Guest post written by Two Left Feet author Kallie Emblidge
Kallie Emblidge works for The Washington Post and is a co-chair of the paper’s union. She lives and writes in New York City. Two Left Feet is her first novel, but she’s been a football fan forever.
About Two Left Feet: A Premier League football star must defend his roster spot—and his heart—when a threateningly talented and handsome midfielder joins his team in this utterly charming debut romance, a profound love letter to the world’s most popular sport. Out January 13th!
I have a confession to make: I actually didn’t set out to write a Sports Romance. I mostly just wanted to write about football (soccer! You know what I mean) and it ended up a love story, because football is deeply, deeply romantic to me.
For over half my life, I’ve been drawn to the structure of the beautiful game: how the long flow of play is like watching a feature film whose credits only roll by the whims of a single referee’s sense of time, the precision and trickery of a sprung offside trap, the primal geography of passing lanes sprawling over some 75,000 square feet of grass and sod. I’ve never had much of a head for math, but statistics and jersey numbers and league-position calculations tumble around my head constantly.
No other passion has lasted quite as long or made quite as large of an impact on my life. Loving football taught me two languages (I’m fluent in Spanish and Catalan), once moved me across the world (to study in Barcelona and see my favorite team play in person), and introduced me to people I’ll know forever. Above all, football has given me a keen sense of belief in the collective, a hope to play all of life like a team sport.
The irony, though, is that mainstream men’s football, the big brands-and-billions version of it, is so diametrically opposed to another core part of myself—being queer.
I worried, and sometimes still do, that being a bi woman meant football was a space I’d always have to fight my way into, elbows first. While there’s a sense of relief and belonging as the delightfully gay women’s game keeps growing in scale (though I’d love to see it invested in even further), it also throws into sharp relief just how closed off men’s football is for queer athletes and supporters.
This contrast is how Two Left Feet was born. Oliver Harris, the book’s protagonist, is a footballer with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’s a hometown hero, the best player in a mid-tier club, trying to make something of Camden’s expectations and his own intense desire for greatness. He loves the game in an all-encompassing way, and he has to love it that much, for it to be worth what it means giving up: his authentic self as a gay man.
When Leo, Oliver’s teammate-competitor-protégé-friend-crush-lover, enters the pitch, I wanted to really dig into how the sport is both the propulsion and the obstacle to their relationship. Because men’s football is undeniably homophobic, and toxically masculine in other ways, any whiff of queerness is undeniably dangerous to them. But the first thing that makes Oliver certain he wants Leo, romantically and physically, is watching him play, and thinking about what it would be like for them to play together. There’s a very rich tradition in the romance genre of this particular contrast (hellooooo Heated Rivalry, may you reign for one thousand chapters/episodes) and I feel very honored I got to take my own stab at exploring it!
The book is set in 2017—when I started writing, I wondered if it might not feel timely once it was released, yet the circumstances are still much the same now as they were almost a decade ago. No openly gay player has ever played a match in the Premier League (the top flight in England, where Camden competes in the novel).
My greatest hope for Two Left Feet is that it someday will feel like a period piece, because it’s commonplace for athletes in every sports, of every gender, to play exactly as they like, as exactly who they are. I wrote Oliver and Leo an unambiguously happy ending explicitly and on purpose, with a better future in mind, trying to will it from page to reality, the same way I’ve always tried to manifest a goal when for my team while they’re on the pitch with the ball at their feet.
