CT: There’s a part in the book where Elizabeth asks Richard what his favorite childhood memory was, so now I’m going to follow suit… What do you think yours is?

KD: You’re totally going to expose me for having cribbed from my own life, my own memories. The “true” version of Elizabeth’s memory - where she’s in a laundromat with her mom and her pretzel nuggets are vibrating on the washing machine - is actually a memory of mine. 

I was home sick from school - I had to have been 5 or 6 - in the laundry area of our basement with my mom, and she’d given me some pretzels to eat (I imagine to settle my stomach). I can still see the pink plastic bowl they were in - it had these scratches on it, sort of hatchet marks crossing it from having been washed so much. 

The memory is very much tied to those pretzel nuggets and that bowl. The feeling Elizabeth feels is very much what I remember feeling… though who knows if I actually felt that way? I don’t remember feeling sick, just feeling safe and happy. I don’t know if I would say it’s my happiest memory, but it’s a very sacred one.

CT: Having a vivid memory of being secure is very powerful…

KD: It is powerful. If someone were to ask me to prove that my childhood was happy, to me, that memory proves it because I remember it so viscerally. It was never clouded by anything that came after it, and that’s quite significant.

One of the things I worry about, sometimes, is that stories require conflict - problems, trouble of some sort - yet I had an extremely lucky, relatively conflict-free childhood. Coming to terms with my sexuality was hard, but sometimes I think, “Have I gone through enough to come up with interesting stories?” Which is why I try to focus on empathy. For me, it’s about putting myself in someone else’s shoes and then drawing on authentic experiences/memories that I know/have. 

I still have a lot of angst about writing characters and situations that are so wholly different from mine. If you do your best, use empathy, and create characters and situations as authentically as you can - that’s writing.

CT: Which character do you relate to most? 

KD: I would always roll my eyes whenever writers said “there’s a part of me in every character.” But I totally understand now why they say it! Going back to empathy: if you’re doing the hard work of putting yourself in your characters’ shoes over the entire course of the story, then little pieces of you are going to come out in each character. They have to.

That said, if I were to pick someone I was most like, it would probably be Elizabeth - in terms of my personality. I’m also like Richard, but only when we’ve both been drinking. He and I undergo the same loss of inhibition…. When I drink I get very affectionate with people; I let down my guard. I get goofy in a way that’s very easy to make fun of. I love everything! It’s an unbridled enthusiasm that’s very easy to malign.

It’s funny: Richard is a character I had to change a lot because I assumed people would like him more than they did. In early drafts he was more of a successful producer, more of an overt “douchebag.” But with a heart of gold! Or so I thought. Once you got to know him you were supposed to like him, but it was taking too long. Readers didn’t want to stick with him; the douchebag factor was a problem. So I had to temper it. What was important to me with him was to create a man who was attractive but also very vulnerable - someone who had a self-loathing you would not necessarily expect.

CT: You brought out that vulnerable/self-loathing side when they were around the ducks - when Elizabeth starts laughing at something that seems so trivial - and he felt he was above that humor. It was something unfortunate that Mike sustained in him.

KD: Richard and Mike are at that point some friends get to - where it’s been a number of years and something has got to change. That doesn’t mean the friendship has to end—their friendship definitely doesn’t end—but the state of their friendship at the end of the book is different from what it was in the beginning. It has to undergo a fundamental change and that’s the case with a lot of adult friendships. Richard and Mike need to mature as friends because I agree: they’re not doing each other any favors. That was something I was very interested in portraying—friendship alongside romance, among the same cast of characters

CT: Are you also huge movie buff?

KD: I’m a movie fan. I made the conscious decision to reference books and movies in this novel that aren’t esoteric. They’re very popular and I did that both because I wanted the people reading the novel to be likely to know the books/movies, and also because those were the books and movies I believe the characters would like…. But they don’t all align with my taste, especially the movies.

