While trapped in an abusive marriage, a woman reunites with her first love in the YA bestseller’s first adult romance, Ordinary Love.
Your protagonist, Emily, is drawn to ancient Greece. What inspired this interest?
One of the themes of the book is measuring who you are now against who you were before. There’s meaning in seeing where we’ve come from and how we’ve grown. So I wanted to give Emily a passion that was really focused on the past. There’s something liberating for her about knowing that no one’s knowledge of the Classical period is perfect. We’re all just trying to sift through fragments to construct a picture of what life was like.
Another theme of the novel is class and money.
It’s a common trope in romance for a girl who doesn’t have much to be showered with wealth and then say, “Oh no, I don’t need all that.” But what Emily says, which I think is more realistic, is, “why wouldn’t I want that?” There’s a relaxation that comes from not having to worry about money. But then Emily discovers that there’s a real loss in surrendering so much of herself to being taken care of financially. She is very independent-minded, but when she enters into her marriage, her husband says, “Why work? We don’t need a second source of income.” And that sounds really tempting, until it’s 10 years later and you don’t have a career. I wanted to show both things: why wealth is seductive, and how it can rob us of our autonomy.
How did you approach the character of Emily’s husband, Jack, someone equally magnetic and manipulative?
And someone really wounded, too. He’s emotionally abusive of Emily and I wanted to show how destructive that dynamic can be. Emily lives in a state of hypervigilance, because she never knows when he’s going to be charming and when he’s going to lash out. But I didn’t want Jack to be just a villain. You can see his wounds. He’s not well; he thinks he’s doing his best, trying to show his love, but his view of things is distorted.
Why make Gen, Emily’s love interest, an Olympic athlete?
I was inspired by queer figures in sports who have come out in big ways, like Megan Rapinoe, Abby Wambach, Sue Bird, Nikki Hiltz. There’s something compelling to me about the intersection of queerness and this phenomenon of putting everything on the line in a very public way in the process of doing your sport.
Gen and Emily draw strength from each other. How did you land on this dynamic?
Needing to lean on someone can make us feel like we’ve lost some autonomy, but it shouldn’t be that way. That’s something both Emily and Gen express to one another: it’s not a weakness to accept support. We’re all meant to help each other.
