In conversation are authors Robyn Schneider and Ciara Smyth, who both have newly published novels out this month—You Don’t Live Here and The Falling In Love Montage! The pair chat about their novels, love stories, grief, TV shows, snacks, and more!
Tell us about your new books, YOU DON’T LIVE HERE and THE FALLING IN LOVE MONTAGE.
Ciara Smyth: The Falling in Love Montage is a story about Saoirse who, in my opinion, has very good reasons for not wanting to get into a relationship. But then she meets Ruby and Ruby is cute so what’s a girl gonna do? Ruby loves rom-coms so she suggests that they have a relationship where there’s no serious stuff, just the kind of fun things you see in the falling in love montage of a movie. Saoirse agrees because, like I said, cute. But she promises herself it won’t get serious. Good luck with that girls!
Robyn Schneider: Sure! You Don’t Live Here is my queer love letter to Gilmore Girls and The OC. It’s about sixteen-year-old Sasha, who loses her mom in a terrible (fictional!) earthquake, and is forced to move in with her estranged grandparents in their wealthy, conservative town. It’s like she’s stuck in a repeat of her mom’s life, down to her grandparents’ expectations that she date the right boy and make the right friends. But her grandparents’ ideas don’t exactly match up with hers, especially after she meets the girl next door. It’s both a coming of age story and a coming out story, since Sasha’s grandparents don’t realize she’s bisexual. But mostly, it’s a story of a family dealing with loss, and learning how to live together after their world is upended by tragedy.
Ciara Smyth: I adore Gilmore Girls so that plus bisexual coming of age, I’m in heaven. Can’t wait to read it!
Both of your books feature girls falling in love. Tell us why you decided to write these love stories into your books.
Ciara: Falling in love is the most exciting time. It’s so intense and fun and it takes over your life for a little while. You can’t decide when to fall in love, it doesn’t come when it’s convenient. It doesn’t always happen with the perfect person, it just happens. I think we want to control so much of our lives and we cannot control this, even if we try. And on purely a writing level it was just fun for me to write all these date scenes. They are all my ideal date scenarios if I’m honest.
Robyn: Ok, you need to keep talking about love forever because I love the way you describe it. Also, date scenes are my favorite kind to write, too. Falling in love is a transformation, and it’s something that you can’t come back from, not fully. Love changes how you see the world, and yourself. And I love stories like that—stories about people discovering who they are, and choosing who they want to be, not just obsessing over who they want to be with.
Ciara: I couldn’t agree more, I think how we love is so intricately tied to who we are as people and how we see the world and ourselves and I like love stories to reflect that.
Both books deal with young women learning about and presenting themselves authentically. Why did you feel this was important to write about for today’s YA readers?
Robyn: Being a teenager is a journey of self-identity. You try on a poem to see if it makes you feel something, you buy a pair of shoes because you want to be someone who wears shoes like that. You experiment and you learn and you gather these pieces of the world and make them pieces of who you are. But growing up queer, there’s this additional element of figuring things out. And it’s not always as easy to share as being a fan of musicals, or having a grunge aesthetic. So I wanted to write about a girl who learns to share her authentic self—all of it—after she learns that if you don’t tell people who you are, they fill in the blanks themselves.
Ciara: I probably still buy shoes hoping to be the kind of person who wears them! Being authentic and listening to yourself are really difficult things to do and it’s a lifelong journey that usually starts in adolescence. I feel strongly that culturally we try and avoid negative ‘bad’ feelings and that the things we do to avoid those feelings are hurting us far more than we realize. Saoirse doesn’t want to feel heartbroken again, she doesn’t want to lose anyone else and that’s a very understandable reaction to loss but she’s going to miss out on so much if she sticks to that plan. You have to feel your feelings, sooner or later! I work as a mental health professional in my day job and so it’s natural for me to unpack things like this in my writing, but I surround it with kissing and banter and angst.
Robyn: Loss is so hard to overcome, especially when you don’t realize the full scope of its emotional impact. Unpacking your feelings is a theme I write about as well, and it’s so important to have stories that are positive examples of this.
In each of your books there is a strong emphasis on family, both positive and negative. What went into developing these relationships?
