In A Dash of Salt and Pepper by Kosoko Jackson (Berkley, Dec.), a “charming romance,” per PW’s review, Xavier Reynolds, reeling from a bad breakup and a career setback, returns home to small-town Maine, where he finds himself working as a prep chef in the kitchen under—sometimes literally—chef/owner Logan O’Hare, a single father. Jackson, who’s also a YA author, spoke with PW about writing for different readerships and the enduring appeal of early aughts dramedies.
How would you describe your main characters?
Xavier is a burned-out, failed golden child who returns home with his tail between his legs—the gifted kid who didn’t achieve what he thought he would. He was supposed to get an MBA and work for a Fortune 500 company, and now he’s working for a mom-and-pop restaurant. My YA readers will recognize the type: YA books talk about the gifted kid, but we don’t see what happens after that. It was important to me to get right the depression of feeling a failure but also be light and jovial. What made it fun was writing Logan as a love interest. He represents this small town, which was a comforting blanket to wrap myself in. It harkens back to the shows of the early 2000s. A lot of readers who are now the target demographic of rom-coms grew up watching Gilmore Girls, and this book very much gives back to that.
In what ways is writing for adults different from writing for teens?
One of the key things is how young people and adults view love. When I’m writing YA, these feelings are a lot bigger. For a teenager, your first love is all you think about. You forget about school, your family, your friends. With adults, there are life responsibilities: a job, a mortgage, a child perhaps, or other people who are counting on you. That means that love isn’t the only thing.
As a YA author, writing sex is new to me. We don’t write sex on the page; the most is usually fade-to-black. For this book, I wrote my sex scenes last. I always did it with my eyes closed: in my heart, because I started as a YA author, I’m like, “Oh no, we can’t write sex!” But it was also liberating to finally do it. Sex is another way to show the personalities of characters and how they move in a sexual space. There’s a lot of sexual attention and steaminess between Logan and Xavier. I always think about it from a craft point of view: how does this sex scene tell us more about our characters?
How do you consider consent when writing sex?
There was a more BDSM-y scene in one of the earlier drafts and my editor and I decided to take it out; there was no precursor inside the book to really talk about that sort of kink inside of the relationship, and so it would’ve taken a little bit more work. It’s a big example of how society has shifted. In the early 2000s, we had these rom-coms with the quintessential “forcing a kiss in the rain,” and we don’t have those anymore because even kissing without consent is a weird act.
