Please join us for a Q&A with Lily King, author of the novel Heart the Lover.
Please help me welcome Lily King to the BookBrowse Forum.
Lily is the award-winning author of six novels. Her most recent, Heart the Lover, was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, TIME, NPR, and The Washington Post.
Lily has also published a collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her 2020 novel, Writers & Lovers, won the New England Society Book Awards and was a New York Times Notable Book and chosen as a top-ten best book of 2020 by The Washington Post, NPR, People Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, the New England Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014.
Please use this space to ask Lily questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment, click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Lily, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Hi Kim! Thanks so much for having me here! I’m looking forward to this conversation.
I live in Portland, Maine but we escaped the cold before another storm hit last week and are in Mexico right now. I’ve been on a book tour for nearly six months and of course the minute I get away for a vacation I get sick, so I’ve been in bed for the past few days with that bad cold everyone seems to be getting. I’m glad this is written and not a Zoom so you can’t hear me hacking.
I grew up in Massachusetts, read Judy Blume at age 8, and knew I wanted to do what she did. Reading and writing were my favorite things at school and I was lucky enough to have an English teacher in high school who also taught Creative Writing. I took two semesters of that class and wrote a lot of short stories. I majored in English at college and took a ton of CW classes. I moved a lot of places after that—Paris, Maine, Vermont, Syracuse (for grad school), Spain, California—and finally ended up back in Massachusetts with a first draft of a novel when I was 32. I met my husband that fall. Two years later I sold my novel and found out I was pregnant in the same week. When we had our second child we moved to Maine. It was hard to juggle novel writing with raising little kids, but once they went to school things got easier to manage! Now they are grown and out in the world and I miss them all the time. Our youngest is here with us this week and it’s been really great because she has just finished a draft of a novel and we’ve had such fun long talks about it. She’s really good, much better than I was at 25!
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Welcome!!! I’m sorry to hear you’re under the weather. I hope you’re safe in Mexico! There are a lot of reports on the news right now about unrest in the country and advising Americans to “shelter in place,” although Mexico is a big country so it may be nowhere near where you are.
Your most recent novel, Heart the Lover, has certainly gotten a lot of attention since its publication last year. Congratulations! It must be tremendously gratifying to have a book become such a huge hit. When did you realize you had a real winner on your hands, and that it was going to take off in such a big way? Why do you suppose it resonated so much with readers?
Heart the Lover has been called both a prequel and a sequel to your previous novel, Writers & Lovers, so I find it impossible to talk about one without the other. Both books feel very personal. How much of the plots are autobiographical?
Greetings! Judy Blume…aww, I am old enough to remember when she startled everyone with her “problem novels.” They were so good. My question is whether or not you have a favorite out of the novels and short stories you have written? There is still a waiting list for Heart at my library. Congratulations!
Did your education at Pingree influence your writing in any way?
Welcome, Ms. King! I’ve read and loved both Euphoria and Heart the Lover. Both involve love triangles among the main characters. What do you think a love triangle allows you to explore as a writer that a single love storyline does not?
I’ve been so surprised by and grateful for the readership of this book. I’ve been blindsided by it. I didn’t expect it in the least. I could tell when the book was poised to come out that my editor was more excited than usual, more hopeful, and it’s not exactly a hopeful time in the book business, so I noted that. And when it came out people started posting pictures of themselves crying. I was just really surprised by the emotional response to it, the way people related to a story about first love, and how it made them think about theirs. I honestly didn’t know so many people have had such intense first loves! But everywhere I go people tell me about them!
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I don’t have a favorite. I feel like I put everything I had at the time into each of them and I care for them equally. I know if I were an unconnected reader of my work I would have a favorite. I just can’t figure out what it would be!
My favorite of Judy Blume’s novels was It’s Not the End of the World.
I’m sorry for the waiting list! Tell your library to buy a few more copies! 
After completing Writers & Lovers, what made you decide to return to Casey’s story?
I’m fascinated by the fact that there’s not much overlap between the two books. Heart the Lover completely skips over the years covered in Writers & Lovers, and in Writers & Lovers, there’s not much information about Casey’s life before events in that book*.* What went into the decision to approach your novels this way?
When I write fiction I draw more from emotions I have experienced. The scenes, the dialogue, much of the detail is made up, but the characters often feel feelings I have had. You can look at my life and you can look at Casey’s and you will find similarities. I became a writer, she became a writer. I was broke, she was broke. I worked in a restaurant, she worked in a restaurant. But the plot points that move the story along are often invented. I never played golf; I didn’t lose my mother in my thirties; I never dated an older famous writer; I never gave up a baby for adoption, and on and on. Casey and I are very different people with different histories and yet her emotional journey in each book is something I can identify with closely.
Hi–yes my education at Pingree, the high school I went to in Massachusetts, had a huge influence on my writing. My creative writing teacher was Tony Paulus and he taught the course like a graduate-level seminar. We had to have a complete short story on his desk every Monday morning, and we critiqued each other’s work and discussed it every week. I learned so much early on from him and my classmates. It’s really where I became a writer and never looked back.
Hi and thank you! I think I like love triangles for the tension and the uncertainty. They draw out different sides of the characters and often suggest some emotional unavailability somewhere in the triangle. And they are just fun to write, to play around with. Three people in a room is much more dynamic than two.
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Hi Kim—I’ll try to answer both your questions here. I got the idea for W&L in May of 2016 and I just saw it as a novel about nearly a year in the life of this young woman struggling with grief and her desire to write a novel. I gave her a little childhood backstory, but the book was just about this year after her mother died. I never once thought about writing another book about her, and even when I first started writing the college scenes in Heart the Lover I didn’t have a name for the narrator and no one was more surprised than I was when I realized she was Casey. I had turned to the back of my notebook to make a note about the future, when this character was married, and instead of writing her husband I wrote “Silas” then stared at the name, realizing who she was. I think soon after that day I wrote the convo about her having had a golf scholarship and them calling her Jordan as a way to try out the idea, I didn’t know if it would stick. But it did.
Welcome. I’m enjoying reading this dialogue. I loved Euphoria and Writers and Lovers and ended up finding Heart the Lover intensely powerful. I may be alone in my response to aspects of the college years, since mine were so different, and wondered if that section was problematic for any other readers? The characters in their 40’s were so believable and the account of the painful death is one of the best I’ve ever read, so thank you. I’m a reader in my late 70’s.
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Thanks for being so specific, Lily! I definitely wondered about some of those elements. I would have placed money that you’d been a golfer, for example!
I’d never heard a writer say that they focus more on what the characters is feeling rather than the character’s actions. I suspect that’s why they strike such a chord with your readers; it’s the feeling they identify with rather than the character themselves.
It seems like most of the non-Casey characters you focus on in both Writers & Lovers and Heart the Lover are male. How did you approach creating them? Do you generally feel more comfortable writing male supporting characters, or was there just not much space for other female characters in these novels?
I’m going to use the spoiler tag here because I’d like to talk about the end of Heart the Lover.
The last section, where Yash is dying and Casey reconnects with Sam was amazing. You could have taken the last part of the novel in many directions. Why did you choose to end it this way? What sparked the idea? Did you have other options in mind that you were wrestling with?
(To include a spoiler, click the “+” icon & scroll down. The spoiler tag is the next-to-last option.)
Do you have a writing routine? Also, do you start with a detailed outline or do your stories evolve as you write them?