Ciara: With Saoirse and her mum the relationship is very different from what it once was and because of her mum’s illness. I did a lot of research about dementia and the impact on families. With Saoirse’s Dad I think the struggle was to show him through Saoirse’s eyes, as someone whose actions were terribly hurtful, but also to let the reader see that he’s not totally awful, he’s just a flawed person who is sometimes selfish and thoughtless and funny and caring. One of my favourite sayings is, “of course our families know how to push our buttons, they put them there.” That’s true of Saoirse and her dad but there’s a lot of love there too and that’s important. We can hurt people we love, the important thing is working out how to talk about it so we don’t keep doing it over and over again.
Robyn: Exactly! It’s the repeated mistakes that hurt the most. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten to see my parents more as people—and I’ve gotten to see my friends become parents, and it’s made me realize that we’re all just people trying to do our best, and it took me far too long to realize that. So I wanted to write about messy, complicated, but ultimately loving and supportive family relationships in a way that conveyed hope and truth.
Ciara: Oh my God yes! I think about how high my expectations were for my parents when I was younger and now I think about how my parents were not much older than I was when I was a teen and I feel sorry for them!
From the start of THE FALLING IN LOVE MONTAGE, Saoirse is comfortable and outspoken about her lesbian identity, whereas Sasha is still learning her bisexuality in YOU DON’T LIVE HERE. How did you go about creating these characters and how they understand their identities?
Robyn: Sasha is a people-pleaser, which is something I also struggle with. It can be so hard to crave acceptance and affection, especially when you identify as queer, because it feels like the two sides of your personality are at odds. I wanted Sasha to be a character whose insecurities were relatable, and whose sense of self never wavered, only her thoughts on what to do about it. Bisexuality is a complex thing; you can’t define your sexual identity by the relationship you’re in, or the gender of your current crush. It’s all part of a larger thing. And I wanted to explore that through Sasha’s coming to terms with the first girl she ever likes enough to do something about it.
Ciara: I think so many people struggle with that sense of being torn between what will make others happy and what they really want for themselves. The fear of rejection is very real.
RS: It’s hard to be different, but it’s even harder to feel like you’re the wrong kind of different, or the kind of different whose story is rarely told.
Ciara: Saoirse doesn’t think very much about her identity as a lesbian, she’s comfortable with it and doesn’t face any hardship on account of it and for me that’s maybe a bit of a fantasy of what I would have liked to have as a teenager. I think that although of course, homophobia is still a big problem and books that deal with that are vital. Books that deal with confusion are vital. But I think it’s important to show characters who are comfortable in their skin, who doesn’t struggle because of their sexuality so that we know that there can be another way.
Robyn: There are so many different stories about queerness right now, and I love that so much, because I agree that all of them are vital. As a reader, recognizing your struggle in fiction is so important, but also reading about others who are comfortable in their identities can be so uplifting.
Grief plays a role in both of your books. How does this affect your character’s relationships with their romantic interests?
Robyn: Grief is a hard thing to carry with you when you’re falling in love, because it makes you feel guilty for your happiness, and it clouds your judgment, because it’s just so big sometimes, and so heavy. I wanted Sasha to have to ultimately work through her grief in order to be worthy of the girl she’s interested in, but for the shared grief of having lost a parent to be something that made them grow close in the first place.
Ciara: Ahhh, all of those waring emotions. So difficult to manage and sort out, especially perhaps if the person you normally think things through with, is the person you’re missing. Saoirse’s losses are the driving force behind all of her choices in the book. She chooses a no strings attached relationship because she’s lost so much recently and she thinks if she keeps things casual she can have the fun of a falling in love montage without falling in love. But we are attachment seeking creatures and I also think some part of her is reaching out to connect with someone even though on the surface she says she doesn’t want that.
Robyn: We all really do want to connect, especially when we’re hurting the most. But it’s so hard to let people into your hurt sometimes, especially when you care about them.
During the COVID lockdown, what has been one TV show or movie that’s brought you comfort during this time?
Robyn: Definitely The Great. All those snarky “huzzah!”s and “indeed”s. It’s this farcical and lush mis-telling of the rise of Catherine the Great, and I don’t know which is better, the dialogue or the costumes. (Spoiler, they’re both excellent)
Ciara: I haven’t even heard of this before now! I’m going to check it out. I’ve been re-watching Community. It’s so funny and smart and most importantly, short. I have a very short attention span right now. #sixseasonsandamovie
Robyn: I LOVE Community! Also, only tangentially related, but that pizza box room-on-fire GIF is such a classic.
What the perfect snack to pair with your book?
Robyn: A sea salt iced coffee and a pineapple bun!
Ciara: Well, I think given the sheer number of films referenced in the book it would be remiss of me not to say popcorn.
