviews that have a tone of surprise as they say something like, I didn’t like her at first, but by the end I understood her. Like…yeah, that’s a book!

I have been trying to write a friend group book since I was about 24. For context, my first three books came out between when I was 19 and 23. I was moving on from YA and into something new, but the problem was that there was no place for stories about people in their 20s at that time, and that’s what I was writing. I remember exactly the phone call, I was in my dorm room on the phone with my editor and she was saying there was no space for the stories I was trying to write. Now you can write literally whatever, and I fucking love that for us.

I kept trying to write what it felt like to be in a group of friends, and it kept coming out as a thriller. No matter what I did, I ended up with a dead body by the end. Probably because IRL, friend groups can be toxic af.

#2 - setup and payoff

if you’re following summer house drama at all, you’ll know that amanda and west are personas non gratas. Here’s the super basic rundown if you missed it:

a recently divorced woman is hooking up with a guy her best friend dated a few summers ago.

That doesn’t sound like the end of the world, but somehow, this has been enough to set the internet ABLAZE.

ciara (world’s most beautiful and hilarious and kind woman) fell for west wilson a few summers ago. West is the kind of class clown, jock adjacent, deeply funny guy who charms his way into every girl’s heart and is then too emotionally immature to not let you down once he’s in there. he and ciara broke up. He went and spilled more than she wished he did to the press after their season. Last summer/season, he was a good boy and didn’t bring any girls back to the house, did his best to be in her good graces and respect her. They inched their way back to friendship. This summer/season, they inched their way even further into being friends again, and because they always will with a guy like that, things inched back into more-than-friends.

Meanwhile, Ciara’s best friend in the house, Amanda has been in a bad marriage with a man named Kyle. They are deeply wrong for each other, she has always wanted him to be someone he wasn’t, and he let her down time and time again. Then their marriage finally fell apart and they split. Immediately after, rumors of Amanda and West started circulating. J’accuse! The best friend and the ex? No! Not after how Ciara supported Amanda! Not going after his ex’s best friend! Not before the body was cold on the marriage! Not with literally one of the only guys ALSO ON THE SHOW and therefore a friend of her soon-to-be ex-husband!

Add in the nature of the show and whether or not they have jobs after this, plus the huge audience who will be voicing their opinions loud and clear (even I am guilty of this, I mean, how was I not going to do like 9 videos as Amanda?)—those are real stakes. They’re ones we understand. If the reason Amanda and West being together was any physical obstacle, no one would believe it. But the reason we’re riveted by that and by Scandoval, is because we knew. We were there, we saw it, we know how much it matters.

If you are reading a book that begins in Chapter One and equate it to Season One (aka., Kyle brings his ‘ex’ Amanda to the house in S1 of Summer house) and then have it detonate by the end (Season 10) that leaves you wanting to read the whole book over again (or rewatch the whole show, as so many people are now) to look for clues. Because no one saw the wronged girlfriend turning out to be the villain.

And when they fight, they’re fighting about everything. It’s never about the pasta.

#3 - skipping the boring parts

I’m not really a member of Bachelor nation, to me that and the Kardashians and the TLC reality are all totally different worlds I have never really been part of. But I’ve seen Love is Blind, The Ultimatum, and some seasons of 90 Day Fiancee and The Bachelor. Ditto for music reality shows like American Idol. They put them in every competition show, but jesus christ does anyone like the part where they sit down and talk about trauma and what they’ve been through? And someone says that sounds really hard and then they kiss and some weird band from 10 years ago plays an acoustic set in the airplane hangar where they’re having ice-cold dinner and drinking wine out of continuity-friendly glassware? NOOOOOOO

O

No one cares about that in writing either. Show, don’t tell, do not infodump on me. If you must give context that won’t be on the page, then for the love of god, give me something else in the scene. I once wrote a scene in a book where a character was talking about his difficult childhood and the POV character is trying to thoughtfully listen, but at the same time the hot summer sun is rapidly melting her ice cream cone and so she’s having to manage the droplets as they cascade out of her control:

“They’re all over the garden. They represent both life and death and she thinks that’s beautiful.”

I was increasingly aware that he was telling me something serious and that mattered deeply to him, but the sun was hot and the gelato was melting at a pace that seemed almost unnatural. So as I nodded, actively listening, my tongue was racing wildly around my ice cream.I tried to appear the way I wanted to, which was interested and respectful of his dead mother.

“That’s very nice,” I said, catching a rogue stream before it made it to my thumb. “So what sort of stuff do you do now?”

“Oil paintings. Usually large format. Figurative. Some portraits, but they’re not straight…” he paused, eyes slipping down to my wrist just as a droplet did, “not straight from life. They’re still somewhat surrealist.”

“I’d love to see them.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t like to show them too often. They’re sort of upsetting—you have some in your eyebrow.”

I swiped at it. “Thank you.”

“Other eyebrow.”

“Okay, yes, thank you.” Swiped again. “Why are they upsetting?”

I wrote that like a decade ago, so I’m not claiming it’s perfect. But the scene was so much for fun to write and to read, and by the time the ice cream is thrown away in a fit of irritability, you’re almost relieved to not have the distraction anymore. To hear what the character is really saying.

#4 reality TV as modern shakespeare

Eavesdropping, devastating one-liners, the soliloquies (confessionals), audience asides, reputation, betrayal, loyalty. God, the talk of loyalty. These things don’t often find themselves in our real lives, but in fiction and reality TV we eat it up! We want to be satisfied. We want public humiliation. We want shame and the defeat of enemies. We want feuds. You can’t have a book without a protagonist and an antagonist (and if you do, you’re being intentionally rebellious and still something, if it’s any good, will represent each). You can’t have a reality show cast without a villain. Someone is there to stir the pot. Succession and The White Lotus are frequently compared to Shakespeare, and it’s for the same reason (only not as respected of course, because people don’t respect reality for its heroism). Kendall Roy is also definitely skiing and saying he’s the number one guy in the group, a la aforementioned Jax Taylor. Backstabbing and overheard betrayals, vital to all.

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Outlining a book is so hard. It’s so hard. And for one reason it’s because everything sounds ridiculous. “And then she finds out so then she tells him and then the mother misunderstands—” but that’s how it works, that’s actually what we like as readers.

Reality TV has had some of the greatest betrayals of all time and you cannot convince me otherwise.

