JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
During the pandemic, author Becca Freeman spent a lot of time walking around Brooklyn, listening to Taylor Swift. Then one day...
BECCA FREEMAN: "'Tis The Damn Season" came on, and for some reason, it scratched my brain differently that day.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "'TIS THE DAMN SEASON")
TAYLOR SWIFT: (Singing) 'Tis the damn season, write this down. I'm staying at my parents' house, and the road not taken looks real good now. And it always leads to you and my hometown.
SUMMERS: The song's about going home for the holidays and reconnecting with someone you left behind. Freeman couldn't stop thinking about the people in that song, so she put it on repeat and walked around for three hours.
FREEMAN: I remember coming home with frozen fingers and toes but also this note in my phone that had a pretty faithful rendering of what became the prologue of this book.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "'TIS THE DAMN SEASON")
SWIFT: (Singing) So I'll go back to LA and the so-called friends who'll write books about me if I ever make it, and wonder about...
SUMMERS: When we spoke, Becca Freeman told me that idea eventually became her new romance novel. It's called "Back Where We Started." And the people from the song became characters Katie and Drew, high school sweethearts who once had big plans for their futures.
FREEMAN: She's always dreamed of being a famous actress akin to maybe a Julia Roberts. And when we meet her in the present, she's actually achieved her dream, and she now is a famous actress known professionally as Blair Banks. And then on Drew's side, Drew grew up in a level - sorry, Drew grew up during an era of Obama administration optimism and always dreamed of being the president. And as you probably imagined, he is not the president when we meet him in the present. And he's actually flamed out of national campaign politics and returned to his and Katie's shared hometown. And he's kind of, against his will, been suckered into being the mayor of their small town.
SUMMERS: So I asked Becca Freeman about what these big ambitions say about her characters, both as teenagers and the adults they grow into.
FREEMAN: Katie and Drew had these really big dreams and really thought that they could become the power couple that they imagined and forge their paths together. But they both have these ambitions that are very public-facing and almost diametrically opposed and both very based on likability. And so as they get into the real world, as they become adults, they realize that their ambitions are a little bit fundamentally incompatible with staying together, which is really juicy fodder for a romance novel.
SUMMERS: For sure. Now, when Katie comes back to her hometown, Drew's life looks so different from the one that they had imagined when they were young, but at least, like, on the surface, he seems happy. Why can someone else's contentment feel threatening when you've sort of built your own life and organized it around achievement and success?
FREEMAN: Sure. So Katie has given up so much in service of her dream, and there's really a little bit of a sunk cost fallacy there of, I've chosen this and now I have to stand by this, whereas Drew has given up on his dream, and he's the one who is actually happier. And I think for Katie, seeing that, it really makes her question a lot about her own life and her own ambition and if the things that she thought would make her happy actually are making her happy.
SUMMERS: In the writing, how did you approach Katie questioning her success without suggesting that an ambitious, successful woman needs to become less so in order to find love?
FREEMAN: That was really important to me. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't creating the Hallmark vision of the woman coming back to her small town and giving up on her dream. I really wanted Katie to grapple with the life she had created but never question giving it up and figure out how to exist within her dream in a way that still made her happy. And a lot of that for her deals with people pleasing. And I think when I started this book, I would not have personally identified as a people pleaser. And I realized along the way that maybe I was giving myself a little bit of therapy...
SUMMERS: Oh, interesting.
FREEMAN: ...Via Katie and dealing with her people-pleasing issues. And for a lot of this book, it's Katie dealing with her great ambition and her locus of approval being outside of herself and figuring out how to get back to a stasis. And I think Katie probably has more resolution on her people-pleasing issues through this book than I did, but it was a really interesting discovery about myself.
SUMMERS: Another thing that was really interesting about this book as it relates to Katie is there's a bit of a critique here in the way that the media scrutinizes women who have these high-profile acting careers. You've named women like Lindsay Lohan, Taylor Swift, Edie Sedgwick as influences on that character. Was there something about the way that the press and our culture looks at these women that you wanted the reader to really just sit with?
FREEMAN: Yeah. So celebrity normal person is one of my favorite tropes to read as a romance reader. And in most of the celebrity normal person books I've read, the celebrity is usually the man. And these books are really fun. It has a lot to do with going to big fancy parties and hiding from the paparazzi. And the story usually has to do with the female main character's - the normal person's - sense of worthiness to be with that person. And I thought I was doing something creative when I swapped the gender of the famous person in the relationship. And as I started writing, I realized pretty quickly that the experience of being famous as a woman is very different...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
FREEMAN: ...Than the experience of fame for a man. And so Katie's dealing with a large scale of scrutiny about every decision she's making, her appearance, perceived relationships that she's having, which I think we know from being pop culture observers that we're seeing these young women be put under a microscope. And so really thinking about what that would be like and how that would affect your relationships, both romantic and platonic, to how people have a preconceived notion of who you are before they're meeting you.
SUMMERS: Becca, so much of Katie and Drew's story is about dreams, really big dreams. So I want to end by asking you, what's a dream that you had that you're glad you didn't give up on, and what's one you're glad you gave yourself permission to change or tweak or let go of?
FREEMAN: Well, I'm not sure that being an author was a dream that I would have even claimed out loud before I started writing my first book. I've been an enormous reader since - ever since I can remember, there's no part of my life where I haven't been a reader. And I think I always thought that I would maybe try to write a book someday as a bucket-list dream. And it was really the pandemic and having so much more time and a lot of anxiety to deal with that made me sit down and start writing for the first time. And I'm really glad that I kept going and completed that book, which ended up becoming my first novel, "The Christmas Orphans Club." As far as a dream I gave up on, I was always a chatty, bossy kid.
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
FREEMAN: And I think that from a very young age, there was a natural inclination for people to say, you should be a lawyer. And I went to college thinking that I would be a lawyer. And it wasn't until about halfway through, maybe when I was away from some of that outside influence, that I stopped to think and say, hey, I don't actually want to be a lawyer. And so I'm really glad that I was able to separate that. I think I would have a very different career and probably not be an author had I pursued that all-encompassing path.
SUMMERS: Becca Freeman, thank you so much.
FREEMAN: Thank you.
SUMMERS: She's the author of "Back Where We Started." And it's out now.
(SOUNDBITE OF TAYLOR SWIFT SONG, "BACK TO DECEMBER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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