Lily King on Campus Novels, Time Jumps, and Having Fun While Writing

Writer and Books Are Magic bookstore owner Emma Straub spoke with Lily King about her new book, Heart the Lover (out now with Grove), smart characters, time jumps, and the utterly exhilarating process of finishing a novel.

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Emma Straub: I loved this book Heart the Lover so much. I was describing the book to someone in the store the other day, and my description started with the question “Did you read Writers and Lovers?” If all books by the same author are siblings of a sort, I see Heart the Lover as Writers & Lovers’ Irish twin. I love when I feel like authors aren’t done with a certain zone, and need to go back—I’m thinking of Kevin Wilson, or George Saunders—sometimes the area is just too fertile to walk away. Let me start by asking this: what do you find irresistible about smart youths?

Lily King: I think Irish twin is the perfect metaphor. It certainly was as unexpected as one! I honestly didn’t mean to write it. Every novel of mine is a reaction to the one I wrote before, like I am trying to get as much distance from the old novel as possible. So when I finished Writers & Lovers and COVID hit, I started in on a political murder mystery set on a Maine island during a pandemic. After about 90 pages, I was bored. Right at that time, my friend Ann Patchett sent me the manuscript of Tom Lake. I read that first scene in the gym and I thought, she is having fun. I was having no fun. So I turned to a page in the back of my murder mystery notebook and I started writing the first scene, set in a college classroom, of Heart the Lover. I had no idea who the narrator was, what her name was, or that she was in any way connected to my last novel. I wouldn’t have thought that was a good idea. I realized it once I was much further along, in too deep to stop. I sort of had to acquiesce to the fact that they were linked.

Oh, but you asked me about smart youths!

If you are going to have a love interest—or two—they have to be smart in some way. For me, in books and in real life, a real romance—the sudden swoon, the infatuation, and the eventual love—just doesn’t happen without both a strong physical and intellectual attraction. Also, the dialogue is much more fun to write when they’re smart.

ES: Oh, Lily. You’re a braver woman than I—I think if Ann had sent me Tom Lake while I was in the  middle of writing a novel I wouldn’t have turned around and written something beautiful, I would have jumped out the window, narrating all the while in Meryl Streep’s voice. Once you started in that college classroom and had your characters, and they’re saying smart things, did you then build out the rest of the novel? Or do you not do that? Do you…..(gasp)……just see what happens??

LK: I usually do just see what happens. Once I write a few pages, I start getting ideas which I collect in the very back of the notebook I’m writing in. Almost immediately I have a vague sense of the emotional arc of the story, where the main characters are starting from emotionally and where they will end up. How they will get there, and what will happen along the way, comes to me more slowly. This book was slightly different in that I knew immediately that what I was most interested in was 30 years after their senior year in college. So when I began writing that first classroom scene, I was thinking of it as backstory. I was just sort of easing in, assuming it would be a brief little section, then I could make the leap. But it didn’t turn out that way. I actually did start having fun. I liked being there and all these people showed up and got entangled, and it took me well over half the book to get to the section I initially thought would be nearly the entirety of the book. And I struggled mightily with that section. Even though it was the first vision and the reason for writing the book, once I got there I was lost for a long time.

ES: That is so interesting, Lily. Let’s talk about that time jump–without giving anything away, how much did you write in your notebook (which is to say, plan in advance) everything that had happened to the characters in between the two sections? I don’t want to give spoilers, but I will say, that thirty-years-later part comes with an enormous emotional wallop. I cried so much that it was just sheets of water on my face. This is not a complaint! I loved every tear. Did you know you were aiming for that kind of an ending?

LK: People’s tears have been such a surprise to me. I wasn’t thinking tearjerker. I was just thinking, how do I land this plane? It became very technical and logistical for me after a certain point. At the start, when I was writing the first draft of the third part, I had a lot of sadness as I wrote, but it was not a sobbing sadness. It was more that heavy lead-ball sadness that I carried around with me. I didn’t think it would necessarily transfer to readers. I wasn’t really thinking about readers at that stage. When I write a first draft, I don’t really believe there will be readers, because to have readers you have to finish the book and that always seems impossible until it happens.