Southern Charm is a great example because it ostensibly takes place in high society. Which in this case means a lot of rich trust fund kids drinking too much (love them). Old money, ancestral homes, boys refusing to grow up and to live in indulgence in booze and women, wit and clever takedowns. Reputation matters in that town as much as it would in a small village. The unmarried women cry of being an old maid if they’re not wed and burdened with babies by thirty. There is talk of decorum. It’s wild.

It’s fascinating to show how those things which feel so ancient to us in King Lear or whatever are actually still afflicting and entertaining us now. Because even if we aren’t trust fund kids hoping to inherit an old estate and worried that we’re too long in the tooth to be loved, we can relate. We’ve felt pressure from parents or whoever to be successful. We’ve worried that we shouldn’t dump the shitty boyfriend in case it’s “too late.” (It’s not, it never is, dump him.)

#5 the dreaded group trip

FORCED PROX IM IT Y. Producers know what they’re doing when they force these wasted, starving, jet-lagged saps down at a restaurant and get them talking.

In my book, Destination Funeral is essentially the group trip episode of the season. Friends with crippling resentment are forced together with an endless supply of booze (and days, as there is a time loop where Saturday refuses to turn into Sunday).

It escalates inevitably into this, and it’s all to do with the things said, unsaid, and felt between the people in conflict.

A book should feel like a pressure cooker. A romcom should be leading to the release of a kiss, a suspense might lead to the fear of literal death or being caught, a good reality tv season leads to a confrontation. They release the season the way they do on purpose. They know what they’re doing. And our books have to, too.

On a group trip, there is almost nowhere to run. They can’t just call an uber and go home to their safe space. In a book, finding a way to narrow the gauntlet is crucial. You can’t just introduce more plot, you have to remove their safety nets. Make your characters address what has been brewing the whole time. Is it the sexual tension? The anger? The boat is gonna sink? Or is someone hopping back on the PJ and talking to a producer in tears?

In real life, we shouldn’t really handle our problems by yelling and screaming, icing each other out, or getting revenge. But hell’s bells if I don’t want my characters and reality casts to do that. I love a storm out! I love a secret kiss! I love a we know but no one else does yet.

One issue we have with our culture right now, as I touched on in another essay, is that we are super moralizing about everyone, fictional or not. We want everyone to be a good person and that simply does not work. I truly cannot fathom why anyone says they will not watch Summer House if Amanda and West are on the next season. He has now been fired, but I don’t get why! A mega betrayal of friendships and a marriage? Are you kidding me, that is reality TV gold! I am not watching reality TV or reading books for honorable behavior. I am watching and reading to feel something. I give the caveat that I wouldn’t want poor Ciara to have to film with people she hates. But Vanderpump Rules and Summer House have quite literally never had more buzz than when the biggest scandal of all the seasons came out. So how wild is it that it might be the very thing that kills them?

For the same reason, I guess, that a romcom doesn’t usually keep going much longer after the kiss. The thriller doesn’t go much further after the unmasking of the killer. Because the big twist is about as far as we can go. You go as far as you can until the bomb explodes. We want to see a little of the picking up the pieces, but not much. By reaching an inflection point, these shows, just like any good plot, really have to stop before they jump the shark. What are we gonna do, watch them argue about what happened for a season?

Reality got too real. The last season of Vanderpump with the real cast was just a rehash and then a bunch of adults who disagreed with each other on a fundamental basis being forced to meditate together in Tahoe.

So that taught me where to end the story too. Before you make them drag their feet through the and this is the lesson we learned.

On that note, bye!

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We don’t like angry women. We want women to be soft, generous, self-effacing, gentle, and good. Every author I know struggles with the age-old complaint from readers about the likability of the main character. Most of them aren’t setting out to write a polarizing main character or to challenge the reader with a difficult woman, but not a single one of them has made it through their career without seeing this complaint. It’s the cost of writing a character who needs to undergo change, and who is not a total simp.

I think it’s a problem with the inherent nature of story structure at odds with the expectation we have for women. Self-possessed, philandering, manchild Barry Lyndon gets to be the hero of one of the most lauded male films of all time. But a restless, imperfect woman in a romcom can be an instant DNF unlikable main character.

I so respect Caro Claire Burke and Gillian Flynn and the ilk for confidently writing main characters who are complicated, pissed off, spitting angry, brilliant and misguided. Yesteryear is not polarizing because it’s anti-feminist, it’s polarizing because the main character is an asshole. Gone Girl had to play its hand so carefully, in such a meta way, introducing us to a completely wonderful, supportive, flawless, selfless Amy Dunne. And by the time we learn the twist, we’re already locked tf in.

Trust me, I also want to like the main character. So help me god if I have to read about one more alcoholic journalist who resents the fact that people want to pay her a lot of money to do something interesting, I am going to LOSE MY MIND.

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My very first book, Here Lies Bridget, was a book about a mean girl who gets in a car crash and winds up in limbo, facing the five people she has wronged the most. As punishment for her Regina George behavior, she has to live in their shoes, see herself through their eyes. I was nineteen when I wrote and sold it, far too young and new at all this to even hesitate before writing an anti-hero. One of the best and worst things about writing and selling a book at such a young age was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I wrote an extremely classic structure of a hero’s journey. A main character starts at their worst and has to find their way to becoming a better person. And yeah, people hated Bridget. Even though the entire plot was about her learning why her actions matter and the reader learning how she got there, what made her such a dick. For example, she’s a bitch to her stepmother. She’s also got an absent father and mother. She says disparaging things to her best friend about her body because she’s jealous of her, thinking no way could this thin, gorgeous best friend of mine actually think I mean anything negative I say. She’s been deeply hurt and she’s got no one who sees her pain, so she lashes out. And she’s A LITERAL CHILD.

This is not a defense of that book or a plug (it’s no longer in print, I recently got the rights back so may release it in some other way sometime!). I love that book, I love Bridget, and the book simply would not have worked in any other way. I admire my teenage self for writing someone that way.

I started writing Destination Funeral last year and no book I’ve written has ever undergone so many rewrites. It’s a book about a group of friends with big divides and ancient resentments who get thrown together for an endless weekend. I wrote it so many ways, I wrote in the third person, with perspectives of both sisters. I wrote it with chapters in the heads of each character. I wrote it with the main character being the little sister, who at that point was like a chronically self-possessed chefluencer. And I landed with Didion Bennett as the only POV character. She’s back at Birdsong and she’s PISSED.

