“I had to be very aggressive about my own mental health,” she continues.
“I felt like I was wearing the skin of this book.
But were they ever really ready to let go of all that they had?
Grand Central Publishing
But could they be even better together the second time around?
Read more after the first look.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You’ve seen such success in the indie and self-publishing worlds.
Why turn to traditional publishing now?
They’re actually through Forever, who’s publishingBefore I Let Go.
I had a four part series, which was my debut series, and it was traditionally published.
Then I started indie publishing after that.
So it’s really a return to traditional publishing.
I just got excited about the possibility of reaching new buckets of readers.
I got excited about reaching a new group of readers that I might not reach on my own.
Tell us more about this book and what inspired it.
It’s actually the first book I ever wrote.
Even before my debut novel that I published with Forever.
It was just languishing under my virtual bed.
I had not thought about it.
And as I revisited it, I just was like, I love these characters.
This is a messy story.
And I wrote it when I really didn’t know what the conventions of romance were.
It’s a woman and her family, a divorced couple, not a marriage in crisis.
They’ve been divorced for a few years, and they have two children.
It takes place in Atlanta and Atlanta is a really special city to me.
It’s where I’ve spent most of my adult life.
lived there for over 20 years.
The series is called Skylands.
It’s so charming yet cosmopolitan and very diverse and very progressive.
It’s almost my take on small towns, but it’s not a small town.
It’s “in town.”
It is that sense of community, but it’s a city setting.
So, it’s an in-town romance.
And what aresome of the themes you’ll be exploring?
It is a family that has experienced back-to-back catastrophic losses.
A lot of people think, “Oh, Kennedy writes sad books.”
I don’t think that I write sad books.
I write real life books.
And real life is not always easy.
But the thing that I love is that I’m in control here.
In real life, things don’t always turn out right, but in my stories they do.
We are meeting this family when they’re recovering.
Yasmen has complicated grief, [which] is when it goes beyond a year or so.
She has been very aggressive about taking her life back.
There’s a lot in this book about mental health.
Your work often tells the story of a second-chance romance.
What appeals to you about that narrative of coming back together after a long time apart?
All I want is for them to be together.
There’s something I want for them as individuals too.
When they come back together, they’re coming back together with their own wholeness.
It’s not like, “I’m finding my other half.”
It’s not determined by a man.
I have figured this path out for myself.
I still have my dreams.
I have my own ambitions.
I have my own sense of self.
You are also the queen of angst.
Why does that heaviness and that tormenting of your characters appeal to you?
Healing is a big theme for me bouncing back and triumph in the face of adversity.
Sometimes I feel like love shines brightest when it’s tried.
My husband and I have had to love one another and support one another through adversity.
The pure things are the pure things.
The real things are what remain and everything else burns away.
And there’s some things that you only learn through difficult circumstances.
I like to see the mettle of characters.
You always do extensive research.
What were some rabbit holes you fell down with this one?
I’m always at a certain point like, “Ok, you’ve got to stop.”
My background is journalism and I used to do a lot of freelance writing and interviews.
Interview is something that I lean really, really hard into.
I interviewed about seven moms who went through something very similar to what my heroine went through.
And a few couples that actually ended up divorcing in the context of what happened to this family.
I did do a lot of research on grief.
I came across this study on grief done by a neurologists.
There’s this cloud that comes in and certain areas of your brain start to overcompensate.
I don’t think of grief as a linear process.
We talk about grief at times in stages, but I don’t think it’s that linear.
And I did lots of research with therapists.
I had therapists as beta readers.
[laughs] I’m just so particular about covers.
It definitely is different because when I’m doing something as an indie author, I have complete control.
I was very fortunate that the team at Forever and Hachette really listened to me.
And I listened to them, and it was a lot of collaboration.
Within that, what was on your wishlist for this cover then?
We wanted something that felt different from a lot that we’ve seen in romance lately.
I wanted it to be very clearly a Black woman on the cover.
This is a Black love story, where both love interests are Black.
I wanted that to be very clear on the cover.
I wanted some brightness to it.
I wanted it to feel vibrant.
Yasmen has been through a lot but she is in a season of joy.
There is a friendship at the core of this book, which I really love creating these girl-ships.
There’s three women at the center of this story and they are empowering each other.
They laugh a lot.
There’s a lot of humor and laughter and joy in the book.
So, I wanted there to be elements of vibrancy that conveyed that.
If you had to choose three words, to sum up the book what would they be?
