We chat with author Jodi McAlister about An Academic Affair, which is a charming new romance about two English professors who embark on a fake relationship…only to discover that it may be harder to pretend than they realized.
Hi, Jodi! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I have a double life. By day, I’m a romance author: An Academic Affair is my eighth novel. By other part of day,* I’m a romance scholar. I work as a Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University in Melbourne, and my research speciality is popular fiction, especially popular romance (essentially, I have the same research area as Sadie does in An Academic Affair). I’ve been doing this for quite a while now – I’m currently the Vice-President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. The TL;DR version: I write romance and I study romance.
*by night, I’m exhausted. This is a lot, and I’m not even remotely a night owl 😉
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I’ve been writing and reading ever since I can remember: this started very, very young. I attempted to write my first novel when I was six years old (it was two pages long, and had twenty chapters), and never really stopped.
I wrote my first actual novel manuscript when I was an undergraduate. That book really taught me how to write: not least because over the next decade-ish, I rewrote it from the ground up four times. I was extremely lucky that it wasn’t one of those manuscripts that languished forever in a desk drawer: it ultimately became my fourth published novel Libby Lawrence is Good at Pretending (and a testament to the fact that when I really love a story, I simply cannot stop writing it).
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: I can’t pinpoint the specific title, but the first author I ever remember reading was Enid Blyton. I basically taught myself to read from her Noddy books, and then graduated swiftly to the rest of her oeuvre. That first ever novel I attempted to write when I was six was extremely unsubtly inspired by her Famous Five/Secret Seven/various other child detective books!
- The one that made you want to become an author: When I was nine years old, my school librarian put Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody into my hands. This is a classic work of Australian young adult fiction, set in a post-apocalyptic world several hundred years after a massive nuclear event nearly wiped out humanity. Some people have developed special gifts – the heroine Elspeth can read minds and talk to animals, for instance – and they’re dubbed “Misfits” and sent off to work camps, the most brutal of which is called Obernewytn. When Elspeth gets sent there, though, she discovers friends, romance (her romance with the brooding Rushton was very formative for me), and eventually a community of shared learning as the Misfits work out how to use their gifts. It definitely made me want to become a author, but that bit about the community of shared learning probably also has something to do with me becoming an academic.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The romance novels of Kiwi author Lucy Parker live rent free (like: rent. free.) in my brain. It’s hard for me to pick a favourite, but Pretty Face – a romance between a grumpy theatre director and the soap opera actress he’s been forced to cast in his big West End play – is one I reread a lot. It has one of the best first lines I’ve ever read: “It was the last straw when she seduced the vicar.”
Your latest novel, An Academic Affair, is out November 11th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
“We’re totally married for work.”
What can readers expect?
An Academic Affair is about Dr Sadie Shaw and Dr Jonah Fisher, two rival literary studies academics. They’ve been butting heads for fifteen years, ever since they were undergrads, competing for all the same awards and honours and opportunities.
However, when a permanent academic position comes up, and Sadie and Jonah realise that, due to a partner hire clause, they can both have the job if they’re willing to get married (on paper, totally just on paper, why would you assume that anything romantic would happen in this extremely just-on-paper marriage??), they decide to try collaborating rather than competing for once…
Where did the inspiration for An Academic Affair come from?
Given I am an academic, writing something set in my world felt like a pretty logical and natural decision! This is especially true given my penchant for slipping some of my big thoughts about romance narratives into my work: why not write characters who are forever doing the same thing?
More specifically, though, the idea to write academic rivals in a marriage of convenience situation arose quite naturally: I certainly wasn’t trying to play trope bingo with it. I always start with setting when I write, so when I’d decided on academia,* it was pretty logical first to get from “academia” to “academics” and then to “rivals” (inspired both by the fact that academia is full of rivalries, but also by the fact I’d just written three friends-to-lovers books in a row and wanted to explore something a bit different).
I’d had this seed of an idea about partner hire vaguely percolating away in the back of my mind for a while, ever since I’d first met an academic who got hired that way. I initially thought this would be a great excuse to play with fake dating, but then I explored how it actually operates in Australian universities. You have to sign a legal document about the nature of your relationship, and if you lie, you can go to jail. I didn’t want that possibility on the table for Sadie and Jonah, which it would be if they said they were dating and they weren’t. But then I realised that if they said they were married and they legally were, well…
*specifically, I decided to set the bulk of the book in Tasmania, which is where I had my first academic job and is a place very near and dear to my heart.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I really enjoyed writing the slow burn of Sadie and Jonah’s relationship (obviously!), but something I especially loved exploring was their respective relationships with their sisters. Sadie and her sister Chess are extremely close: they’re the only family either of them has, and Sadie deciding to enter a marriage of convenience really throws a spanner into the works for them. Jonah, on the other hand, has a more distant relationship with his sister Fiona, but when her husband leaves her, he finds himself deeply regretting that he hasn’t been there for her more and wanting to become a better brother.
I have a lot of siblings myself, and they’re some of the most important relationships in the world to me. My previous three books were all set on reality TV, where I didn’t really have the scope to explore sibling relationships, so I was delighted to be able to dig into them here.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
There was one big challenge each for each of the protagonists:
Sadie has pretty much exactly the same research area and pretty much exactly the same job as me. However, I’m not particularly interested in writing characters who are me – self-insert is not really my vibe – so figuring out how to make her meaningfully different was a challenge. There were a few ways I went about it, but the biggest one was making her younger than her sister Chess: I, personally, have oldest daughter written all over me.
With Jonah, the challenge was to make it clear that he and Sadie are only right together now: I didn’t want to write a romance where they feasibly could have got together and stayed together five minutes after they met and only waited fifteen years out of some kind of misguided stubbornness. This meant giving him some bad habits that he had to work through when he was younger – he was a bit of a “well, actually” guy, for example – and treading the line of not making young Jonah unforgivably unbearable. Negotiating that and showing his growth as he became someone that could be a proper partner to Sadie was very tricky and required some precision.
What’s next for you?
I have a new novel out next year! It’s called A Study in Sparkling, and it’s set in the same world of An Academic Affair – it’s the story of Jonah’s recently-acrimoniously-divorced sister Fiona and the hot younger man who runs the local wine bar…
And I also have two academic books coming as well. The Bonkbuster: Women’s Popular Reading in the Long 1980s, which I co-wrote with Dr Amy Burge, will be out in January; and Audio Erotica, which I co-wrote with Dr Athena Bellas, will be out later in 2026.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed reading this year? Are there any you’re looking forward to picking up?
I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to make sure that at least one third of my romance reading is by authors from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (while great books are being published everywhere, I feel pretty passionately about supporting local authors and books!).
We’ve been blessed with some great new releases this year down under. I’ve particularly enjoyed In Spite of You by Patrick Lenton (a queer revenge rom-com), A Smart Girl’s Guide to Second Chances by Steph Vizard (the single best deployment of the love triangle I’ve ever seen), and In the Long Run by Emma Mugglestone (the loveliest book about two people building a run club together and falling in love along the way). I’m also really looking forward to The Duke by Anna Cowan, a sapphic Regency romance I just got the ARC for and am forcing myself to wait to read until I finish my next round of edits!