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As happens every time I write something, I understand the book months after writing it. It wasn’t intentional to write a book about an angry eldest daughter, but that’s where I ended up. Because as I learned from Donald Maass at a talk he did years ago, and I’m paraphrasing, internal obstacles are the only ones that matters. People don’t believe in external obstacles. Romeo and Juliet might be the last time that really worked. Or like anything in the distant past where your character could actually be literally killed and those are the external stakes.

These days, what external obstacle do we buy? Long distance? If he likes you, he’ll make it work. You work for rival pizza shops? Grow up, LUKE. You’re in a relationship already? Oops! Now you’re unlikable.

So I ended up writing this unlikable main character. She’s a horrible bitch in the beginning. Without spoiling anything, let me tell you where she begins:

She’s been working her ass off for years in New York and has had a recent surge in her career. To quote the book:

In this era, every spotlight seems destined to grow so hot, it eventually scorches whoever stands beneath it. Burning them alive while the hordes watch with far, far more interest than they did when the praise glowed merely warm. Like a greedy audience in the Colosseum, hungry for blood.

It’s true, we’re merciless with celebrities. As if so many of them aren’t artists who finally, finally got where they wanted to go, only to be ripped to shreds.

So Didion’s mother has just died, her career is on a razor’s edge at all times (picture The Bear), and she’s just walked into a house that used to be her favorite place on earth, and she’s faced with the three people she’s spent years trying to avoid.

Her sister (a flighty, flaky girl who could do no wrong in her mother’s eyes)

Her ex (he was careless with her heart and hurt her more than once)

And the best friend (he got caught in the crossfire)

But what I know people will miss is that Didion is not just mad at what everyone did to her. She’s mad because she’s an eldest daughter with an emotionally immature (and eventually part-time) mother and an absent, ancient-ideals, right-wing father with a closet full of khakis.

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I try not to look at reviews, but in the early stages it’s irresistible. It’s the first time my 100k words are out in the world and I have to know how it’s landing. Plenty of people say, I just didn’t really like the main character or In the beginning I didn’t like Didion, but by the end you understand her. And a LOT of reviews say, I AM AN ELDEST DAUGHTER AND I FEEL SEEN.

It should come as no shock that *I* am an eldest daughter myself. My brother is ten years younger than me, my mother was an infant herself when she had me, and my dad died when I was 23. I started working (at Starbucks! loved it!) when I was just thirteen years old. I was the oldest kid on the block and a girl, so I was the babysitter. Even on the 4th of July or during a block party, I was sort of the child-adult to all the kids.

And don’t get me wrong, I was desperate to grow up. I can still feel the nauseous disdain I felt for the kiddie menu. Kill me. I wanted to grow up. I thought the grown ups were so cool, chatting and telling clever jokes, playing Trivial Pursuit and drinking wine and trying to remember the name of the guy who played the cop in that movie from the early 80s no one saw.

Since I was ten when my brother was born, I was like a built-in babysitter for him, too. I cannot blame my parents, how could you resist an extra set of hands to occupy a bored baby or to change a diaper? I was also obsessively watchful over him as I had childhood OCD and constantly worried about everyone’s freak accidental death.

The problem was that I was then fourteen, looking wistfully at my four-year-old brother and longing to be a child again. I remember when he was a toddler and we went on a nighttime walk and for some reason I was allowed to jam myself into the stroller when he needed to be held and I got pushed home and I never forgot it, always remembered the moment of getting to not be in charge, not even of walking the last few blocks home.

I am not mad at anyone, not my parents or anyone. As I have been saying constantly for the last few years as the internet has surged with rage: you can be mad and it doesn’t have to be at someone.

So much of my anger and empathy made its way into my main character. The resentment of being depended upon. The fury of the high standards set for you and seemingly only you. Didion’s mother forced her to go to college, even when it didn’t align with her interests or what she wanted to do with her life. Babe did not do the same thing for her other daughter, Sammie, who got to galavant around the world being irresponsible instead. I can relate to this in big and small ways. I am also marrying an eldest son, who had gold standards to reach that didn’t seem to exist for his younger sibling.

Didion is mad and so am I about having to be so responsible for so long. When I stopped bartending at 33 years old, I had been in the workforce for TWENTY FUCKING YEARS already. When I think of someone who’s been working for twenty years, I picture a truckstop waitress in a gritty 1970s movie. I don’t picture a 33 year old still dealing with pimples.

My brother thinks that the younger sibling is based on him, but it’s not. (Like actually not, not “i just don’t know it” not). It’s a natural conclusion since so much of my fury is in the main character, but she is not based on him at all. Sammie, the younger sibling, represents the younger version of Didion in a way. She also represents freedom and what it is like to be unchained from the expectations put onto Didion by others and by herself. Sammie represents the closest facsimile to Didion that she has, but she’s missing the chip on her shoulder. Sammie with her peppering of unconsidered tattoos, her unselfconscious flakiness, her worry-free soul.

Didion, from the outside, is easily seen as a micromanaging control freak with a stick up her ass. Sammie absently thinks she might go swimming in the ocean at night tells her not to. To Sammie, this is a lack of trust. She knows what she’s doing! She doesn’t need Didion to manage her, she’s an adult!

But Didion sees the potential for danger, sees how things might go, and desperately needs things to go smoothly and without threat of catastrophe. Her mind goes to so what if she gets caught in a riptide and then she is killed and then not only do I have to deal with the horror of that but then I will have to call the police and then what do I do then, it’ll be a funeral and then the rest of my life it will be my fault that I don’t have a sister, it’ll be my fault she’s dead and all because I couldn’t suggest she don’t swim in the pitch black ocean at fucking midnight.

On one hand, it would not be her fault if her sister chose to take a risk and then suffers the consequences. But wouldn’t it be so much better to not take the risk? This is the way an eldest daughter’s mind works.

Eldest daughters are competent, efficient, stoic, and the proud bearers of tense shoulder muscles with the solidity of marble.

I can just do it. Then it’ll be done.

