Young adult romance Her Name in the Sky by Kelly Quindlen—author of queer YA love stories Late to the Party and She Drives Me Crazy—gets a traditional release 12 years after its self-publication in 2014. The novel follows teens Hannah and Baker in Baton Rouge, La., in 2012, best friends who must hide their romantic feelings for each other from their strict religious families and peers. In a conversation with PW, Quindlen spoke about revisiting her debut and how it ties into her forthcoming novel This Must Be the Place, publishing with Roaring Brook in May.

Why did you initially self-publish Her Name in the Sky?

I started working on Her Name in the Sky in 2012, so we’re coming up on 14 years since I started writing it. In a lot of ways, 2012 was a different time. Don’t ask, don’t tell was still an active policy. Obama had not yet vocalized his support for same-sex marriage. Marriage equality was still three years away. It was a very fraught time for me. I was 23 years old, and I was teaching in Louisiana, and I was very closeted at school. None of the other teachers or my students knew [that I was queer].

I started writing this story based on my own upbringing, of being in a Catholic community and realizing that I had feelings for a girl and trying to reconcile all that. It took me about two years to finish the story. During that time, I was also reading what was available in the YA landscape which—for LGBTQ books, especially sapphic books—honestly wasn’t a lot. At the time, most people were saying that it was really difficult to get young adult LGBTQ stories published. On top of that, mine had a religious element, and it had a pivotal on-page sex scene. Not only did I worry that there wasn’t a place for it in traditional publishing, but I also worried that it wouldn’t be handled the right way, or by understanding people. Some of that was me not giving enough credit to publishing professionals, but some of it was also just where we were at the time. I decided I wanted to have full control.

I had a very small online following at the time because I was really into the Glee fandom. That was my escape. When I was teaching, I would go to school each day, I would teach middle school math, and then I would come home and write Glee fanfiction about Brittany and Santana. I bet I could get some of my followers to read original work, so I self-published Her Name in the Sky in January 2014.

What compelled you to pursue traditional publishing for your subsequent books?

I wanted to challenge myself to try something new. I felt like I had done well with self-publishing. I learned a lot about marketing and interacting with readers and organically building a fan base. I wanted to take that to the next level and work with a whole team, [including] an editor who could push me to be a better writer.

Around 2015, I started going to more book festivals and getting more into the YA scene, and I was seeing that some LGBTQ YA books were doing well. I went to the Decatur Book Festival, and I saw Becky Albertalli speak there about Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and I got to meet her and talk to her. It made me realize, “Oh, there is room in traditional publishing [for me].” Or, at least, there was starting to be.

I was also drawn in by the accessibility of traditional publishing. Sometimes people would email me and say, “I’m trying to find your book at my library,” or, “I’m trying to find your book at my local bookstore, and I can’t get it,” and the only way to get Her Name in the Sky physically was through Amazon’s print-on-demand service. You couldn’t walk into a bookstore and find it on the shelves. And I just thought, “I want to be in the big leagues now.”

Why return to Her Name in the Sky now, more than a decade after its original publication?

The story wouldn’t let me go. Late to the Party and She Drives Me Crazy were very much open and shut books. I felt like I had told the story that needed to be told, and I was able to finish them and not look back. But the characters from Her Name in the Sky stayed with me. I was still writing one-shots about them I would post on my Tumblr that were, like, a scene of Hannah and Baker that took place after the book ended. Fans would write in and say, “Could you do a one-shot of Hannah and Baker in grad school?”

My agent, Marietta B. Zacker, and I thought we should ask Macmillan to reissue it so that it could have a wider reach, and so that I can redo parts of it now that I had developed my writing skill set more. We originally took that idea to them right around when the pandemic started. I wrote a whole proposal, and I included screenshots of things that fans had said to me, and fan art and fan playlists from Spotify, and all the sales data. And I pitched a new epilogue that would have Baker and Hannah in their adult years, perhaps mentoring a younger queer person. My editor, Mekisha Telfer, came back and said, “We don’t think this is quite the right time [for a reissue]. But we were most captivated by your idea of the epilogue. Can you say more about that?”

I had already started writing what would become This Must Be the Place, about a recent high school graduate who inherits a gay bar from her late uncle who she didn’t even know was gay. I married that with this idea of Hannah and Baker as thriving queer adults. And it just made sense. Now, in This Must Be the Place, Hannah is a 30-something out-and-proud lesbian engaged to be married, and she’s mentoring this 18-year-old girl who just recently came out and inherited this bar that she doesn’t know what to do with. It all came full circle.

What reaction are you hoping for from Her Name in the Sky fans with the publication of This Must Be the Place?

I’m really excited for fans to meet Louisa. She is my pain in the ass problem child. She knows who she is, and she’s just trying to figure out how to be this new version of herself. And there’s a whole cast of characters that work at the bar with her that I really, really love. And there’s a bar cat named RuPaul.

Hannah is kind of Louisa’s fairy gay mother, if you will. She’s an educator who, during the summers, works as an assistant manager at the bar to make some extra money. She takes Louisa under her wing and teaches her not only about the business, but about what it means to be a queer person in spaces that people forget that we exist, like in Alabama, where the book takes place.

Hannah and Baker are also planning their wedding, so there are little lines thrown in about who’s going to officiate the ceremony, what songs are going to be on the wedding playlist. Some of my oldest readers and die-hard fans of Her Name in the Sky have gotten galleys of This Must Be the Place and one of them said, “After all the pain they went through, it’s so wonderful to see Hannah and Baker grown up and in complete control of themselves and in control of their lives, to see them happy and succeeding. And yet, their stupid senses of humor haven’t changed.”

Her Name in the Sky by Kelly Quindlen. Roaring Brook, $24.99 Jan. 27 ISBN 978-1-250-41445-8; $14.99 paper ISBN 978-1-250-41447-2