FAQ
On Something Borrowed & Something Blue
Are you more like Rachel or Darcy? How did you come up with the plot of Something Borrowed? Is it an autobiographical story? I am much more like Rachel, but I think I have a little bit of both girls in me, just as I will always have some things (whether traits or experiences) in common with any protagonist, particularly when I’m writing in the first person. To write convincingly, I think you must be able to relate, in some way, to what a character is experiencing. Like Rachel in Something Borrowed, I was a lawyer who was unhappy in the big firm culture. Rachel was generally a rule follower and risk averse until the summer after her thirtieth birthday. Upon turning thirty, I, too, reevaluated my life and decided to make a major change. As for Darcy in Something Blue, she and I both moved to London at a crossroads in our life, and we both have identical twin sons (the scene with her doctor in London at her ultrasound was the most autobiographical scene in any of my books). And like both women (and most women everywhere) I know what it’s like to have a complicated female friendship. But fortunately, I never fell in love with my best friend’s fiancé (nor did the reverse ever happen to me!) I just wanted to tell a story about a complex female friendship—and thought that a love triangle would illustrate that dynamic in a fun, page-turning way.
Why did you decide to tell Darcy’s story in Something Blue? Even though some of the characters are the same, do you feel writing from the different viewpoints made the two books feel vastly different? What were the advantages and disadvantages to writing a sequel? It’s hard to imagine two women more different than Darcy and Rachel, which is one reason their friendship fascinated me. Theirs was a friendship built upon the past, and these can be some of the strongest—and yet some of the most strained. In early drafts of Something Borrowed, I thought often about what Darcy would say if she could hear Rachel’s thoughts. How would she defend herself? How would she view events differently? And yet, I never really considered writing the sequel until the completion of Borrowed when I spent some time fine-tuning Darcy. She was undeniably self-centered, superficial, and self-indulgent, but I never viewed her as evil. I wanted to be sure that she was not coming across as a flat character devoid of any depth or warmth. After all, Dex spent seven years with her and Rachel put up with her for much longer. To make that part of the story realistic, I thought it necessary to soften some of her edges, and so I added in a few scenes to show her good-hearted side. In so doing, I became much more interested in Darcy as a person—which was the genesis for my sequel, Something Blue. One advantage to writing a sequel is that the characters are already drawn. The disadvantage is that I had to write for the reader who had not read Borrowed, but be careful not to retell too much of the first story for those who had. Striking that balance was difficult. I was also constrained by what happened in the first book. In writing Darcy’s flashbacks, for example, I had to keep in mind chronology and conversations of the first book—so I didn’t have the freedom I enjoy when I start a manuscript from scratch.