And how many times has she heard: well no one asked you to do it

MAYBENOTBUTITGOTDONESORUEITHIUARHGOIAHJR

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So Didion’s character has gone years without talking to her ex, her old best friend, her sister, or her mother before she died. After years of fight or flight, she landed in freeze. Because what was she to do? After years of playing the cool girl to an ex (thanks again to the gift of the cool girl speech given to us by Gillian Flynn), of taking on more than she wanted to (including the arrangements for her father’s funeral), of meeting the unfair expectations and not doing what she actually wanted, she is sick of taking the lead. She wants someone to save her. She wants someone else to give a shit enough to try. She wants someone else to fix it.

The problem is, when you block everyone (literally and emotionally) and don’t communicate, it’s pretty hard for anyone else to do that.

(Though the first thought an eldest daughter might have is…I would find a way. If it was me, I would figure it out, so why can’t they?)

Over the course of the book, you learn about the past. The fireworks and stolen beer on the beach on the night of her first kiss. The sunburned evenings and exhausted muscles of a day in the waves. The feel of freshly washed hair seeping through the big t-shirt after a cool shower on a summer evening. The taste of a mother’s good food on an empty stomach.

But also the pain. Didion is hurt and no one came to swoop in and save her the way she would if the situation were reversed. She wants nothing more than for someone to try as hard as she does, to take the load off for her and say, I can carry this, you just relax.

In order to heal, she has to find a way to let go of control. To let it be messy. But she also has to find a way to make an effort in a way that doesn’t fill her with resentment.

And so.

I know a lot of readers who don’t get this character are going to feel like she’s just a martyr, just a bitch, just a bitter person. I don’t really care. Because we the angry eldest daughters need to be on the page just as much as the sweetheart main character who oh-so-nobly can’t be with the one she loves because he’s the brother of her best friend. She is not perfect, and the story is not a litigation of why everyone has wronged her.

It’s just a story of an eldest daughter who is sick of doing her best and everyone else’s.

I do think authors owe readers the pleasure of going on the journey with the main character. It’s not fair to scream that she’s complicated, get over it! watch hallmark if you want a perfect woman to learn almost nothing! Reading a book is like getting in the car with your main character for a long road trip. The company can’t suck. But I do think when we read, we all need to remember that we’re reading stories about people who need to change. That’s why they’re there. That’s why we’re there. Not all characters change, sometimes they’re dicks the whole time (do not get me started on The Guest by Emma Cline).

It’s my hope that a lot of people give Didion the benefit of the doubt as they read her story and that the stormswept beach on the island off the coast of Georgia takes them away. I hope they smell the tomato vines and feel the sea spray. I hope they hear the crackle of the vinyl records and the creak of the back staircase.

I hope you love her by the end.

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Here are some links if you want to read Destination Funeral and support your favorite big sister <3

Amazon

Bookshop.org

Audible ( I narrated it!)

Libro.fm

Add to your TBR

audio version of the article ^^

We all know we’re oversubscribed. It’s too much information, it’s too much chaos, it’s crisis. If I see another Mel Robbins clip talking to a scientist about our nervous systems or a 22-year-old TikTok influencer slinging Nello for commission talking about cortisol levels, I’m going to lose my shit. The problem is that even self-care has become a job. We’re self-care-maxing. Is anyone else sick of the job of daily serums and, I don’t know, an infrared mask? It’s so much labor!

Not to mention the pressure I put on everything. This bath better relax me! My skin better be perfect after this! Even going on a walk is with the goal of being thin and healthy (yeah, I admitted it, thin got first billing, sorry for being a woman in our society, god, I’m trying not to care—another job).

They say if you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Well…I also think that if you professionalize and financially incentivize the thing you love, you’ll never rest a day in your life, either. To a certain extent, this is my lot in life—I can’t even practice goallnessness without wanting to write about it. But I think that’s okay, that’s how I process and ultimately, it’s healthy. But the rest of it? Something’s gotta give!

Here are the things I have financialized or expectationified in my life:

• writing

• art (pet portraits, I mean they are really cute, check ‘em out I do like doing them but they’re on the list!)

• being funny

• watching hallmark movies

• talking to my mom and brother (we have a podcast, half the time end up saying we should save our conversations for the pod)

• singing/making music

YOU SHOULDN’T BE ABLE TO LINK ALL THE THINGS YOU LIKE TO DO

I mean, it’s fine, I am lucky AF to do those things and make even a penny. But the problem is there is so much pressure on those things to work out. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s brilliant book on art, Big Magic, she recommended not putting pressure on your art (there were more brilliant, less obvious-sounding pieces of advice in there), which naturally makes sense. But at the time of reading that book a decade ago, and today, it feels so hard to actually do. I've written too many books that didn’t get shopped to publishers, didn’t make it past the agency phase for whatever reason, that I don’t have it in me to write for ‘no reason,’ so that’s out of the question. That’s kinda why I like being on here, because it doesn’t have to pass any particular test or be anything, it can just be. But still, there’s enough of an outcome considered (people will see it, it has to be thoughtful) to count it as goalless.

No, what I need, is something so pointless it’s a waste of precious time. Like, I have a walking treadmill and I once went through a phase of not just walking on it while editing the podcast, but also walking on it while playing fucking video games. In a way, it was good, not just sitting around, staying active, but in another way, it made everything into work.

Everything feels like fucking work, so I’m so drained all the time! In between writing, podcasting, filming and editing videos, trying to promote my book, plan my next one, I’m doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher (god I hate it so much), vaccuuming not just one room but I may as well do the whole house. I also have a little completionist in me and a little ADHD. So it’s an absolute black hole.

Even cleaning—scrubbing the kitchen from top to tile, is with the goal of it sparkling.

No, what I need to do for a while is this:

#1: Care 100% less about the outcome of the work I do

Like, actually 100%. I will do a good job, because I’m hardwired to do that, but why do I care about the outcome? I can literally not control it so I actually need to let it the hellllll go once it’s out of my hands. I wrote a good book. Did it get good reviews? Great! How are the sales? Okay, well, everyone’s broke and miserable and I can’t control that so….that brings me to one of my favorite mantras I ever heard: if you can control it why worry; if you can’t control it why worry?

#2: Do more pointless things, like actually pointless

This is where it’s hard. I’m like, well maybe I should just jog around the neighborhood, and then my next thought is, yeah, i’ll just do a little every day—and then I’m back to workifying it again. And then, bonus, my next thought is: and that’ll be great because i’ll probably lose a few pounds and it’s good for you! Yes, I need to be active, but this doesn’t count as pointless.

This is where the raking of the sand type stuff comes in.

