And I would love to know about that other career of yours and what type of work you were doing.

Yeah, so I kind of have always been the girl who loves politics and the girl who loves theater, writing, film and TV.

You know, like in high school, I was president of the Model UN Club and president of the theater club.

So just cannot emphasize enough how much I did not get kissed in high school.

I was a little ahead of my era there.

When Glee came out, I was like, come on, man, now I would have been cool.

glee of course the epitome of cool anyway all that to say um so that's kind of always been me in college i was sort of pursuing those two things i was studying playwriting but also very involved and engaged politically i interned for senator john kerry in washington dc and then he was running for president and i was going to school in western massachusetts so i would drive up to new hampshire to volunteer for the primary and for the general.

and I'm really curious like what was the journey to publication like for getting this book on shelves and do you have a sense of how people are responding to it because like this was such a breath of fresh air to me I was so excited and on every page I was just like I can't believe this got published like this is so amazing that a book like this is out there right now and I'm very curious just from your experience as an author like what what has that been like for you to bring this book out into the world

I think all of those things you're saying are right.

And I have to say, I came up with this idea, as you mentioned, right after Kamala became the nominee.

And it was like, I hadn't really, I felt, I would say I felt an immense amount of relief when Joe Biden was elected president.

But I didn't really feel hope between when Hillary lost the election in 2016 and when Kamala became the nominee in 2024.

And people had always asked me, when will you write about politics? And the truth was that I didn't want to because I couldn't connect with those hopeful feelings that had motivated me to get involved in politics in the first place.

And when Kamala became the nominee, I was actually on vacation with a friend in a small island in Indonesia.

And I was, you know, we were up in the middle of the night watching the TikToks and the edits and brat and like all of that.

If that was like a way of continuing to give yourself hope, being able to visualize and imagine what that would feel like.

Can you talk, can you tell people about that? 'Cause I don't think we've talked about that yet.

Yeah.

So my thesis on this is that the Republican Party is the opposite of a romance novel, which is that a romance novel exists to empower women and queer people, to show those characters experiencing power, uh, obviously in their love lives and sex lives, but also in their families, in their careers.

And that today's Republican Party exists in direct opposition to that.

That obviously, uh, trying to take away women and queer people's rights to control our own bodies on almost every level, but also taking away our access to good jobs, to education, to healthcare, the ability to have self-determination in our own lives.

And so the idea that I could write about a character whose core beliefs are about disempowering women and queer people in a romance novel-

And that's a message I think is very powerful and

Definitely.