To me, I’m like, how could it get more romantic than that? I’ve always been attracted to and fascinated by those stories and kind of obsessed with that trope and that genre of love story. I’ve just always been really taken with that sort of love story of transcending reality, transcending life and death and time and space. I think also because, when I was a kid, one of the really formative Disney Channel movies I loved was Susie Q, which is like another oh, she’s a ghost, and only he can see her, and at the end it’s like how are they going to end up together? Then I kind of rediscovered it in college and got really, really into rewatching the whole series and making all my friends watch it with me. I was a big Lost fan when I was around 13 and it was first airing. KT: What inspired you to take this mystical, sci-fi approach in having one of the main love interests essentially stuck in the ’70s? A lot of things can be a barrier in a relationship, but that’s a big one.ĬM: This might sound like kind of an out-of-left-field answer, but actually one of the biggest formative pieces of media for me, and a huge, huge, spiritual parent of this book, is actually the TV show Lost. Just like a waitress who’s trying to make rent, a girl who ran away from home and all of these things. And I wanted to see if I could create a story where it felt like that - as magical and fantastical and the stakes felt as high - but the people in it were just very ordinary, you know, people like anybody else you would meet on the subway. Like, I think that my first book, a lot of the plot is kind of held up by the fact that these are two people with unlimited resources who can fly across the world to see each other. I also really wanted to challenge myself to do something as different as I possibly could from my first book. I was really inspired by that, and so I had this idea that I wanted to do a sort of magical or supernatural or paranormal or sci-fi type of impossible romance that would play with the idea of the subway as a liminal space. Just taking the subway, looking out the window of the subway car into the other train passing in a tunnel, and that sort of feeling of probably the closest you can get to approximating liminal space in real life. So, that whole experience to me - it was like, wow it’s just like on TV! It just seems so magical.Īnd that was kind of what inspired it. I’m from the South, and, where I’m from, we don’t have a lot of public-transit service, certainly not underground public transit. And so, the whole trip up there, I’m like, oh my god, what am I going to do next? What’s my next book? And that was also the first trip that I - I’ve been to New York several times, but I had never really done the subway by myself extensively, and that was the first time I really learned how to navigate it. I was going to hang out with some friends and meet my editor for the first time. When did you come up with this plot?ĬASEY McQUISTON: It was a trip that I had taken to New York, literally right after I signed my deal for Red, White & Royal Blue. So, you went from that to a love story whose center stage is a New York City train car - which, while a lot of things, glamorous is maybe not at the top of the list. KATIE TAMOLA: Red, White & Royal Blue was a cultural monolith, a queer love story involving a literal prince. Shondaland caught up with McQuiston to talk about the disparate world of the metropolitan subway, challenging herself as a writer, influential media from the early aughts, and what comes next. Relationships are hard, but, when you physically can’t get off a New York City train, they are infinitely harder. There’s just one catch: Jane is stuck in some kind of time warp, having been on the Q train since the 1970s. She feels quite lucky when she continues to run into Jane on her commute, and their mutual feelings grow deeper and deeper. Jane is the quintessential subway crush, and August has their life planned together before she even reaches her stop. One day, August is awestruck when, while on the Q train on her way to class, she sees the most dazzling and mysterious human she’s ever laid eyes on. Although she tries to fly under the radar, her eccentric roommates love her from the moment they meet her, which August isn’t exactly used to. August is just trying to keep her head down and get by. She’s pragmatic, guarded, and a 23-year-old recent transplant to Brooklyn.
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