For the parts of the book that are the “behind the curtain” world of publishing—I once was fortunate enough to work for a successful literary agent in the Denver area. Working as her assistant and helping with aspects related to foreign rights, I got a very clear and interesting vantage point of the publishing business. What I learned while working there has been instrumental to me in many ways. One, it made me realize that if I wanted to continue working in publishing, I definitely wanted to do it as a writer. Two, it made it very clear to me just how hard I was going to have to work to make a career as a writer happen. And three, it gave me the insider knowledge I would need to make Clare and Simon’s fictional lives rich and authentic.

Which character did you connect with the most? Which was the most difficult for you to write?

Honestly, I really do love every one of my characters, and in case you’re curious, there are elements of myself in each of them. And while Clare and I share a profession, it’s actually Eileen’s character that I most closely identify with.

The most difficult character for me to write was Adam because he needed to be one thing to Clare and another to my adult readers. He’s the love of Clare’s life, a teenage boy, and a legend in her mind. He was this, but also for my readers he was flawed, a person who made unkind choices and was also all too human. Adam’s character required me to live fully in Clare’s mind, a woman still mourning the greatest loss of her life, recreating different realities for that loss through her fiction, while either ignoring, denying, or completely having no memory of the very real aspects of Adam’s behavior that provide the evidence to contradict Clare’s extremely romanticized vision of Adam—of course, until she finally tells herself the truth in her last and final book.

Adam was a juggling act because we have to rely on Clare, a somewhat unreliable narrator when it comes to her memories and the fictions she’s been telling herself for years.

Eileen is an incredibly fascinating and layered character, but any one of us could step into her shoes. What qualities did you bring to her to make her accessible, relatable, and sympathetic?