Today we welcome author Rainbow Rowell to Heroes and Heartbreakers. Rainbow’s new release, Eleanor & Park, is an intimate account of two people falling in love for the first time. Rainbow herself points out that the main characters in her first novel, Attachments, spent most of the book apart, and she is just so over that. We asked her to share her thoughts on the most satisfying love stories ever, and she told us that, for her, it’s all about depth. Thanks, Rainbow!
I think when I was younger, I thought it was romantic when characters took an entire book or movie—or TV series—to find their way to each other.
I swooned over those first kisses that began just as the credits rolled . . .
Not anymore.
Now, if two characters take the entire story to finally kiss—I’m too fed up by that point to care. There are exceptions, of course, but usually these romances make me feel manipulated, jerked around. Bored.
This might seem hypocritical to anyone who’s read my first book, Attachments. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the main characters in Attachments spend most of the book very apart. In fact, it might have been writing that story that pushed me over the edge.
When I started writing, Eleanor and Park, I just wanted to get past all that. Eleanor and Park don’t fall in love right away, but they meet on the second page.
That’s what’s interesting to me now—and what formed the basis of the relationship in Eleanor and Park—not how characters get together, but what they do when they are together. I want to read and write about people falling in love, and people don’t fall in love in separate rooms.