This is the kind of pointless shit I need in my life.

I actually get it now. Do you just grow up and then eventually, thing by stupid thing everything kind makes sense?

Yes, anyway, I get it. Because you do it, and even if it’s perfect, then you wipe it away.

So for one idea, I suck at piano. I have played my whole life and I’m not very good! I can sightread anything, so anything that’s written down, I can play, but usually just at whatever damn speed I want, etc., and I have no goals of being a concert pianist, so this is great, this one can stay. I’ll never put that on the internet, make money for it, or evidently, get any better, ever. I am exactly the same amount good at piano I was in 2006, so let’s stick with that.

That’s where I’ll start! But not every day, for god’s sake, or I’ll rebel against me. Just whenever, for a bit, whatever, if I feel like it, for a while, I’ll play sometimes.

#3: Expectations are my new arch nemesis

This is similar, but not the same as #1. The best things that have ever happened in my life came from absolutely no expectations. I went to Marfa, TX when I was 25 with no idea about Texas except for basically the higher the hair the closer to god, and was absolutely shook by the experience. It was the time in my life, the people I was with, the breakup I’d just gone through, the fling I ended up having, and the culture shock of getting out of the cramped East Coast and being in the desert snowglobe of Far West Texas. That’s a story for another time, and when I write that article, I’ll link it here. But that’s because if anything, I expected yuck out of TX and got omg what.

I’m one of those coupled up assholes who met my boyfriend (five years and still cute) when I wasn’t looking, met organically through a mutual friend. No expectations.

I have also had awful experiences with high expectations, that include but are not limited to:

• a $600 bottle of wine

• Rome

• my latest book coming out (just, you know, it didn’t suddenly outsell all the Harry Potter books like I expected it would?)

• Hacks and Beef

• pixie cut

Expectations are famously the killer of a good time, but they are also a big part of my over-productivity, disappointment, resulting discouragement, and thus being drained.

So this week, I’m going to—without making it a job—I’m going to casually bear in mind the goallessness I’m striving for. Post and ghost, not worry about video views, for example.

And then hopefully—no wait! No goal! I was going to say maybe I’ll feel less tension in my shoulders, I’ll be more relaxed, I’ll—no! Just, I’m going to do it. Whatever, man!

Give me your most pointless ideas and I’ll do a part two where we can all bask in the nothing together

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I cannot stop thinking about Taylor Swift on Seth Meyers

Listen. I’m an author. I come from a long line of authors. I got published when I was 19 years old. I’ve been thinking about story a long time, and the reason I’m interested in what happened that night when she told this story about a drunken mishap, that wasn’t just a funny little story—it did so much.

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If you wrote it in a book, it would be setting up so much for these characters. It would be doing so much for character. I know Swifties want to believe she was riffing off the cuff—I know because when I did this article as a six-minute-video on TikTok, a few of them said so in the comments—but she’s not going to do that. In addition to having more eyes on her than anyone in the world in a time when everyone watches each other more than ever, always waiting for something to cancel them for, she’s a professional storyteller. And I don’t mean that just because she’s a musician or a pop singer. In the same way that Dolly Parton is a storyteller, so is Taylor Swift. Her songs are stories, tortured poems. Some artists rhyme mosquito with libido, and other artists drop easter eggs throughout their career for the scrambling basket-wielding fans.

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I’m not a Taylor Swift hater. She seems nice. There are people out there that I am disgusted with (obviously) and she doesn’t come close to that. I’m just not putting her on in my own time unless one song is a real banger and I’ll toss it on a driving playlist or something. I’m not a fan of this album, I think it was riskless and samey. I also think a lot about music and the half of my family that is not made up of professional writers is made up of musicians. I liked a lot of her other music more and that’s okay!

But really, I’m glad she’s happy and she’s getting her back thrown out.

But first thing—she’s telling Seth this story about some crazy night. First detail she shares is Travis had had as many shots as everybody else.

Important.

This sets us up for later, when Travis makes a big mistake. It’s not because he is dumb, it’s not because he doesn’t actually know who somebody is. It’s because he is a little tipsy—but not because he’s just drunk. He’s just as drunk as everybody else. So it’s very normal.

Okay, so:

• Travis is letting loose and having fun with the gang

• Everyone was drinking, so it wasn’t just her boyfriend going too far

• He wasn’t operating at 100% mentally, so if he’s acting a little dopey it’s because of the drinking that was completely on par with everyone else

Taylor makes clear she was also drinking:

• She is down and hanging also. Stars, they’re just like us!

• She and he were drinking, so this wasn’t sober-girlfriend drunk-boyfriend night, which is famously awful

Then we go on to learn—he’s excited because this night she’s casually, a lot of celebrities are there. His favorite director is there.

Who’s his favorite director? His favorite director is Greta Gerwig. He likes her because he is a genre-hopper.

Next up:

• Travis is a feminist!

• No, no, not he liked Barbie, she’s his favorite director

• He is enough of a film buff to have an opinion on directors and his favorite is Greta Gerwig

• He is enough of a film buff to think about and appreciate a director who can direct more than one genre

• He’s NOT JUST A JOCK, JOCKS AREN’T FILM BUFFS

• His favorite director is not, she repeats, his favorite director is not Quentin Tarantino

I wonder how he felt about Frances Ha.

No, but it’s obviously because of Barbie and it’s like, okay…so what we’ve learned is that her boyfriend loves Barbie. Is that not a fine enough thing to say

So she’s like, you should tell her, You should tell her you love the movie, whatever. And so he told her on the bus after that he had gone up, but that he didn’t think Greta like his joke. She then, telling the story, calls him like, baby, or something and it’s annoying. He tells her that he had said, Hey, I’m just Ken too! and gestures at Taylor:

• Okay, so he’s putting himself below Taylor, in a deferent, fun way

• He’s a sweetheart! Look at him, guilelessly going up and making a little joke

• He is a GOOD. GUY. ALL AROUND.

Then he’s saying, then he’s telling Taylor this story. I don’t think she liked my joke though. I don’t know if she didn’t really react, she was dancing with Hugh Grant all night, and Taylor’s like, really? The tea is teaing or some other such millennial-whatever. He says, they were like…soulmates.

• he tells his girlfriend everything

• they gossip together—the dream!

