Writers whose first book is successful can fear a sophomore slump, Marianne Cronin is no different. Her first novel, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot was shortlisted for a Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, and received the American Library Association Alex Award. She was “deep in a full-scale panic” about book two and dealing with morning sickness when inspiration stuck and led her to the charming story 90-year-old Eddie Winston. Eddie’s unlikely friendship with 24-year-old Bella, who is grieving her late boyfriend, leads to friendship and a quest to reunite Eddie, who has never been kissed, with a lost love.  Cronin shares her journey creating this whimsical novel. 

AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?

 CRONIN: I have been writing for as long as I can remember. I studied English and Creative Writing at university for my undergraduate degree. I went into it worried that perhaps studying the thing I loved would rob me of any joy in it, but the opposite happened—I enjoyed writing even more. Before enrolling, I had never shared my writing with anyone so I remember being so nervous prior to the seminars where we would share our writing with the class, but I quickly got used to it. Then for my MA and PhD I went into literary linguistic studies, which explores how language is used in fiction to create effects for readers. Deconstructing how other writers use language helped me in my own writing and I began working on my debut novel, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot during my MA studies.

 AUTHORLINK: Where did the idea for Eddie Winston is Looking for Love come from?

 CRONIN: The idea for this novel came from a song! “The Ramblin’ Rover” by the Scottish folk band Silly Wizard was a song I had played hundreds of times while writing my debut novel (The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot) and one day one of the lyrics stood out to me:

 Oh, there’re sober men and plenty,

And drunkards barely twenty,

There are men of over ninety

That have never yet kissed a girl.

 I loved the idea of a man in his nineties who had never been kissed. I could really picture this man – I knew he was kind, he was whimsical and he was fun and I wanted to explore what would happen if he decided, at the age of ninety, to try to find his first kiss.

 AUTHORLINK: What writers influenced this exploration of love in its many forms?

 CRONIN: So many writers! I try to read a mix of genres because I find there’s inspiration to be found in all different types of writing. I love the emotion and delicate writing of Joanna Glen; I love the warm, infectious communities of unlikely friends to be found in Beth Pooley’s writing. I love books with older protagonists, like The Lido by Libby Page and The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher. I also adored the exploration of love in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw.

 AUTHORLINK: Though the subject matter is serious, the book is infused with whimsy and charm. How did you pull that off? 

 CRONIN: Thank you so much! I think it’s very much my natural writing style to blend serious things with a bit of light. Previous novels that I’ve abandoned have been ones where I’ve tried to lean in too much to the serious and they’ve then felt far too bleak to find any joy in them! I’m often trying to amuse myself when I’m writing and it’s a delight when readers tell me they’ve found some fun or humour in the writing. I love oddball characters (and oddball people in life too!) so I find them the most fun and interesting to explore and to place them in a world and see what they do next.

 AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing Eddie Winston is Looking for Love?

CRONIN: Finding Eddie’s path to the ending was definitely the hardest part of the book. I knew within a few days of writing the beginning exactly what the last line of the book would be and how it would end, but it took me about a year of writing to figure out how Eddie actually got there. I tried various different paths and none felt quite right. Once I landed on the path he takes, it felt obvious that it should have been that way the whole time!

AUTHORLINK: This is your second novel. How has your writing process changed?

  CRONIN: Writing a second novel is such a privilege. I was a lot more efficient the second time around—I was able to judge which chapters were slowing the plot, and get them cut before sending the draft to my editors—although that’s not to say there wasn’t more to be cut but it was a much swifter edit than with Lenni and Margot! This time, I knew that sometimes I can get away with doing odd things (like naming a character after a sandwich or having a talking eggcup) and so I allowed myself to have a bit more fun.

 AUTHORLINK: I’m wondering what advice you offer to apprentice writers about either craft, or staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both.

 CRONIN: The best advice I’ve ever read about handling rejection is Kim Liao’s article about aiming for one hundred rejections a year. Reframing rejections as something to collect and gamifying the process of being rejected is such a great way to view the experience of putting your writing out into the world. I read her article a year or two before I started looking for an agent (a process that took about two years) and it helped me when the rejections were coming in to consider them achievements rather than failures.

In terms of craft, I tend to say that writing what you love is the key to doing your best writing. No matter what genre that is. I’ve personally found literary analysis books to be hugely helpful for understanding how writing is constructed—if you’re into that sort of thing, always recommend Mick Short’s Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose but with the caveat that it’s very technical and not at all designed to teach creative writing, but it taught me how to write nonetheless!

 AUTHORLINK: What do you hope readers take away from reading Eddie Winston is Looking for Love?

CRONIN: Eddie was such a sunshiney character to write—I had some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing creating him. I hope that readers find a bit of that sunshine in the book. It’s a book about second chances, about love, friendship, and a guinea pig with incredible hair—it’s full of things that bring me joy and I hope the book will bring some joy too.

 AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.

CRONIN: I’m working on book number three at the moment! It’s very early days, I’m only 20,000 words in so there isn’t too much I can say about it yet, but I think at the moment it might be a slight sidestep in genre which is very exciting. Although having said that, I’ve learned that this early on, there’s every chance that the characters might completely shapeshift and become something else entirely!

  Marianne Cronin was born in 1990 and grew up in Warwickshire, England. After gaining her PhD in applied linguistics, she worked in academia until becoming a writer. Her first novel, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, published by Harper Perennial in 2021, was shortlisted for a Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, and received the American Library Association Alex Award. Her second novel, Eddie Winston is Looking for Love, is published by Harper Perennial. She lives in the Midlands with her family and her cat.