Lily King: What is life without love? | imaginary

TThe cover of Lily King’s new novel, A Lover’s Heart, shows an abstract face crying white tears against a tangerine background. It’s an appropriate image, given that many early readers—from BookTokkers to fellow authors—reported crying uncontrollably during the last third of the book.

For King, the reaction was unexpected. “I definitely felt a lot of emotions while writing,” she says. “I wasn’t crying, there was a deeper sadness.” But she describes writing her sixth novel, which begins with a college romance in the 1980s and then revisits the same characters in middle age, as an enjoyable experience. “It was really nice to go back to the ’80s and college. It was a relief.”

King’s latest novel shares a “connecting thread” with Writers & Lovers, her 2020 bestselling story about a 31-year-old woman who works as a waitress while striving to establish herself as an author, and whose fans include Curtis Sittenfeld, Elizabeth Strout, and Madeline Miller. Like that book, and 2014’s “Ecstasy,” inspired by the life of 1930s anthropologist Margaret Mead, “A Lover’s Heart” features a love triangle (actually, the triangle in “Ecstasy” is more of a square). King says this dynamic rings true in life, at least in her experience: “You go through dry spells in your relationships and then the relationships fall apart.”

But King didn’t intend to write a love story this time. She was working on a “political murder mystery” titled Mercury Island during the pandemic. “I had about 90 pages in, and I was running out of steam. I had a dead body on the first page, and I didn’t care how he died,” she laughs. Then her friend Ann Patchett sent her the Tom Lake manuscript. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, she’s having so much fun. I’m having so much fun reading this.’“ So she flipped up the back of her notebook and began writing the first scene of “A Lover’s Heart.”

King’s writing is warm and compassionate — even when characters are behaving badly, she offers them compassion — and she comes across in the same way, speaking from the home she shares with her husband in Portland, Maine. She’s inquisitive, talkative, has a cascade of long, curly blonde hair, and exudes a sense of the outdoors — she hikes, and, as she tells me wincingly, “I dare say, I’ve gotten really into pickleball.”

For all its joy, it was devastated by the political situation in the United States; Her voice cracks when she talks about her concerns about voting rights, and about the tech companies she accuses of being “bent on keeping us apart — actively and intentionally — without seeming conscience or responsibility. And that breaks my heart.”

Given the darkness of the moment, she admits that in the run-up to publication, she sometimes wished she had written a political murder mystery, not a love story, after all. At times she worried that the book’s title—taken from the card game the characters play—was too “simple.” One of her two adult daughters even told her: “If you use that nickname, it will ruin your career.” That really bothered me!

But in the end, she decided to “go all in.” “Falling in love produces all these great feelings and chemicals and hormones,” she says. “The extraordinary thing is that you can read a novel and feel the same things.” She is well aware that love stories are sometimes discussed “in a pejorative way. And I really want to oppose that, because I don’t know what we would have if we didn’t have love?”

King knew she wanted to be a writer since her first creative writing class in high school. But the road, she says, was “very, very slow.” She studied English as an undergraduate, an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University, and then, like the protagonist of “Writers and Lovers,” Casey, she paid rent to wait tables. Her first novel was published when she was 36 years old.

She says she developed literary instincts and alertness during her “chaotic” childhood in Massachusetts, which included periods at home alone with her unhappily married parents while her two older brothers were at boarding school, then acquired 14 half-siblings after her parents divorced when she was 11, and remarried three times in between. “Her father was an alcoholic. I don’t know how he got all these wives to marry him!” She says. Each family’s setting was completely different. “There were four different cultures. I became very adept at watching for signs of how this culture worked, how I could best survive, how to protect myself.”

She also read a lot as a child, and it was Judy Blume’s novels about teenage girls navigating complex social dynamics that inspired her to write. She and Bloom are now friends, having met during an online event during the pandemic. “It was an incredible honor. She gave me everything. I feel like I wouldn’t have this career if I hadn’t read her books.”

These days, she is a diverse reader. “I always keep a copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse on my desk, as well as Shirley Hazzard’s Evening Off,” she says. A long-time fan of Tessa Hadley, Strout and Colm Tóibin, she cites My Friends by Hisham Matar, about three Libyan exiles living in London, as one of her favorite books. Recently. For now, “it is useful to read dissident literature about countries going through authoritarian crises. I’ve read a lot of these books throughout my life – and now it’s in a completely different perspective. We Americans have always had an exceptional point of view, as if that would never come here. And so I think these stories are very important – but we also need to balance our reading so that we don’t become terrified, numb, and frozen.”

Which, in the end, is why she decided to embrace her serendipitous love story. Imagination, she says, “allows us to see things from many points of view. This is an important part of communal living.” When we connect with others through imagination, it reminds us “that the vast majority of people on this earth are truly good and have love in their hearts.”