I wish I had a greater knowledge of movies, honestly. If I had to pick, I’m much more of a book person than a movie person. And the books are more in line with my taste. Elizabeth makes a statement where she says, “ I read pretty much anything between Austen and Fitzgerald,” and that’s what I used to say. I was always the weird kid who refused to listen to anything other than classical music and opera, or to read modern literature. No modern music, no modern books. My tastes broadened in college, but I’d still say the Victorian Era is my sweet spot.

Also the conversations they have around those movies are supposed to help advance the plot, or help mirror the plot, so I was fooling around with a few different things.

CT: Like Great Expectations?

KD: Yeah, Great Expectations - even Harold and Maude a little bit….

CT: What’s so significant about Harold and Maude?

KD: I actually do love Harold and Maude, and there’s a little bit of mirroring there, like when they talk about what Maude does at the end of the movie…. Also Jane Eyre. They talk about Jane Eyre a lot, and I happen to be finishing yet another reread right now, so it’s very fresh in my mind. 

There’s something about their relationship as they become closer. The way Richard jokes with Elizabeth and she plays the “straight man” of the relationship—quiet, yet more than able to keep up with him every step of the way… For me this mirrors Rochester and Jane, the jocular quality of their pairing. Little things like that.
CT: It’s a little ironic that you just retold a modern version of classics like Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations with your story, since you don’t favor contemporary work.

KD: I definitely wanted to convey a sense of playing around with the plots and themes and relationships of those stories in a way that readers and fans of those books would be able to pick up on. 

CT: Any horror movies? 

KD: They talk about how Alien is actually a horror movie, and it really is. I love Alien, actually…. I agree with what Richard says. And I do love horror. There’s a lot of interesting new horror right now, like The Babadook and It Follows. Especially It Follows. The way it was shot, and the score… it felt different in a way I really appreciated. The story was good, too, but I really liked the look and feel of that movie….

CT: If you could choose anyone - dead or alive - to play your characters in a movie, who would you choose?

KD: You know, I never think of actors when I’m writing. And I was talking to another author about this the other day, because you get asked the question a lot. It makes sense, coming from a reader, because readers immediately want a visual and it makes sense to latch onto a familiar face. When you’re writing, the characters are so nebulous for so long, they don’t really have a face… and that never goes away. That’s the real answer. I don’t see specific faces for them. When I’m thinking about them I’m thinking about everything about them—and that’s what happens when you truly engage with the characters in a book.

CT: Elizabeth was very multidimensional, and when you introduced Orpheus and we saw a different side to her. What was the inspiration behind Orpheus? 

KD: My initial inspiration for him was locational. I’ve lived in the Venice/Ocean Park area for 12 years. For the first 5 years, I lived in the Windward Circle part of Venice, right off the Boardwalk, and the homeless population is a huge part of that area. (Although, it’s a huge part of pretty much any area in L.A.) It’s nearly impossible to close your eyes to it, and if anything, that trend has only deepened as the years have gone by. And it was very important to me to bring the setting of Los Angeles to life. Elizabeth always lived in Venice, and in bringing Venice to life it felt natural to me to include a character who was homeless.

CT: Why a professor? 

KD: I wanted him and Elizabeth to have another point of connection between them other than their circumstantial proximity to each other. It was important to show their ability to connect in a way the reader hasn’t seen her do with Richard.

CT: There was a scene I thought was really interesting: Richard was describing the events of his best friend’s wake where he went up to the casket and started laughing. Did that actually happen? 

KD: Yes. Not exactly that way, but when I was a senior in high school—and I went to a very small public school in Westchester, NY—there was a boy who was killed in a drunk driving accident at 20 years old. He was at college by then, but he was a well-known town figure. He starred in all the big musicals our high school put on, and he was very talented and outgoing, and everyone knew who he was, so it was just shocking that he died. It would have been shocking if anyone died, obviously, but it was particularly shocking that he did…. He even visited the high school with his college A cappella group—we had a special assembly—and it was while he was on a trip with that group that he died. They were all riding in a van and he was the only one to be killed in the crash.

