Check out our interview with Rachel Meredith, the author of "Girl Next Door."
What was your inspiration behind the book?
A few years ago, I was attempting to write a “contemporary” novel after a decade of trying and failing to write SF/F. It was about a filmmaker who has to move back home, and there was a subplot in there about the filmmaker reconnecting with her grumpy next-door neighbor from childhood, who, as it turns out, is secretly the author behind a bestselling romance novel about the two of them. The manuscript wasn’t going well. I was trying to troubleshoot by explaining the premise to my wife, who’s an editor, and she was like … The subplot is cute, you should just write that ...
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
It means the joy of being able to read stories that speak to my experience as a queer person, and the joy of reading stories from other queer perspectives. It means protecting the visibility that queer and marginalized people have fought for in publishing, and working — as an author and a reader — to deepen and expand that visibility, always.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
I think on the most basic level, it makes for better storytelling. But beyond the world of books, stories that represent a variety of people add to our collective understanding as a society, working against the forces that are always trying to make us more close-minded and miserable.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
The book is about a freelance journalist who discovers that her childhood next-door neighbor is the anonymous author behind a wildly successful queer romance based on their senior year of high school — except they were never actually together in real life. It's about second chances, coming of age in your messy 20s, and coming home. As I mentioned above, it started out as a subplot from a different novel I was working on, which I then expanded into a full-fledged novel of its own. That expansion took about two years. When I was starting out, I didn’t feel confident that I could write a good rom-com. Partly because I wasn’t sure if my sense of humor would appeal to readers, and partly because I’m a huge prude. But the lack of confidence allowed me to have humility and be open to making (and working through) a lot of mistakes, which made it much more rewarding overall than the ten years I’d spent trying to write other types of novels, where I felt like I had more practice and know-how. In that sense, the “why” behind the book is pretty selfish. I was in a low place in my life, and it helped me feel light. I truly hope it makes readers feel the same.
What can fans expect from your book?
Physical comedy, weird jokes about the Byzantine Empire, a very prickly love interest. A main character who’s adrift but not particularly eager to figure out why. A premise that’s meta (though hopefully not annoyingly meta), and a full cast of characters, each dealing with their own issues, connecting and reconnecting in ways that change them all.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
I’m working on another sapphic rom-com that I think of as a companion book to "Girl Next Door" in terms of the second-chance trope and the fact that it’s about summer, which feels like a coda to the “school year” theme I was going for in GND. Wish me luck!
