Book Five: Jasmine Guillory in conversation with Emma Straub
Jasmine Guillory published her first book, The Wedding Date, only a few years ago, but she already feels like an institution in the rom-com universe. I can give anyone one of Jasmine’s books and know that they’ll have a great time. Her newest book, Party of Two, came out this week, and we hosted Jasmine and the ladies of my favorite, thirstiest podcast Thirst Aid Kit last night. Jasmine was nice enough to answer a few questions from me via Zoom the other day, and she didn’t even mind when my children interrupted us a dozen times in thirty minutes. As I tell her in the interview, I plan to sell a million copies–so get reading!
Emma Straub: So, in my last interview that I did for the Books Are Magic blog I interviewed Courtney Sullivan and Emily Mandel, because I realized we were all on our fifth books. And then last week a lightbulb went off in my head and somehow, Jasmine, so are you!
Jasmine Guillory: Somehow so am I!
ES: The reason I am surprised is not because you are not a brilliant novelist, obviously, but because it’s been two and a half years! Two and a half years. So number one, my first question for you is how the bleep does someone write five books that are coherent and funny and full of heart and terrific in two and a half years?
JG: Thank you, Emma, that’s so sweet! But also I did not write them in two and a half years. You know, publishing–The Wedding Date was my first book. I got my agent with that book and my first deal and everything. I wrote these books more like in five years, because–
ES: Oh, okay!
JG: That’s still a lot more time. Because The Wedding Date I wrote in...2015 was when I wrote that book, and I got my agent the following year. And then I did more work on that, because the lead up to publication on that book was much longer than for any of my other books.
ES: Okay, so right, publishing is glacially slow, but does that mean you started writing The Proposal before The Wedding Date came out?
JG: So my deal for The Wedding Date was a two-book deal with The Proposal. I started writing that, like I turned The Proposal in in 2018–no, in 2017. I turned The Proposal in months before The Wedding Date came out, and so there was a lot more lead time. This book and my last one have had the least lead time, just because of juggling and schedules and stuff, so for this book I turned the draft in to my editor in January.
ES: Oh my gosh!
JG: I mean, the credit does not go to me here. It goes to the magical people at Berkeley and at Penguin Random House for getting the book into a book form by June, because usually it takes a lot longer.
ES: But I mean, what that says to me is that you are really in sync with them and that they trust you. They trust that you are going to turn in a manuscript that is nearly ready.
JG: Well I hope that trust is well–I don’t want them to keep trusting me like that forever! Because god only knows what will happen next.
ES: Well, I won’t name names because this is for the bookstore blog, but you can definitely see it when there are writers who have published lots and lots and lots of books and are well-known and adored, and they publish a book that’s 700 pages, and you just look at it and you know that nobody touched it, you know? The editors are like, thank you!, and just keep moving.
JG: I never want to be there.
ES: No! No, no, no. Thank god for editors. Thank god. I want to back up: so two and a half years ago is when your first book came out.
JG: Yes, January of 2018.
ES: So I want to know, what was Jasmine Guillory doing up to that point and at what point in your life–I mean was it third grade or five years ago–were you like, really what I am is a writer. And were you always writing?
JG: Okay, first of all, Emma, I am barely there. That is always so hard to think in my mind: really what I am is a writer. Really what I am is a writer? But I was a lawyer up until–well, I am still a lawyer. I can’t take that away from me, but I haven’t practiced in about a year and a half. Up until when The Wedding Date was published, and for another year after, I was still practicing as a lawyer.
ES: And what kind of law did you practice?
JG: I have done a number of things. When I first started practicing law I worked at a big law firm doing a bunch of different stuff: securities law, patent, IP. Like a lot of stuff where, you know, big companies fighting against other big companies type of stuff. And then I worked for the Legal Aid for a while, mostly doing stuff with kids, like special education and healthcare stuff with kids. Since then, I’ve done a jumble of other things, like I worked for a foundation for a while. When The Wedding Date was published, for a year afterwards I was basically contracting as a lawyer, so also big corporations suing other big corporations. It was a little less stressful for me because I wasn’t working directly for the law firm, so it was a little easier for me to pick it up and do that. Then I was also, while I was doing that, working part-time for a communications firm out of LA doing political communications stuff, which was a lot of fun. It gave me a lot of fodder for books.
