We chat with author Alexandra Paige about Weekends With You, which is a heartwarming and romantic debut told over the course of one year in monthly weekend installments, about found family, new love, and the magic of London.
Hi, Alexandra! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! Thanks so much for highlighting Weekends with You and giving me the opportunity to introduce myself. At this moment, my entire personality is pretty much my excitement surrounding this release, my enthusiasm for future projects, and the sheer joy and honor that come with being included in this space. When I’m not writing, however, I’m teaching seventh grade English, working at a day camp, squeezing in some international travel, spending too much money on iced coffee, listening to the same ten songs over and over and over again, and reading every romance novel I can get my hands on. I’m living in New Jersey (where I was born and raised), having the best time embracing all the chaos and joy of my late twenties, and loving all the time and energy I have to give to my work (and my family and friends, and long walks in the sun, and too many steps in my skincare routine, countless hours in the kitchen).
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Is it too cliche to say as a kid? I hope not, because it’s the truth! In elementary school, pretty much as soon as I figured out how to write a story, I was submitting them for local prizes, reading them in talent shows, rewriting the existing children’s books in my house, and forcing my stories on my family. I didn’t decide I wanted it to be anything more than a hobby, however, until sometime between undergrad and my MFA, when I realized it was time to push myself to write a novel and see where it could go.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Girl, The Goat, and The Goose (age 4.5)
- The one that made you want to become an author: Book Lovers, Emily Henry
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Strays, Emily Bitto
Your debut novel, Weekends with You, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Heartfelt, messy, charming, relatable, fun
What can readers expect?
Readers can expect to be taken on a chaotic tour of London with a quirky group of flatmates, to see themselves in the characters and their struggles as twenty-somethings in a big city, to want to shake the characters out of their own heads, to cheer for them when they finally do get out of their own way, to appreciate their own found families and the magic of those kinds of friendships, and to want to move to a converted warehouse by the end.
Where did the inspiration for Weekends with You come from?
I moved to London for six months during my MFA, and during the significant amount of time I spent looking for housing before I moved, I came across several listings for warehouse conversions. I knew immediately that would be the setting for my first novel, so I reached out to several people already living in warehouses who posted listings looking for flatmates, and then interviewed a few via email and Zoom. This gave me a good sense of the kinds of people living in these spaces, the spaces themselves, and what warehouse life looked like, and the story kind of took shape from there!
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I loved exploring the friendship between Lucy and Raja. It was important to me that their friendship was so much deeper than the drama between Lucy and Henry or whatever else was going on in the flat, and I really enjoyed developing their history and writing some sweet moments between the two of them.
I also so loved writing the ending. I was initially nervous about figuring out exactly how to end this story, but when the idea for the final scene came to me, it felt so right and I couldn’t get it on the page fast enough. Reading my own writing sometimes feels like staring at a picture of myself for so long that it stops looking like me, but reading that scene makes me feel so proud of this book and so connected to these characters in a way I think might be special for a debut.
This is your debut published novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
The road was as exciting as it was excruciating at times, but even amid the rejections and the waiting and the endless revising of a million versions of the same query letter, I was too excited to be discouraged. I owe everything to my agent (shoutout Hannah Todd at Madeleine Milburn) and my editor (Ariana Sinclair at Avon, HarperCollins) for making this process such a dream come true. When Hannah called and told me Avon was buying my book, I was in the middle of running a boot camp-style event with a bunch of middle school boys at camp, and I cried all the war-paint off in the middle of the office. It’s all been so surreal. So humbling, such hard work, such a lesson in trust and patience, so exciting and prideful and mostly just surreal.
What’s next for you?
Next is a second rom-com with Avon in 2025 (we’re going to Ireland this time!), and a third rom-com and a YA in the works, so mostly next is really just a lot of crossed fingers and thousand-word days and celebrating WWY and basking in the gratitude, creativity, and joy that come with this craft.
Lastly, are there any book releases that you’re looking forward to picking up this year?
So many it’d take all day to list them! A few at the top of the list are Emily Henry’s Funny Story, B.K. Borison’s Business Casual, Coco Mellors’s Blue Sisters, and Florence Given’s Women Living Deliciously.