• he goes out and hunts and gathers tea for taylor at her parties filled with a bunch of pseudo-to-actually cancelled celebrities (why on earth she dropped Mila and Ashton I don’t know) and comes back and drops the tea at her foot like a dead mouse

• He is such a cool girl’s guy that he can spot soulmates

• Taylor loves to hear gossip! Stars, they’re just like us!

But then she thinks that’s really weird. She’s like, then I’m going through, I’m looking at all these pictures from the whole night, and I’m like, Trav—she has a nickname for him—

Trav, it seems like you were dancing with Greta Gerwig all night. It seems like she really liked your joke.

And he’s like, that’s not Greta Gerwig.

And the person Taylor Swift pointed to was Greta Gerwig, obviously.

So the thing that actually happened is that he mistook Hugh Grant’s partner for Greta Gerwig. It’s not her.

So instead of this being a story where her jock boyfriend doesn’t have any idea who Greta Gerwig is, but liked the movie Barbie which is cute of him, instead it’s this like, oh tay-tay tell the one about—

Also, it’s very like when you have a kid and you’re like, oh, this is his favorite director, he loves this director. And it’s just like he’s five and he likes the movie Avatar. Doesn’t mean James Cameron’s his favorite director, but okay.

I just think that what’s funny about it is that there’s just so much—this is being introduced as a casual story, but it isn’t, is not casual at all. It’s so intentional.

Every.

Word.

Was hand chosen.

Bespoke AF.

So much is accomplished, and if you wrote this in a book, you’d be trying to accomplish the fact that he is just a good going guy. He’s nice. He cares about women, but he also doesn’t care about celebrity. He doesn’t get too wasted unless everybody’s drinking because it’s just a special night.

She’s so media trained and she is so careful about what she says. And this might not even be from a celebrity perspective. This could just be a girl who wants everybody to like her boyfriend or fiancee.

It could just be that, because we all do that. God help us.

I don’t know for women who date boys, we’ve had to do a lot of heavy editing. And then would there be a breakup? Then the real story comes out, or that story gets told very differently. I would love to hear this story on the other side of a breakup, not that I’m hoping for that, blah blah blah.

I just think it’s interesting.

When you look at things through that storytelling lens—as her PR team and she, as a storyteller always will—it’s fascinating. There is so much heavy lifting done in this story and I think that’s why it came off so…weird.

When I first posted the video of this take—30k views ago and counting

—my best friend was like, haha watch out for the swifties.

WHY ARE THEY SO SCARY?

What in the authoritarian pop star is happening? I’m just trying to imagine if I was like, GUYS YOU ALL HAVE TO LOVE…I don’t know…LYLE LOVETT. Don’t talk bad about BJORK. I like Father John Misty, so EVERYONE has to be NICE ABOUT HIM.

I don’t know, again, I think the thing I like least about her is the way people get all freaky about her. Other than that she seems nice! Very, very, very careful….and nice.

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One of my favorite things is going into a short-term situation and getting into the instant new groove. You go to an airbnb and suddenly you’re saying things like, “you have to wiggle the handle.” You’re in a foreign city for a week and quickly form opinions about the local coffee shops, able to say things like, “the owner there is so nice, Rod, but bless him, he can’t pull an espresso to save his life.” It doesn’t take long, either, does it? I think that’s why, after 72 hours in Italy, you start asking, “why don’t we have tomatoes with salt for breakfast at home??”

The nihilistic line of thinking is that we all go on vacation and think we’d be different, but in reality we are who we are, no matter where we are. Sure, that’s true to a certain extent—I love to imagine giving up the hustle and floating like a ghost around an Italian villa, but if Vanderpump Rules got the old gang back together, would I really not watch? No, of course I would.

I just went on a weekend trip to Malibu (I know, boujee AF and very much making up for a lifetime of ratchet trips to dusty-ass Ocean City, MD for the first decades of my life). There’s a (wildly overpriced) grocery store (as spotted in the weird ending of The Idea of You) and a brewery restaurant, and not much else. Of course you can drive down the PCH to Nobu or Sunset Grille but a) are you kidding and b) I don’t feel like it.

-some kind of breakfast you wouldn’t usually have first thing, with juice/coffee from somewhere nearby

-weird, endearing, mismatched beach towels

-walking around the grocery store getting provisions, chips, sandwiches, something sweet (will I regret getting something steaming hot), an enormous thing of water and at least 2 other kinds of liquid (4 if you’re partying)

-lugging provisions and tons of other stuff down to the beach but you’ll never use any of it

-the dragging of chairs and then picking them up and then they knock into your achilles tendon

-trying to put down a blanket and having it flag up against your legs and immediately get covered in sand

-either a) sitting down in a chair and feeling a little like you’re in an airplane seat but it’s nice kind of b) lying down and there’s a lump under your back but it’s pliable sand so you grind against it like a Charmin bear against a tree until there is an ass-shaped divot

-you try to read or listen to whatever

-you get sand in your snacks

-the water is colder than you expect

-someone says ‘it’s really nice actually’

-if you go all the way in, you return to your towel/blanket/chair feeling like you’re one of the cool people who did it, whatever it is, and you’re happily worn out

-if you just got your legs wet, you’re either freezing cold anyway or already as hot as you were before you went sort of in the water

-eventually someone says something about dinner, and this is fun because either you’re going to grill/have dinner at home/order pizza or something, or you’re going out, either way it’ll be nice and not boring like it might be at home

-you shower off the sunscreen, the sand, the day, and you feel more like a noodle than any massage could ever make you

-is it just you or do you look prettier than usual? why do you ever wear makeup when this is you without it?

-the simplicity of cotton and possibly denim feels good on your clean, sandless skin, probably with a tinge of healthy, I’m alive sunburn

-if you’re staying in to eat, then you eat less than you might at home for some reason, but also it’s delicious and you realize you were starving (maybe it’s like a burger you put too much cold ketchup on a pile of ripple sour cream and onion chips on a paper plate that you get seconds on)

-the soda or beer or wine you drink HITS. HARD. It’s good.

-If you go out, someone wants to get an appetizer and you get something weird like a quesadilla or wings which you’d never get usually, and then maybe everyone splits a key lime pie or chocolate cake?

