What’s the new book about?

This neurodiverse high schooler—her name is Marlowe Meadows. She’s going into her senior year of high school. Right before summer break, her boyfriend of two years broke up with her and she feels even more lost. She built her high school identity around the guy, and his main complaint was that he didn’t think she was romantic enough. She’s autistic, so that resonated with her in a terrible way.

Marlowe decides that she’s going to teach herself through romance novels. She conscripts this goth guy who works at a romance bookstore in her town to help her, and along the way, she realizes what romance means to her.

Did you pull anything from your personal life into the book?

It’s based on my own journey—I’m autistic. In high school, I would date but always felt like people fell in love faster than I did. I didn’t understand the rules of it or what I was supposed to be looking for. To understand if I was in love, I read a lot of romance novels to get a sense of what I was supposed to be doing. 

Are there any tie-backs to your Southern upbringing?

I set the book in a fictional, extremely Southern small town in Georgia, a reflection of where I grew up. There were two stoplights, and everybody knew and dated each other. I never felt that I fit in very well, and I put a lot of that into the novel.

Your first novel came out a few years ago. What was that experience like?

I have two business degrees, and I’m a PA—I didn’t study a lot of English in college. I don’t have a technical background, but I’ve been a voracious reader my whole life. I know what I like in a book, but I didn’t have a whole lot of training in plot structure and craft. 

I wrote Long Story Short over the course of five years, and finally finished after I told myself I had to either commit or stop talking about it. The first draft was a dumpster fire—there were characters that didn’t make it through the whole book and character arcs all over the place. 

There was this Twitter mentorship program where they paired me with an already-published author in my genre, Sophie Gonzales. She helped me figure out what I was trying to say. We revised it again, and again—amazingly, a literary agency picked it up pretty quickly. It was a very long, somewhat painful process.

With The Calculation of You and Me, my publishing team bought it on pitch—they were like, can you write this in eight months? 

Wow. How was the accelerated writing process?

Very, very stressful. I’m violently neurodiverse and I have ADD—sitting still and doing quiet, introspective things are hard for me. 

I figured out a schedule that worked with my brain to get words on the page, but the last two months were hairy. I wasn’t even halfway through the book at that point, so I had to double down. It taught me a lot about writing on deadline. I feel like book three will be easier—and then, hopefully, all the books to come.

So there’s a book three already in the works?

Yes, it’s my little secret.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Correction: The main character’s name is Marlowe Meadows, not Marlon, and her conscript is a goth guy, not a golf guy.

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