A Love Story That Hurt: A Guest Post by Laura Steven
Our B&N YA Book Club pick is a whirlwind adventure about star-crossed lovers, their doomed romance and love that transcends time and space. Read on for an exclusive essay from Laura Steven (The Society of Soulless Girls) on the inspiration behind Our Infinite Fates.
Hardcover $20.00
Our Infinite Fates (Deluxe Limited Edition) (Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition)
Our Infinite Fates (Deluxe Limited Edition) (Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition)
By Laura Steven
In Stock Online
Hardcover $20.00
The Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition will include an alternate cover and designed endpapers!
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets This is How You Lose The Time War in this fantastical love story that defies death as two souls reincarnate through the centuries.
The Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition will include an alternate cover and designed endpapers!
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets This is How You Lose The Time War in this fantastical love story that defies death as two souls reincarnate through the centuries.
It’s been eight years since I first had the idea for Our Infinite Fates, and over the course of that almost-decade, so many different versions of this story almost existed.
For the uninitiated, Our Infinite Fates is a book about two soulmates who are fated to meet, fall in love, and then kill each other in every reincarnated life. It’s a vicious, star-crossed enemies-to-lovers romance, but it’s also a deep exploration of what it means to be human—what it means to fall in love, knowing it can only ever end one way. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written, and it took so, so long to get it right.
In 2017, the concept began with a single question: “What if a girl who was murdered in a past life wanted revenge in this one?”
For years, I poked at this idea, but I could never find the perfect structure, the perfect genre, the perfect story. I wrote more first chapters than I can even count, but everything I came up with felt half-baked, shallow, like I was unwittingly pulling a narrative punch. Like some part of me knew there was a more epic, sweeping, ambitious version of this book out there, and I just had to find it.
Then, in the darkest depths of the pandemic, Taylor Swift and Bon Iver released exile, and everything clicked into place. I wanted to write a book that felt like this song. Haunting, devastating, but sort of fundamentally hopeful. I realised that my idea was, at its heart, a love story—a love story that hurt.
Instead of centering the murder mystery element, it struck me that I needed to center the twisted, gut-wrenching romance. The core questions started to evolve, to take a different shape. What if this protagonist could remember all of her past lives? What if she was repeatedly destroyed by the person she loved more than anything? What if this book really embodied the line: I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.
After these revelations, the structure finally came to me fully-formed. We would meet the protagonist in the modern day, fighting to stay alive past her eighteenth birthday in order to save her little sister, terrified to step around every corner in case her fated killer was waiting in the shadows. We would also move slowly back in time, over the course of a thousand years, to peel back the layers of their love story—and figure out exactly why they were cursed like this to begin with.
(When I finally figured out the why, I gasped in public. Don’t stab me when you get to *that* line.)
From there, I spent weeks researching every tiny detail of their past lives. These doomed lovers swept the canvas of time and space, from the glittering Byzantine Empire to the witch trials of Vardø, from the tundra of Siberia to an asylum in Vermont, from a trade ship in Batavia to the blood-soaked trenches of a brutal world war. In every life, I changed their genders, their cultures, their physical bodies, and pushed myself to explore what a soulmate really is—how could love transcend these ever-changing realities?
And why do humans keep doing this to ourselves? Why do we love and love and love, knowing it can only end one way? Does this make us unbelievably stupid, or unbelievably brave?
It took a long time to find the perfect lens with which to tell this story, but I’m so thrilled with the resulting book. Writing it broke me and then remade me—I still cry when I think about the ending—and I hope reading it does the same to you.