My planning is really just a lot of notes compiled in pencil in the back of my notebook. I just took a look at that notebook and I found a few tea-stained sheets of paper with an attempt to order my ideas chronologically for that section. When I wrote the last section, I didn’t even know about the middle section. That came much later. And when I look at these notes now, what I see is someone trying to make sense of an old relationship that never quite made sense. I see myself struggling under the weight of all these emotions and fictional fragments and lofty ideas and real memories, and I just feel so bad for her. What a quagmire! That whole section was a quagmire until I finally shot it through with this huge fictional element that shifted it from what might have read like a three-day journal entry to something more like a novel.

ES: It’s a beautiful quagmire now, Lily! I want to go back to what you said about readers—is there a point later in your editing process when you do think about how people will read your books? The book is about to come out, which I always find is just a strange point in the lifecycle of a writer–how do you feel about it? Do you have ways that you hope the book will be received, or read, that vary from book to book, or are you a writer who truly just moves on once it’s off your plate?

LK: The reader comes into view once I have a functional draft. I start thinking of two people, my editor and my dear friend Lisa who lives across the street. Lisa is a passionate and close reader, and we love all the same books. I often say she is the reader I write for. And my editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, is always in my head. She’s been the editor of all my books and I hear her voice when I start to edit my own work. At that stage I can start to see what the book is really about and how I can sharpen the story and its themes/obsessions. I love that time because I have a full and possibly viable novel but it’s still malleable. After a certain point it hardens and you have to let it go. I try not to have any expectation about how the book will be received, interpreted, or defined. I can weigh in about the cover and the language on the flap copy, but after that it leaves my control. I have to let go. This book I wrote about the many kinds of love—the protean shape of love—in the span of a lifetime, and about time and memory and loss becomes…a campus novel. That’s out of my hands.

ES: Oh my god, this is not a campus novel! I mean, there is a campus, and it is a novel. But I would never! In truth, I think people who come to the book thinking that it is merely a campus novel will still love it to bits. I only worry about that kind of stuff when I feel like the reader is going to be let down by the chasm between what they were sold and what the book really is.

I love that you have an actual, literal, ideal reader and that she lives across the street from you. Thank you for your service, Lisa! Does Lisa walk around feeling drunk with power all day long, knowing that she is the perfect reader for one of our country’s best writers? She should make herself a sash of some kind, like Miss Universe, only it should say Miss Ideal Reader.

That malleable period is such a wild one, isn’t it? When you have a little house built of Jell-o and it’s all wobbly but is standing up and you can really make it whatever shape it’s supposed to be. Maybe that would be a good last question: how do you know when you’re really and truly done, when a book is, as you say, hardened into its final shape?

LK: I laughed out loud at the Miss Universe sash for Lisa! Is this really the last question? It all went by so quickly! It’s so funny that you use the house metaphor because I always think of a novel as a house and I always say that writing the first draft is like walking up the steps and through the front door (weirdly in my metaphor someone has already built the house and I am sort of coming upon it) and seeing the living room and the kitchen in back and a staircase and then someone—two-thirds of the way through my draft—shoves me down into the basement. It’s always that way. I go through this terrible time when I’m stuck in the basement and can’t find my way out.

The hardening happens slowly, over many drafts. It’s a solitary process. I’m not a writer who wants early feedback. When I feel like I’m at the point when I can’t see how to fix any problems that remain, when I don’t even know if the problems I see are problems, or if the real problems are somewhere else, then I show it to my writers group, my agent, then my editor. This time the problem I thought it had was truly a problem and even though the book was 90% hardened, I had to go in and crack it to pieces and put it all back together again. In 11 days. That was terrifying. But utterly exhilarating. I’ve never had a better time writing in my life.

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Heart the Lover by Lily King is available from Grove Atlantic.