Consider Yourself Kissed 

By Jessica Stanley

(Riverhead Books)

Interview by Diane Slocum

(Editor’s note: In this chat, Stanley reveals how she made the book feel real and how stories comfort her in uncertain times.)

Coralie’s job takes her from her home in Australia to London where she knows no one. Then she rescues a drowning little girl and meets Adam, the girl’s father. Before long, they are a couple and Coralie is thrown into a chaotic mix of in-laws and ex-es and half-siblings. Her own family has its challenges as well with a domineering, distant father, a dying mother and a brother back in Australia. On top of this, during these years of 2013 through 2022, Britain is going through its own upheavals with Brexit and Boris Johnson. Adam is in the thick of it as a political writer, further complicating Coralie’s life. Even though she now has everything she once wanted, she feels she is missing something she can’t live without. Herself.

AUTHORLINK: Where did you get the idea for your story? How did it develop from there?

STANLEY: As we emerged from the pandemic, I held a joint fortieth with my husband. Our friends and neighbours were there, our kids, their friends. If I could have flashed forward when I was 29 and seen this dream life, I wouldn’t have believed it was mine. But I hadn’t flashed forward those eleven years. I had lived them. And I was struck by the disjuncture between how the moment looked, and how getting there had felt. It was a dream, yes. But getting there had been really, really hard. I thought – what if I could capture that struggle?

AUTHORLINK: What interested you in having it take place over ten years?

STANLEY: Over the pandemic I reread many of my favourite books. Most of them took place over long periods of time, like the Cazalet chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard and American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. There’s something inherently comforting about the chronicle form. The highs, lows, excitements and lulls are just like life. And you get to show how people change over time – and how they don’t. It’s so satisfying. I wanted to try something similar.

AUTHORLINK: Why did you start your book with one page of 2022 and then go back and write the story from 2013 on? Did you always plan to do it that way?

STANLEY: I wrote the book from the beginning to the end and only slotted in the 2022 preview at the end of the writing process. I think my brilliant agent Lizzy Kremer suggested that it might be nice to have something suspenseful, pulling people along. Personally, I barely remember most prologues as I’m reading, and just get lost in the mood of the story. But I’d had some alarm bells about starting the story in 2013 without a promise to the reader that we’d be getting closer to the present day. So a few paragraphs of 2022 solved both our concerns!

AUTHORLINK: The political situation in Britain during the years of your story plays an important part. How did this become something you wanted to include? And then there is covid.

STANLEY: My favourite book in the world is The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. The main character Nick Guest comes to stay at his university friend’s family home in Notting Hill. He has a beautiful London summer, a gay coming of age. Then things get difficult for him. It all takes place in a particular place, London, in a real time, the 1980s, between Margaret Thatcher’s real second and third victories at the polls. The vivid history and real factual reality of the mid to late 1980s only adds to the truth, beauty, devastation and poignance of Nick’s love and heartbreak. I decided I too would keep everything grounded in real life, 2013-2023. Hollinghurst makes a main character a Tory MP. I made Adam a political journalist. That allowed me to show how external public events penetrated and sometimes even took over Coralie’s private home and private life. It took a lot of research to get all that right, but it allowed me, as an author, to put on the page some of what we went through and survived in that very turbulent period in our national life. It was a lot, it was hard, and we deserve a pat on the back for managing it. At the same time, I always feel the need to disavow the Covid element of the book and reassure people it’s only a few pages. Perhaps because all the trauma has been brushed aside without a national conversation, no one wants to go back to that time! I get it.

AUTHORLINK: The book is full of relationships beyond the romance between Coralie and Adam – children, parents, ex-wife, half siblings and many more. How was this complex extended family important to your story?

STANLEY: Since it was a main goal of mine to make the world of the book to feel real, it was so key to create a genuine-feeling social and relational universe. I also wanted to show that one can be lonely in the way Coralie is when she first moves to Lonodn – knowing hardly anyone. Then I wanted to show one can be surrounded by people and still feel it. I’ve been both kinds of lonely in my life, and I thought getting it down on paper might help people who are feeling it now.

AUTHORLINK: All of these characters orbiting around Coralie take on lives of their own. Can you say if you grew especially fascinated with one or two of them?

STANLEY: It was so easy and fun to write people like Anne, Adam’s brisk and dismissing mother, and Tom, the new husband of Adam’s ex-wife. But the person I came to love the most was Daniel, Coralie’s brother. I felt I really understood him, how his experiences growing up led him to where he was, but also how his lovely sensitive personality helped him transform and find love. I know quite a few people like that – gentle and loving.

AUTHORLINK: Besides enjoying the story, what do you hope readers gain from reading it?

STANLEY: I wrote the book during hard times about hard times, and I would love for people to find comfort in it. It brought me comfort to have the world of the book to be in, I loved writing it. I would love for it to be a temporary shelter to people who needed it like I did.

AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?

STANLEY: I have so many thoughts and feelings that I know will be part of a new book. I just have to find the shape of the story. Hopefully it comes together!

About the author: Jessica Stanley grew up in Australia and moved to the United Kingdom in 2011 where she worked in advertising before writing fiction. She lives in London with her husband and three children.