WOW! WOMEN ON WRITING TOUR OF
They All Fall in Love at the End
by Haili Blassingame
Book Summary
Cat St. Clair is ready for her messy love triangle era now that she’s in an open relationship. But she didn’t foresee a forbidden love triangle with the only two people who are off-limits: her boyfriend’s best friend and his girlfriend. Being a twenty-something writer who lives for plot, she falls for them anyway, with deliciously disastrous consequences, in this electric literary debut for fans of Xochitl Gonzalez, Coco Mellors, Lily King, and Raven Leilani.
It’s the fall of 2024, and twenty-four-year-old Cat isn’t asking for too much: all she wants is three boyfriends, to write her little novels, and to survive another chaotic presidential election. She’s in an open relationship with her college sweetheart Jay, but nonmonogamy isn’t just a hot trend she’s trying. It’s her sliver of freedom in a world eager to wrestle it from her for being a Black woman going after what she wants with reckless abandon.
While political tensions roil the campus where Cat is slowly earning her creative writing degree, she finds herself drawn to Jay’s best friend, Tristan, who’s smart, super hot, and…in a monogamous relationship. And then she meets Tristan’s girlfriend, Nia, a captivating art student with her own gravitational pull.
Friends and family urge her to just be happy with Jay, but Cat is determined to have it all—or blow up her life trying. As she falls for all the wrong people, racking up lies, betrayals, and terrible drafts of her novel, she tries to write her way to a happy ending. But in art, politics, and love, true liberation may take more than rewriting the old scripts. It may mean inventing something entirely new.
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN-13: 9781668204122
ASIN: B0D9DP6GDY
Print length: 384 pages
Purchase a copy of They All Fall in Love at the End on Amazon and Bookshop.org. Add it to your GoodReads reading list.
Author Interview
What are some books or authors that you would recommend to our readers?
I’m currently reading Adrienne Rich’s poetry collection Diving into the Wreck and it is SO good!! (I think she wrote this after divorcing her husband and coming out as a lesbian???). If you’re in the mood for an amazing literary-leaning RomCom with 2000s vibes I’d highly recommend Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley. If you want to be totally confused, turn-around and swept away by stunning language, read Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. It’s about 180 pages and it’s taken me a year to get through it, that’s how dense the prose is.
Tell us what you enjoy most about writing literary love stories.
Is it pitiful to say I love writing about romantic love so much because it’s missing in my life? Well, it’s true. The literary part comes from the fact that I prefer an ambiguous ending, picking apart big questions beyond the romance in the story, and I have trouble following rules, which literary fiction essentially doesn’t have, so I can go off the rails.
Do you identify with your main character, or did you create a character that is your opposite?
Cat (the heroine) is me in an alternate universe without therapy or like my little cousin.
Describe the book or series in 10 words or less for people just learning about it.
Chaotic, heartfelt, messy, provoking, unexpected, hilarious, offbeat, fresh
Do you have any odd (writing) habits?
I basically can’t outline, or rather, it’s extremely miserable and challenging. I’d rather write a whole book than an outline and oftentimes that’s exactly what I do.
What is your favorite line from your book?
“I understood the imperative of caging this animal want—I might die a spiritual death, but I could be sacrificed. Who was to say what would happen if it got loose, loping crooked-legged, yellow-eyed through the world, sizing people up then eating them whole?”
About the Author, Haili Blassingame
Haili Blassingame is a producer for the show 1A from WAMU and NPR. She writes literary fiction about love, desire, and the decisions that feel impossible to make starring plucky, loud-mouth female protagonists of color. Her debut novel is called THEY ALL FALL IN LOVE AT THE END. It has a hot-pink cover. She’s also written a New York Times Modern Love essay about breaking up with her boyfriend and a piece in The New Republic about Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer. She’s also been a guest on the Modern Love podcast, NPR’s Life Kit, and NPR’s 1A. She previously worked on NPR’s Code Switch and Weekend Edition. She lives in Washington, D.C with her 10,000 books and no bookshelf.
Find her online at:
Substack: https://hailiblassingame.substack.com/
Instagram: @hailiwroteabook
Website: https://hailiblassingame.com/
TikTok: @shutuphaili
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