There was a three-day wake in the town - it was open-casket and the first time I’d gone to an open-casket funeral. It definitely struck me. I didn’t have the same thought process Richard had, but I’ll always remember what it felt like to be looking at him in that casket, and the way everyone around him was acting, including—especially—his family. It was just weird. The whole thing was really just so weird. And then by the end of the three days it became vaguely party-like…. I know that sounds awful, but it was three days of 17- and 18-year-olds hanging out, having nothing to do….  By the end it got a little boisterous. And yet you have the family still there, essentially like zombies. Like many experiences, it was discombobulated and… weird. I know I keep saying that. But it really was. So, yeah, that was an actual experience. 

CT: Did you have a similar thought process as Richard?

KD: I didn’t have the same conscious thought process, no. And there are people who have written about it so much more powerfully than I have. Actually, the person that comes to mind is Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried, where he talks about the proximity to death—for him in war—making you feel that much more alive and part of life. How it’s a nasty feeling because you’re like, “well, I’m not dead.” And you feel joy. So there was a bit of that.

CT: Do you ever question it? Why them and not you? Why when someone has that much going for them, and is so popular and loved—and it always falls on those kinds of people. It’s not someone that no one knows; it’s never the Eleanor Rigbys….

KD: I remember one classmate at the time it happened - who was a devout Catholic - renouncing her religion, like: “Welp, I don’t believe in God anymore. I’m done.” And I remember thinking, “I don’t blame you.” So, yeah, why them? I don’t know why. I find myself doing a balancing act between not being an atheist and not being a nihilist. For me it’s about figuring out what you choose to believe…. But that’s just my preference - to believe in something.

CT: Is Elizabeth’s relationship with her brother paralleled with the relationship you have with your siblings? 

KD: I have two sisters, and definitely not, in their understanding of my sexuality and whatnot. My hope is that this is a part of the book where what you said about Elizabeth seeming like one person and then being revealed to be someone else—both because she’s more complicated than the first impression she makes, and because she changes over the course of the story—really resonates with the reader…. Because in the beginning I imagine most readers are thinking, “This is a romantic comedy.” And it is! But I want it to be the deepest version of a romantic comedy possible. 

When you first meet Elizabeth, she’s the classic bookworm with the glasses and ponytail. According to the surface version of this character, you take off those glasses and ponytail, and someone’s going to see her inner beauty. She’s going to live happily ever after because she’s perfect on the inside, has always been perfect, has just been waiting for someone to appreciate her…. But no, she’s not perfect on the inside. In fact, she was kind of a mess when she was eighteen. And who wasn’t? So to me, Elizabeth’s lack of understanding with her brother, and the growth she experienced in her twenties and thirties since then, deepens her, makes her real. As does the fact that she feels like she still has more growth to do… because that’s how I feel. I feel like I still disappoint myself when I interact with other people, and not just because I’m awkward. I wish I was nicer. I wish I were more outgoing (without the aid of alcohol). I’m constantly trying to improve myself, or at least wishing I could improve myself. It never ends.

I knew going in that there’s a bias against books that are an easy read, or that are about romance, or love, or human connection because people are programed to not take these books as seriously. I wanted this novel to be an easy read, but easy doesn’t mean fluffy.

CT: You went to both Harvard and Stanford, took the NY bar, passed, and never pursued a career as a lawyer. What was that process like? What was going on in your head?

KD: I was a late bloomer… for everything in my life. At the end of college I was 22 (as most people are), but emotionally I was still 18. A lot of it had to do with being gay, in that I didn’t deal with my sexuality until I was about 25. Not for any external reason; I just needed time to deal with it, and I think that’s what slowed me down in my twenties, because I never did the things people are supposed to do then—emotionally, such as dating and figuring out who you are other than a student. I was always a good student, but never much else, and that didn’t change until midway through law school….