-after dinner maybe someone suggests a game, and it’s played with low, but content energy and you wonder why you don’t do this kind of thing more

-you watch a movie you wouldn’t watch/rewatch at home and it hits different

-you go to sleep tired and worn out from the waves and the heat, maybe even falling asleep during the movie, but in a nice way that feels good and safe

and here’s the most important part:

-the next day you wake up and you have learned lessons from the day before: you needed more water, you really liked those chips, you don’t need the kooshball game, no one wanted to play, you should have brought cards, the lemonade had stevia in it—

-you adapt

-you do kind of the same thing but differently

-you know the shortcuts now

-nevertheless, it’s nothing like your real life, even if pieces slip back in

I think it’s so sweet how we get into that new normal. We all did that in 2020, we actually all figured out how to do that, even though it was so bizarre. When someone dies, we adapt. When we start a new job, we get opinions on the left versus righthand copier or the better bathroom right away. I think we all worry about whether or not we’ll be okay if something changes, some of us more than others. But maybe go to the beach for a weekend, and see what happens. Even if you anguish the entire time, notice what happens.

Even if it’s just remembering to kick your shoes off before walking in the sand

me in like 2008 being really cool with boys

When someone says I have to watch Andor, I just…my skeleton shrinks to about a third of its usual size and I want to crawl away out of sight and go do something so completely for myself, so entirely girly that it undoes even the question of being asked.

Remember the cool girl monologue in Gone Girl? Well, that was very much me for a long time. I remember hours spent on a weed-smoke drenched futon watching Little Nicky and sitting on the tacky rec room carpet of a college dorm watching District 9 and sneaking glances at my phone in the theater as I endured one of the many Fast and the Furious movies before I had what it took to probably find it at least ironically funny. So many hours of my life watching kung fu movies and endless farting, burping cartoons on YouTube—all to be a cool girl! And because what?? Not because they were cool guys!

Okay. The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with some of those things. And I really liked and to this day really like some of the guys who made me watch those things, but so help me god if I ever had to shut the blinds on a sunny Saturday to watch a Bill Murray movie and eat cold leftovers again I’d probably sooner call the police and confess to the Karen Read case or something.

And here’s the problem, now I have technically seen The Matrix or whatever, but I don’t remember it all, I remember is that I had to watch it in a basement on a Sunday instead of meeting friends at a winery and that it was dark and gloomy and filled with very serious scenes about very serious things and that black and green are a big part of it, and that blue and red pills come into play.

I had Inglorious Basterds and Boondock Saints posters on my college dorm wall (again, just anything to gain validation).

Do you know what I mean? Did you do this too?

I’m completely ruined for Boy Movies (Boy Shows are just even longer Boy Movies).

I’m sure Andor is very good, you know? But when I tried to watch it, a part of me died. I just couldn’t do it. In one ear, out the other. It was like the show itself was being projected directly through my skull rather than onto my eyes and into my own brain.

Okay, so what is a Boy Movie?

Genre: Boy

Color Palette: Greige-Green with scenes of a dark black blue so dark you can’t see anything

A few necessary scenes:

• lead character looks darkly at the person making him do something life threateningly, hooded eyes, and says something like, “i’m nothing like my father”

• a beautiful, bland brunette woman who could have easily played his mother is in the kitchen and completely understands why he has to do what he has to do, does not crack one single joke, could be mistaken for any number of different actresses that kind of look like amanda peet. she is a cool girl character.

• the world is hell and it always was hell and it will always be hell but the lead character was right about something that matters only to him and I don’t care enough to ask more about it in order to understand

Words I would use to describe it after watching: desolate, long

The problem really is that there are good movies mixed into the Boy Movie category. Like when I finally watched Star Wars on my own terms, I liked it! Which, as some people might relate to, is not enough, you must love it (until you hate some of them, at which point you really must hate them). I really do like a few Tarantino movies.

The other problem is that my partner is a boy and sometimes he wants to watch stuff, and I have so evolved past being a cool girl that now I’m sometimes totally uncool girl, who won’t watch anything she doesn’t wanna. I’m sure that one Mission Impossible movie is great! But unfortunately I can’t possibly watch Tom Cruise hang off a building in 2011 right now. I’m sure Uma Thurman is excellent in Kill Bill 2! But sadly, if I have to watch even a second of it, I will walk into the sea until I’m at the bottom of it.

Said okay, the other day. Watched Mad Max: Fury Road. Felt like I was having a dream about a wig store that I couldn’t quite remember but which took place in the desert. Long. Desolate!

Saw the last Avatar movie. Went to the bathroom after the first three hours, checked my phone, it had only been forty minutes. That meant I wasn’t even a third of the way through. Meanwhile, I’ve seen Titanic in theaters at least five times in my life.

I go into things like Terminator 2 as I did the other day thinking, you know what, people talk about this movie, normal people, it must be good.

BOY. MOVIE.

I don’t know, man, I’m just saying. Is this still happening to girls? Or are they better now? I guess at least they can go on their phones. When I had to watch the entire Adam Sandler repertoire, I had to sit stock still and stare straight at the screen with nothing else to do. Every frame of those films went into my body. Leaving little space for anything else.

Somewhere in my mind, the Anxiety and Rage characters are trying to talk to upper management about deleting the slew of core memories dedicated to these movies.

BTW I am extremely glad I made a exception, by the way, for Alien: Earth. It’s excellent. Timothy Olyphant looks hot as a robot (or whatever he is).

Annnnnyway watch this space for lots of great recommendations!

From there it was the path of character, plotting, and general book-writing. But today I want to talk about why exactly I wanted to ask this question to begin with.

And it’s because I AM OBSESSED WITH WHAT IFS.

Are you not? It’s not just me, I know that! In the book, Meg Bryan (aka Lana Lord) had a choice when she was a teenager to go to a small arts college in Ireland or to a state school (most tantalizingly, paid for by her parents). The reason she chooses to stay (allegedly) is because her best friend doesn’t get in. To a lesser degree, I had a similar idea when I was a teenager, and I beefed it up for the book.

I graduated high school when I was seventeen and then took a year off between high school and college for reasons that are largely lost on me now. Especially because I didn’t backpack through Europe or do anything interesting, instead I literally just managed a Starbucks in a strip mall—though shout out to Sbux, that was a fantastic job and I effing loved it.

I had the same deal Meg did—I could go wherever I wanted for college, but if I wanted my parents to pay, I’d have to go to either a state school with in-state tuition or somewhere that cost around that amount. But as I spent hours on CollegeBoard.com taking quizzes and changing filters to explore different colleges and thusly different lives, I somehow found myself at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. I don’t even think I found it through that website, I was just obsessed with looking up colleges and imagining myself there.