ES: Because I was just going to say: listening to you talk about it, it makes me think about how in your books, your characters always have jobs. Which sounds like it should be obvious, but I feel like it’s not. Like your characters always have professional lives that they are deeply involved in and come into the book. So I’m not surprised that you’re like, oh and then I did this and then I did this, I had fourteen hundred million jobs. But so you didn’t answer my question: when did you…
JG: So let’s see, it was probably sometime about ten or so years ago. I have always been a big reader my whole life, but I never really tried writing other than assignments in school. I think partly I just never really thought it was for me or something. And then I was working in this job and I realized that I had no real creative outlet, in that I wasn’t really learning anything new. I missed the process of being in school where you’re learning things all the time. And I was like, well, maybe there’s something I can do that will be creative and I’ll learn something. Well, I know I can’t sing, I can’t draw. I love to cook but there’s only so much I can give away to people. Maybe I’ll try writing? I was like, I always loved to read so maybe I’ll try this. I had some friends who were writers. I had very tentative conversations with them about it and they were really supportive, so I just dove in. Like, started writing a book, which was not The Wedding Date; I wrote before that. But I just loved it. I looked forward to coming home every day from work and writing on my couch for hours, and I had so much fun with this and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I figured out stuff along the way. I think because I’d been a big reader all my life, there were certain things I knew about story structure and things like that just from reading thousands of books, but I didn’t know how to write. I just kind of started. And it was just that I really just kept having fun with it so I kept thinking, let’s just keep doing this.
ES: Did you read romance?
JG: I did read romance, but the first book that I wrote was not romance. I wrote one young adult book. It was a young adult romance, so not totally different, and then I wrote like half of another young adult book that I could never really get my mind around, and so I abandoned it. But The Wedding Date was the first romance that I tried to write.
ES: So what was it about romance that made you think, hmmmm? And I want to preface this by saying, to me, if someone asked me what category your books were in I would say it’s a rom-com, which I would say is different than a romance, but I don’t know. Do you see the terms as overlapping or interchangeable?
JG: I see it as romance is the big basket and then there are lots of other pieces of romance that go into the basket. For a long time the romance that I read was mostly historical romance, which I loved. But I remember at one point reading it and thinking, this is so much fun to read; after I had started writing...I don’t think I could ever write this. My voice wouldn’t translate for historical. I was a history major, so I feel like I would get bogged down in research and I would not pay attention to the story and all of that stuff.
Once I really discovered contemporary romance and started reading it I was like, oh, maybe I can do this. But it still took me a while to really commit to myself that I was going to do it. So I thought that probably at least a year before I started writing The Wedding Date. I had the idea for it a while before I started writing. And once I started reading I just read a ton because, first of all, it’s so fun to read and got super addictive, but then also was very helpful to see: these are the things that I like and these are the things that I don’t.
ES: I think that from my perspective, you burst onto the scene at this moment when the rom-com emerged as this real powerhouse genre within romance. With The Wedding Date and The Kiss Quotient, it was that moment when readers who maybe had read romance previously but hadn’t read it in a while, or readers who never read romance, all of a sudden were like, oh, this is just a fun smart contemporary novel that is about–
JG: Has a happy ending.
ES: Has a happy ending, right. That’s where I came into it, where I read your books and was like oh yeah, wait, there’s like a whole thing? Sign me up! But, I think of you as being synonymous with that moment. I don’t know what it was, but did it feel like that to you, too, where you were like, there’s something sort of happening around me that I’m really a part of?
JG: I mean, the thing is The Wedding Date was my first book, so everything was so new that I had no real idea, you know? Because I did not know what was normal and what was not. There were certain things that I paid attention to, but also when it’s happening to you and people are talking about your book you don’t know if it just seems bigger in your mind.
ES: Or like if Reese Witherspoon is picking everybody’s book, right?
JG: Yes, but that didn’t happen for a little while.
ES: You’ve published books, as we were just talking about, at a really rapid clip. But at this point, this is the fifth time, obviously this moment is really different than any other moment. And I feel like you might be in a better, healthier mindspace than many people, because you are prolific and you’re like, ok, this is this moment. Things will evolve and change, we’re not always going to be in a pandemic. But how are you holding up?
JG: It’s hard, you know. All of it is so hard, and especially since it just keeps stretching. We don’t know what the ending is going to be or when it ends.