I don’t regret going to law school at all, because it’s a good grad school experience to have if you don’t yet know what you want to do with your life. And also if you’re a bit emotionally stunted, like I was. Because it’s so intensive; it’s much more of a collegiate experience than college actually was. At Harvard they organize you into these sections - there are 100 people in each section so you do everything together and you really get to know each other, and it’s intense. A lot of the clichés you read about in fictional accounts of Harvard, like Scott Turow’s One L and The Paper Chase don’t hold true, but a lot of them do because it’s such a pressure cooker of an environment and I really got to know a lot of people well. I met some of my best friends there, and got to open up to them and myself and figure that stuff out, so by the end of law school I’d made a leap emotionally.

I also realized, by the way, that I definitely did not want to be a lawyer!

But that was okay because law school doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer; it teaches you a different way of thinking about problems, and also a lot about writing. There’s a big emphasis on writing in law school, and that proved to be extremely valuable. I took just one undergraduate course in creative writing, and had no idea I wanted to be a writer until pretty late in life (again: a late bloomer), but I think law school helped point me in that direction.

By the beginning of your 3rd year you have to know what you’ll be doing when you graduate, and I had no idea, but that meant I had a full school year to figure it out, and I happened to find this company that was based in New York called Circle of Confusion. It was—and is—a literary management company for screenwriters and comic book creators, and I really connected with the guy who founded it. To be honest, I harassed him and called him every week on the phone until he finally called me back, and then I connected with him when we finally met. For me the job was all about the personal connection with him. He’d been a lawyer himself, and he liked that I was coming from a law background. So we hit it off and I took a leap of faith based on him, into the entertainment industry. That’s when I came out here. 

CT: After all that, what was it like going on your first date?

KD: Honestly, I don’t think I dated until I came to L.A. I think—and this will dovetail nicely with some of the themes of the book—I think dating and the whole culture of dating is total bullshit. In that it doesn’t really exist. For anyone. Gay or straight. I think we like to think it does, and we’re taught that it does, but how many people truly date these days, in that traditional 1950s-esque way? It’s a popular cliché we’ve decided to believe, just like cliques in high school, the way people fall into well-defined groups when they’re teenagers. They don’t, really…. It’s more complicated than this, but we’ve read it, or watched it so many times in books and movies, we come to think it’s true….

Anyway, I hardly dated before I met my husband, and when I did meet him, I suppose we went on a couple of dates, but it very quickly turned from something casual into, “okay, we’re in a relationship now.” It was like an on/off switch. And until I met him I feel like I was “off.” You know? I was doing things, I was meeting people, but I wasn’t dating per se. 

CT: Do you think that anybody can fall in love with each other if they’re put together, or forced together, in some way?

KD: I do think that, and this is why—going back to what I was saying before, do people really date or is that a relic of a different age? - there’s a utility in the old-fashioned form of dating, where people stick with each other…. After that episode with the ducks, I made it clear narratively that Richard was done, and Elizabeth was done too. Most people would’ve been done. They would’ve moved on.

Obviously, there are some people who are so ill-suited to each other that no matter how much time they spend together it’ll always be a disaster. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who are perfect for each other, who hardly need any time to figure it out…. But most people fall somewhere in the middle and my point is that if they’re given the right motivation, they can make a lot of things happen—including falling in love. The human will is strong, you know?

You could choose to think that’s depressing: my utilitarian viewpoint on love. But I don’t think of it that way, and I hope it doesn’t come across that way, either. I think it’s... there’s a lot of talking about love in this book, and in so many books, and it’s something we all hype as this sacred thing. And yet it’s so common. We all feel it, we all know intrinsically what it is, and yeah, I think that’s why a lot of arranged marriages are successful. I don’t think anybody could be made to fall in love with anybody else, but I think with the right conditions love can be brought about much more often than most people think.