The cover of Lily King\u2019s new novel, Heart the Lover, features an abstracted face sobbing white tears on a tangerine background. It\u00a0is an appropriate image, given that\u00a0so\u00a0many early readers \u2013 from BookTokkers to fellow authors \u2013 have reported weeping uncontrollably during the book\u2019s final third.<\/p>\n
For King, the reaction was unexpected. \u201cI certainly felt a lot of\u00a0emotion while I was writing. Not sobbing, more a deeper grief,\u201d she says. But she describes the writing of her sixth novel, which begins with a 1980s college love story then revisits the same characters in middle age, as\u00a0a\u00a0joyful experience. \u201cIt was really great\u00a0to just go back to the 1980s and\u00a0college. It was a relief.\u201d<\/p>\n
King\u2019s latest novel shares a \u201cconnective thread\u201d with Writers & Lovers, her bestselling 2020 tale of a 31-year-old woman waitressing while striving to establish herself as an author, which counts Curtis Sittenfeld, Elizabeth Strout and Madeline Miller among its fans. Like that book, and 2014\u2019s Euphoria, inspired by the life of\u00a01930s anthropologist Margaret Mead, Heart the Lover features a love\u00a0triangle (actually, in Euphoria the\u00a0triangle is more of a square). This\u00a0dynamic feels true to life, King\u00a0says, at\u00a0least in her experience: \u201cYou\u00a0go through droughts with relationships\u00a0and then it just pours.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet King did not intend to write a love story this time. She was working on a \u201cpolitical murder mystery\u201d titled Mercury Island during the pandemic. \u201cI had about 90 pages, and I had run out of steam. I had a dead body on the first page, and I didn\u2019t care how he died,\u201d she laughs. Then her friend Ann\u00a0Patchett sent her the manuscript of Tom Lake. \u201cI thought, \u2018Oh my God, she\u2019s having so much fun. And I am having so much fun reading this.\u2019\u201d So\u00a0she flipped to the back of her notebook and started writing Heart the Lover\u2019s first scene.<\/p>\n
King\u2019s writing is warm and big-hearted \u2013 even when characters behave badly they are presented with sympathy \u2013 and she comes across the same way, speaking from the house she shares with her husband in Portland, Maine. She is curious, chatty, has a cascade of long, curly blond hair\u00a0and exudes a sense of hearty outdoorsiness \u2013 she hikes and, as she tells me with a wince, \u201cDare I say, I\u00a0have gotten really into pickleball.\u201d<\/p>\n
For all her buoyancy, she is devastated by the political situation in\u00a0the US; her voice cracks when she talks about her fears for voting rights, and about the tech companies who strike her as \u201cintent on pushing us away from each other \u2013 actively, deliberately\u00a0\u2013 with seemingly no conscience or sense of responsibility. It just breaks my heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
We Americans have always had an exceptionalist point of\u00a0view, as though that authoritarianism would never come here<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Given the darkness of this moment, she admits that in the run-up to publication she sometimes wished she\u00a0had written that political murder mystery, and not a love story, after all. At times she worried that the book\u2019s title \u2013 taken from a card game the characters play \u2013 was too \u201cschmaltzy\u201d. One of her two grownup daughters even told her: \u201c\u2018You use that title, you will ruin your career.\u2019 That really haunted me!\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end, though, she decided to \u201cgo all in\u201d. \u201cFalling in love produces all of these great feelings and chemicals and hormones,\u201d she says. \u201cThe extraordinary thing is that you can read a novel and feel those same things.\u201d She is well aware that love stories are sometimes discussed \u201cin a belittling way. I really want to push back against that, because I don\u2019t know what else we have if we don\u2019t have love?\u201d<\/p>\n
King knew she wanted to be a writer from her first high school creative writing class. But the road, she says, was \u201cvery, very, slow\u201d. She studied English as an undergraduate, and a master of fine arts in creative writing at Syracuse University, then, similarly to her Writers & Lovers protagonist, Casey, paid the rent waiting tables. Her\u00a0first novel was published when she was 36.<\/p>\n
She says she developed writerly, watchful instincts during her \u201cchaotic\u201d Massachusetts childhood, which encompassed periods at home alone with her unhappily married parents while her two older siblings were at boarding school, and then the\u00a0acquisition of 14 step-siblings after her\u00a0parents divorced when she was 11, remarrying three times between them. Her father \u201cwas a really serious alcoholic. I don\u2019t know how he got all these wives to marry him!\u201d she says. Each family setup was so different. \u201cThere were four different cultures. I\u00a0became very adept at watching for signs of how that culture operated, how I would survive best and how to\u00a0protect myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
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She also read a lot as a child, and it\u00a0was Judy Blume\u2019s novels about teenage girls navigating complex social dynamics that inspired her to write. She and Blume are now friends, having met during an online event during the pandemic. That \u201chas been an incredible honour. She gave me everything. I feel like I would not have this career if I hadn\u2019t read her books.\u201d<\/p>\n
These days, she is a diverse reader. \u201cI always keep a copy of Virginia Woolf\u2019s To the Lighthouse on my desk, as well as The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard,\u201d she says. She is a\u00a0longterm devotee of Tessa Hadley, Strout and Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn, and cites My Friends<\/a> by Hisham Matar, about three Libyan exiles living in London, as a\u00a0recent favourite. At the moment it is\u00a0\u201cuseful to read dissident literature about countries in authoritarian crises. I\u2019ve read a lot of those books all my life \u2013 now it\u2019s with a totally different perspective. We Americans have always had an exceptionalist point of\u00a0view, as though that would never come here. And so I think those stories are so important \u2013 but we also need to balance our reading so we don\u2019t get terrified into numbness and inertia.\u201d<\/p>\n
That, in the end, is why she decided to embrace her accidentally written love story. Fiction<\/a> \u201callows us to see things from so many perspectives. That is such an important part of living communally,\u201d she says. When we connect with others through fiction, it reminds us \u201cthat the huge majority of people on this Earth are genuinely good and have love in their hearts\u201d.<\/p>\n