I’ve seen some people, and I do this to myself, thinking why are you being so lazy, shouldn’t you be doing x, y, and z? And then you remember oh right, it’s a pandemic, you know what I mean? I’m just trying to get along as easily as I can. At first, the whole idea of writing...I was like, that’s ridiculous and impossible. Like why would I ever; I can’t write anything ever again. I think I sent my agent an email like I’m never writing ever again! And she was like, okay, relax. Then at some point in early April I was like, I have to keep writing something just to keep doing it. Who knows if this will be a book or anything, but I just need to write so that I’m writing every day, and that I remember how to write things down. So I’m just trying to do that and trying to still find some joy somewhere. That is the only real writing that I’m doing right now: writing something to try to find joy in it, and then we will see what happens. So hopefully I will have a sixth book, but let’s keep our fingers crossed on that. I’m just trying to do a one-step-at-a-time kind of thing. It’s hard.
ES: So this is a greedy question for me because I just want to know it personally, but I feel like other writers have this question so I’m just going to ask you. So you’re writing something. Does what you’re writing take place in quarantine or in 2015? Or in 1992?
JG: That was actually my biggest brian stumper in trying to start anything. Eventually I was just sort of like, I will write in the After, whenever that is.
ES: Okay, you’re going forward. I’m impressed.
JG: Yeah, and I don’t know if that’s how it’s going to stay for right now. I’ve been very jealous of people who write historical fiction right now, because it’s like, oof, wow, you don’t have to think about this. And going backwards would just feel false to me. It just doesn’t feel right. I couldn’t get my mind around that, even just to 2015. But it also...writing a story with a happily-ever-after in the middle of all of this just seems impossible because we don’t know what’s going to happen. So I just have to jump myself forward a little bit and keep my fingers crossed that there is a forward. In some ways that’s me writing to hope.
ES: Yeah, oh my god. I mean, that’s what we need. That’s why a million people are going to buy your book right now.
JG: I mean, let’s speak that into the universe, please.
ES: Yeah, okay, one million people–can you hear me?–one million people. But that’s how I felt when my book came out, which obviously isn’t why I did it. But when my book came out I was like, okay, this is something that will make somebody’s day better, maybe. Maybe that seems like a low bar for success? I don’t know. I mean to me that’s the most that any of us can hope for.
JG: Right, like in the middle of all this. One time I did a book event, and it was last fall, and I had gone onto it and it was one of those things where I had been traveling a bunch–already tired of traveling. I had an early morning flight to get to this event and I was sort of coming in not in the best place. And then I talked to these readers who were so wonderful and it just filled me with joy, and one woman in the signing line thanked me for my books. She said she read them during a really hard time in her life and they got her through, and then she started tearing up and then I started tearing up, and it was just like that, you know? Those are the things. Those are the things that keep me going, and so I am so happy if my books can bring someone some joy like that, especially in the middle of all of this terribleness.
ES: I just have one more question for you, Jasmine, and then I’m going to hopefully make my children stop screaming. Do you think that the New York Times Magazine published the King Arthur pan pizza recipe just because you’d been making it? Because–
JG: No, they did it before I’d been making it. That’s why I started making it.
ES: But it was in this week’s thing!
JG: Was it really? I didn’t see that it was in the magazine.
ES: Yes!
JG: It has been one the recipes they’ve been making, that a lot of people have been making. But they have also been my heroes during this time. Like please, please don’t let anything bad come out about them! Because their Instagram presence is wonderful, their recipes are great, they’re very helpful, and they’ve been helping me through this quarantine period. So please King Arthur Flour, we love you!
ES: It’s one of those things where I–for everyone who’s reading this who has not subscribed to Jasmine’s newsletter, please do it because you get all the Jasmine, all the bookish stuff, and lipstick stuff, but also all this food stuff and recipe stuff. I love to follow you on your culinary journeys.
JG: Thank you! Thank you.
ES: And definitely, this pan pizza–like I’m a New Yorker, that’s not my…
JG: That’s not your kind of pizza.
ES: No, it’s not my kind of pizza, but it just looks so good.
JG: And it’s also an easier pizza to make at home than pizzeria pizzas are.
ES: I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it and I’m going to take a picture and I’m going to tag King Arthur, I’m going to tag you, I’m going to tag the New York Times Magazine, and you’re all going to feel bad because it’s not going to look as good as yours. But I will eat it anyway.
JG: You’ll love it. It’s a good recipe for this period and for parents because the dough takes a long time to rise but it’s also very flexible timing. So it’s anywhere from 12 to 72 hours, it can be in your refrigerator. So you can just make it one day, plan to make it the next day, forget about it because your children are screaming, and then you can do it the next day after that.
ES: Okay, I like this. This is Jasmine Guillory with hot tips across the board. I love it. Thank you.