I imagined myself with face paint and a styrofoam finger at college football games, in small classes with passionate (hot?) teachers in slutty little glasses, relaxing on quads—etc., etc., etc. And for some reason, I imagined myself at Old Vic.

I have since talked to many Brits who say, “my god, you missed nothing,” which I believe is a review of Bristol (not mine, blame the unnamed English), but could very well be a review of the school too. I looked it up recently and I cannot imagine what drew me to it. While ‘tiny theatre school in England’ could certainly sound quaint and endearing, it’s not like this place is a series of cottages with Beatrix Potter characters serving as TAs. It’s extremely bland, if even bleak? No offense?

Like…it’s fine?

Anyway, I think what must have drawn me in was simply the idea of being in England on my own, acting, being truly independent and making a really bold choice.

Obviously, I did not go, as I cannot speak to whether or not Bristol is indeed a hellscape or not. Instead, I went to Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida, which to its credit was weirdly cheap and extremely beautiful.

I was a theatre major at this time, which was funny for me because I didn’t quite fit in with drama kids. Sure, I was loud and obnoxious and desperate for attention, but my favorite musicals were the movie version of Chicago and Moulin Rouge! and everyone else loved, I don’t know, like…Gypsy and — I just took way too long even trying to come up with another one that I don’t know only because I was in it.

It was at the end of my Freshman year that I started writing my first book (a story for another time) which went on to be bought by Harlequin Teen just three months later. So like all young millennials at the time, I thought to myself, well, I can only be one thing! so I dropped acting and focused solely on writing.

I had three books come out by age twenty-three, and then spent the rest of my twenties freaking out about what to write (again, another story, another time). So, while writing wasn’t working out and while I bartended and mopped up blue vomit and had men throw coin tips down my shirt (mostly offensive for how cheap they were being) I constantly wondered what would have happened if I’d stuck with acting. Not because I wondered if I’d be a famous actress or not, in truth I’m sure the artist struggle would have been very similar and probably more physically draining. But because my whole life would have necessarily changed so much.

All in all I only ever applied to Flagler for my Freshman year (applied and went), Salisbury University for my Sophomore year (applied and went for a semester), and then Towson University in Baltimore for the rest (applied and rushed through, graduating early at 21). I never reached for any huge university or big name or took a big risk at that time, and if I had, my life would have changed drastically. And it’s simple, I just think about it all the time, and when you’re a writer, you end up writing about what you think about. Consciously or unconsciously.

Unlike my character, I didn’t even apply, much less get in. Yet still, I can easily Everything Everywhere All At Once myself into that life and imagine it. What if instead of playing beer pong (Team Belligerence forever) and sitting through boy movies I didn’t want to watch, I’d been there? My life likely would have begun there and I’d have different friends and boyfriends and advisors—and they’d have accents. I’d have a far more accented past and wouldn’t that be fun?

It might have been classier!

There are millions of these moments, big and small, we all know that. Last night, my partner got home and said, grab a helmet, we have to go look at the moon, which sounds insane if you don’t know he was on a Vespa. He was on a Vespa. Thirty seconds earlier, I was emptying the dishwasher and one minute later I was going thirty miles an hour down the nearby main drag and looking at the biggest, goldest moon I’d ever seen.

In January of 2020 as a relationship I was in finally took its last dying breaths, I considered scraping together the money to go to Portugal for a month. For no reason other than it was new, far, pretty, and supposedly safe for solo female travelers. I didn’t go, but if I had, it would have been early March 2020 when I did. And…would I just be Portuguese now? I’d probably at very least speak the language! How insane?

If I had gone, I might be hotter because I’d speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, and twelve words in French, but I wouldn’t have moved to LA and the millions of things that happened wouldn’t have happened, and I wouldn’t have met my partner.

But here’s the funny part: I have come to believe that eventually, the roads meet, one way or another, as long as you’re on the right ones.

Because by not having the guts to go to school abroad, I stayed in the US and got bored enough to write. Because I was bored enough to write, I got published. Because I got published, I always believed I could do it again. I always believed success, a contract, your book at Barnes & Noble, whatever, could happen again.

And then finally, after a decade of anguishing about which Next Great American Novel I would write, I came up with The Other Side of Now. Blah blah blah, writing and publishing process, I got offers, I picked St. Martin’s Press, but the problem was, I’d need to wait two entire years for the book to be released.

Two freaking years.

I am not a patient person. Be it that I’m a sagittarius, a millennial, who cares, I don’t, I’m just not patient and I move very quickly. I work fast, and I have a thousand ideas all the time. Slowing down that much was almost impossible to imagine—the year 2025 sounded like something out of Bladerunner the way all future years do. But I wanted SMP, so I had to wait.

In that time, I decided to make something of my time, and as someone on the internet, I understood that followers on social media are a currency.

I had secretly always wanted to make videos and put them online, ever since the heyday of Jenna Marbles (god rest her virtual soul {she’s alive just…I think very offline now for many reasons}), but the problem was I used to be such an asshole and spend time with such assholes. The 2010s were famous for snark and bitchiness and I was certainly guilty of it. So when I pictured making videos, I pictured my former friends sending them to each other (before I had followers I remember seeing that sometimes there’d be a “1” next to the little paper airplane symbol, meaning someone sent the post to someone else, and ALL I could do was imagine I was being made fun of).

Where did my guts go? For god’s sake, I wasn’t happy about dressing up like a mime in front of my peers in Freshman year of college, but I did it. (I really, really, really didn’t want to and I was grumpy af the whole time, which honestly only makes it more embarassing)

And you know what, I’m probably right. The assholes from small towns that have surely deeply embraced the cringe culture criticism, if they haven’t completely forgotten me, would probably love to make fun of me.

But you know what? I ended up getting the nicest followers in the world. And because of it, casting directors and managers and agents have slid into my DMs, because I started putting myself out there and doing the thing I secretly always wanted to do. And I did it because of writing—and having to wait.

Ultimately, I have come to a place where I believe I can have both paths in my life—and that has made me believe that if I’d gone to school in England to act, I’d probably have written a book one day. And probably in an accent I *accidentally picked up abroad! I’m sorry!*

So to answer the question I’ve been asked a lot of times since the release of my latest novel, that is why I wrote that particular ‘what if?’