The American author discusses our need for fiction in an age of disconnection, the challenges of growing up with 14 step-siblings, and why she’s going ‘all in’ on romance
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he cover of Lily King’s new novel, Heart the Lover, features an abstracted face sobbing white tears on a tangerine background. It is an appropriate image, given that so many early readers – from BookTokkers to fellow authors – have reported weeping uncontrollably during the book’s final third.
For King, the reaction was unexpected. “I certainly felt a lot of emotion while I was writing. Not sobbing, more a deeper grief,” 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 a joyful experience. “It was really great to just go back to the 1980s and college. It was a relief.”
King’s latest novel shares a “connective thread” 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’s Euphoria, inspired by the life of 1930s anthropologist Margaret Mead, Heart the Lover features a love triangle (actually, in Euphoria the triangle is more of a square). This dynamic feels true to life, King says, at least in her experience: “You go through droughts with relationships and then it just pours.”
