A Bookish Love Letter: A Guest Post by Stephanie Perkins

After over a decade together, Ingrid and Cory decide to pause their relationship and reconsider their direction. But with her future up in the air, Ingrid welcomes an opportunity for new beginnings in this charming adult debut from Stephanie Perkins. Read on for an exclusive essay from Stephanie on writing Overdue.

While Overdue is being positioned as my first novel for adults, this is not entirely true. Young Adult book events have always hosted a split crowd with as many eager adults in attendance as teenagers. People who don’t read YA literature always seem a little mystified by this phenomenon, but it’s always made sense to me. Who doesn’t remember what it was like to fall in love for the first time? To make mistakes? To work our first jobs, worry about our futures, dream big with our friends? Whenever a grown person questions me about these other suspicious, YA-loving adults, I like to ask them if they still enjoy watching Clueless or Mean Girls or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Finally, their eyes will alight with understanding.

In this way, I’ve been fortunate to have been writing for adults for my entire career, and my new novel, Overdue, aligns thematically with everything that has come before it. I’m still fascinated by these major turning points in our lives—when big questions suddenly arise and we’re overwhelmed by the notion that maybe we’re not as grown up as we thought we were. Maybe there’s still more to come. And maybe we don’t have a clue how to get there.

Overdue is about a woman who went to college, met her boyfriend, moved to a new city with him, found a job, and then . . . stopped growing. She locked into a version of adulthood too quickly, and is only now—at the age of twenty-nine—realizing that she doesn’t know what she wants and can’t actually see her future.

It’s also a deeply romantic story involving librarians and booksellers, a bookish love letter to its core. I’ve been fortunate to work as both a librarian and a bookseller, and I’ve always known that someday I would write about these careers. These people. Because books are so good at stoking the fires of our empathy, book people are some of the kindest and most compassionate humans I’ve ever known. And in these anxious times, when the future of the world feels forever at stake, it was comforting for me to have spent the last few years writing about such a community.

I hope reading about these book-loving, empathetic characters will bring you some comfort, too. And I hope Overdue will remind you of a time in your life—whether you were a teenager, in your twenties, in a midlife crisis—when everything turned upside down, but you came out stronger on the other side.