Emma Lord knows love stories. Her fifth YA novel, The Getaway List, is a slow-burn summer romance about agency and the shifting nature of friendship. Tom and Riley are still best friends despite the distance that’s grown between them since Tom moved to New York and Riley stayed in Virginia. Fresh out of high school but feeling ambivalent about her future, Riley takes off to the Big Apple to reunite with Tom and hopefully rekindle their friendship while accomplishing goals on their childhood “getaway list.” As the duo embraces the spontaneous nature of the city, they also attempt to define their future on their own terms and come to recognize the fractures that have opened in their friendship, which is slowly blossoming into something new. Lord spoke with PW about crafting quintessential rom-com moments, craving independence, and writing love stories for an emotionally mature generation.
This is your fifth YA romance. How has your understanding of young love evolved over the years?
I don’t know if my perspective on young love has necessarily shifted so much as my view on young self-discovery. I feel like what’s so fun about writing young adult romances is that so much of it is tied up with these moments in their lives when they’re really discovering their passions and what they want out of life and stumbling up a path to get there. The more I’ve gotten the chance to write different stories, the more I’m coming at it from these different angles of what path to self-discovery this character is going to take and find love along the way.
What’s been your favorite or most challenging romance dynamic to write?
I love rivals to lovers; the potential for banter is always really fun. But what I really like about it is when you start out as rivals, you establish that there is a basis of mutual respect. I have really struggled with friends to lovers, both in writing and sometimes reading it. I don’t [typically] gravitate toward it, but I think it’s interesting to do because you have to explain what has stopped them from getting together before, and then still develop some kind of tension. Sometimes it makes it difficult because you’re like, oh come on! So with friends to lovers, I think that it’s important to find that tension and some sort of satisfying shift of like, why now, why not before? I really love reading it when it’s done in a way that’s unexpected.
What are you thinking about when you’re crafting those quintessential rom-com moments?
What’s so fun about a perfect rom-com moment is that it is fundamentally imperfect, and the characters make it unique. Even in the perfect moment, a little awkward, funny thing is going to happen. One of my favorite scenes to write in this book was very early on when Tom and Riley are potentially going to be living together for the whole summer. Riley’s mom is worried that they’re going to develop romantic feelings for each other so as a joke they’re like, we’ll just kiss and that’ll prove that there’s nothing here. And ultimately, they don’t even kiss. I love that moment when they both are like, “Oh, snap,” right before they’re interrupted. I love a romantic moment where things sneak up on the characters and the reader has been seeing it the whole time.
What went into portraying the fractures in Riley and Tom’s long-distance friendship, most particularly facing the realities of change and idealized perceptions of one another?
We all have experience with long distance friendships now, I think, because of Covid. And some of my closest friends are people I’ve never even met in-person, because we just met on the internet. There’s a difficulty when you know someone in their core, in the permanent parts of them that are going to stay consistent forever, but they feel like a stranger to you on the surface, when you haven’t seen them in a while. And I think it’s very real, how you can romanticize somebody you don’t have in your immediate vision. Tom and Riley are relearning each other but also relearning themselves through each other. And that forces them to examine the ways that they’ve changed, and maybe the ways they’re holding themselves back, or the things that they want in life, but haven’t really accepted yet. The tension within themselves is so high that it just creates this tension everywhere else and it’s forcing each other to grow and face things about themselves along the way.
Chasing agency is an evergreen subject in coming-of-age stories. How did you explore it through Riley?
What’s interesting is I have noticed that a lot of YA readers are adults. A lot of them are in their 20s and 30s and I think they can identify with this late bloomer mentality. For some of us, late blooming came from not quite having a sense of agency early on when we should have, either because of well-intentioned parents helicoptering, or because we were afraid. That’s something that I really enjoy exploring, when I have characters who are on that cusp just after graduation or in college. Beyond 18, there is this huge fear of like, “Oh, I’m in charge now.”
Many of your stories center around mother-daughter relationships. Is there something that keeps you coming back to exploring those dynamics?
Riley’s mom was fun for me to write because it was a sort of fanfiction of my own life in the sense where my mom and I are so similar. Often things that frustrate me that she does, I’m like, am I frustrated that she’s doing this? Or am I frustrated because I see myself in the things that she’s doing, and vice versa? And then I based Tom’s mom on my friends. I liked reading those relationships, because I felt like it helped me understand where my friends who do have moms like that were coming from because I’m having conversations with them about it. What I really wanted to stress was, in both of their moms’ cases, they’re coming from a place of deep love. I heard this quote the other day, probably on TikTok, that said we can only love with the tools that we’re given. I took that as like, well, some people are Ikea furniture, and they’re going to see a screwdriver and be like, that’s not going to work on me. You’re going to need the tool that came with the box.
Despite this being a romance, there are a lot of relationships that don’t work out in the moment and the characters choose to prioritize their friendship. What made you want to highlight friendships that survive unrequited feelings?
Even though it’s inherently unromantic, I’ve always found those moments when they’re preserving their friendship to be so romantic. Knowing that no matter what happens with the romance, you’ll still have each other, you still have their best interests at heart, you’re still going to care about that person, that it’s not a conditional thing. That makes the love take on a completely different color. It’s a warmer, safer thing that has a solid foundation that makes it even more romantic when it does work out, in a way. In dating culture, and also when you’re a teenager, the person you’re dating right then is probably not the person you’re going to end up with, but the friends you’re making? Some of them are going to be in your life forever. It’s always important to prioritize each other on a friendship level, first, whether or not it’s a potential romantic connection—especially at a time in your life when everything is changing around you, whether you want it to or not.
It’s an incredibly mature mindset to have, especially for such young characters.
That’s also a testament to Gen Z. I feel like the emotional tools that they have through social media are resources that I didn’t necessarily see. We all hopefully figure out for ourselves in due time. But I think Gen Z is exposed to a wider variety of people via the internet who are going to be able to teach them things like how to give grace to each other in a way. There’s just a lot more empathy and a lot more patience and understanding in Gen Z than I even see in Millennials. They’re using the tools that they have to expand understanding, which has been really a cool thing to see over time.
What can we expect next from you?
My first adult book, The Breakup Pact, comes out in August. And then I have another YA book coming out next January, and that one is going to be a rivals-to-lovers story. And there’s another adult book after that, which is very music oriented. When I graduated from college I moved to Nashville and tried to be a songwriter for a little while. So it was nice to finally use all of that knowledge for something.
The Getaway List by Emma Lord. Wednesday, $20 Jan. 23 ISBN 978-1-250-90399-0
