We chat with author Patricia Leavy about After The Red Carpet, which is a feel-good, contemporary celebrity romance about what happens after the fairy-tale beginning as two lovers work toward their own true meaning of “happily ever after.”
Hi Patricia! Please tell us about After the Red Carpet.
It’s a follow-up to my novel The Location Shoot. In that book, Hollywood movie star Finn Forrester and free-spirited philosopher, Ella Sinclair, fall in love on a film set in Sweden. The book ends with Finn’s proposal on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. After the Red Carpet looks at what happens next. Ella movies into Finn’s Beverly Hills mansion and they try to figure out how to build a life together. They are trying to learn how to each be themselves and also be a partner. All the while, Ella is writing a philosophical treatise on love, exploring the question: when we love so deeply, where do we end and where does the other begin? So there’s sort of a meta commentary about what love really means. Love isn’t something we simply feel, it’s something we do.
What inspired you to write a sequel?
I absolutely loved writing The Location Shoot. Honestly, it was the most fun I had ever had writing a novel. I didn’t want to leave Ella and Finn’s world. There’s a sweet scene in The Location Shoot in which they take a bubble bath together and talk about their dreams for the future. So, I decided to write After the Red Carpet to see if their fantasies come true.
A lot of romance novels focus on young couples falling in love. After the Red Carpet is about a married couple. Why did you choose to write about a couple after the falling in love phase of a relationship?
Pop culture constantly shows us that getting married is the end of the romance story, but actually, it’s the beginning. So many romance novels end with a proposal or wedding. Why? I think the idea that romance ends with marriage is actually pretty sad, and maybe one of the reasons so many marriages fail—we focus on “falling in love” instead of partnership. Everyone starts out hopeful and “in love.” It’s easy to read and write about that, and I’ve done so many times myself. But it’s not the whole story. Merging your life with someone else, growing with them, accepting them unconditionally, all the while retaining your own identity—these things are challenging. In The Location Shoot we see how Ella and Finn met and began their love affair. After the Red Carpet shows us what happens next. It’s a cozy romance that explores what happens after two people fall in love and decide to build a life together.
What makes your novels different from others in the romance genre?
My novels are cozy and meant to wrap readers in a hug. Some people describe them as escapist, feel-good, comfort reads. I adore a happy ending, one filled with love, maybe a lesson, and a touch of empowerment or hope. My novels are character and dialogue-driven. If you prefer lots of description about surroundings, my books may not be your cup of tea. While my novels are romantic and do include humor—smart girl humor—they are not rom-coms (a genre I adore, but not one I write). Really, my novels are about love itself. All-encompassing, cozy, affectionate, sexy, messy, confusing, inexplicable, meant-to-be, once-in-a-lifetime love. At the core, my novels are about relationships and self-discovery. Plots are less important than the central relationships. When there is a kidnapping, accident, or death threat, which is rare, it’s always used as a device for the characters to learn more about themselves and how to love each other better. A lot of romance novels have pretty toxic relationships—people who treat each other badly before they treat each other well. That’s fine, but it’s not what I do. My characters are aspirational. They always treat each other well, although some do have major struggles, but they are internal, not external. These are books for people in love with love itself.
You have a doctorate degree in sociology and are a well-published nonfiction author, specializing in arts research. Does that side of your career influence your fiction?
Definitely. The characters in my novels are often artists, writers, actors, musicians, and scholars. There’s a narrative about the arts woven into each of my novels. Sometimes it’s subtle, other times it’s a major part of the story. I always think that each of my novels is about four things: love, art, identity, and something else. It’s that “something else” that differs for each book and keeps it interesting for me.
What can readers expect from you next?
My novel Shooting Stars Above is the first book in a romance series I’ve written called The Celestial Bodies Romances. It will be out in March 2025 and we’ll be releasing a new book in that series each spring. It’s a super sweet and romantic series about learning to balance the darkness and light in our lives. For fans of After the Red Carpet, Ella and Finn’s story continues in a final book coming out in September 2025 but we’re keeping the title under wraps for now. One tidbit, it takes place decades after The Location Shoot and After the Red Carpet.
