Reverse Age Gap with Jodi McAlister

When I wrote An Academic Affair, which is the first book in the Love Notes series, I was very conscious of the fact that I was setting up other books in this series as I went.

Fiona and Satoshi were always going to be the second book, and I always wanted to explore this age gap.

So previously I've written a lot of pairings where the protagonists are about the same age.

I think the biggest age gap I've had in the past is five years.

And even then it was an older man, younger woman, and it wasn't really particularly part of the narrative.

He was 31 and she was, it was only four years.

He was 31.

She was 27.

So this time around, this was a dynamic I really wanted to experiment with as a writer and, And because the older woman, younger man pairing lends itself so well to a friends with benefits story, that is something else I wanted to play with as well.

I was very conscious of the fact that in my previous four romance novels, the first sex scene appeared at approximately the same place in the narrative.

And I was like, oh, okay, how can I change this up? And playing with this dynamic gave me a really nice opportunity to do so.

I think there are a few different things that people come into an older woman, younger man story expecting.

One is that we often see women putting themselves back together in this kind of story.

We see women who are escaping from something bad, who are escaping from a man who wasn't right for them, from a job that wasn't right for them, from something in general that wasn't working well.

This is almost never a story about a woman who has started very, very late.

I don't want to say that never happens, but that is not the sort of dominant trope here.

What we see are what we might think of as second act stories, women entering a new phase of their life after one chapter has concluded, often very badly.

And then with the men in these books, and I'm talking here about older women, younger men books as a sort of heterosexual pairing.

There are different dynamics here.

when we play with queerings of these pairings along different axes.

But the younger men in this book often represent not so much a return to a time in the woman's life when she didn't have to care so much, but of caring in a new way, of someone who's grown up, because they're a little bit younger, in a kind of different world order.

and who maybe has green flags where once there were red flags, who isn't quite as rigid and formalist and, dare I say, patriarchal as what the woman has faced before.

So the real promise of this trope, I think, is a newfound freedom and the possibility of doing love in different, better, more alive ways.