As the weather turns a bit cooler this season and we find ourselves reaching for our favorite comfort activities, curling up on the couch with a good book is the pastime many of us are turning to first. I have to admit that this wasn’t always my jam as the thought of spending time reading for fun just didn’t rank high on my list after I finished school, along with years of thinking reading wasn’t “for me”. That was until the recommendations being sent my way started getting….well, very gay.
In particular, heaps and heaps of modern sapphic romantic comedies started popping up in conversations with friends, on TikTok and Instagram, and then in the bookstores I began to frequent in search of the next title to rapidly dive into. In my early days of venturing into the gayer corners of BookTok, New York Times bestselling authors and local married couple Rachael Lippincott (Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh, Five Feet Apart) and Alyson Derrick (Forget Me Not) caught my attention while promoting their hit Pittsburgh-set YA love story She Gets The Girl.
This fall, the duo is back with Make My Wish Come True, the highly anticipated second collaboration set at Christmastime just in time for cozy season. I had the absolute honor of sitting down with Lippincott and Derrick to discuss writing together, holiday tropey goodness, and why queer folks simply deserve romantic happy endings.
Described as a queer “Netflix-esque holiday rom-com with a side of How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days”, Make My Wish Come True tells the story of Arden James and her former best friend Caroline Beckett. Both from the fictional Christmas-obsessed town of Barnwich, Pennsylvania, the two lost touch for four years when Arden suddenly took off and became Hollywood’s hottest teen actor. When Arden’s already rocky reputation gets in the way of her getting the role of her dreams, a plan is hatched to change her image. She needs to return home and to the friend she abandoned to do so.
Caroline spent their time apart honing her skills as a writer to gain entry to a top journalism program and doing her best to move on from her first crush and best friend. When Arden shows up with a promise of a Cosmopolitan byline on a telling of a “secret romance” complete with 12 fake dates, Caroline takes the offer in hopes of advancing her career. It’s a win-win that only comes with spending one of the most romantic times of the year with the girl who broke your heart for a ploy at helping her revitalize her tarnished but young career.
Surely everything will go exactly as they planned (it won’t) and they absolutely won’t fall for each other (of course they might!).
Much like their previous book, She Gets the Girl, Derrick and Lippincott individually wrote from the perspectives of the lead characters, with Alyson writing for Arden’s voice and Rachael writing for Caroline. When asked about how they would describe the pair, Alyson expressed her joy of writing for a character with some rougher edges.
“It was a cool experience writing for the ‘cool girl’ this time. Arden is pretty lost in the beginning. A very successful actress that got sucked into the parts of Hollywood that she didn’t want to get sucked into. She’s now realizing that she wants to make a change and there’s a part in a movie that she really wants more than anything she’s ever auditioned for before. To get it, she and her agent make up this sort of lie that she’s been dating her childhood best friend, Rachael’s character, Caroline.”
For Racheal, writing for Caroline allowed her to voice a more personal perspective. “This is my first character where I’ve been able to outright explore growing up with a Catholic dad and a Jewish mom and that feeling like whether you’re enough of either religion” says Lippincott. “You’ll celebrate Christmas and all of that and then be shipped away to the Jewish sleepaway camp that your mom went to in upstate New York where you keep the High Holy Days of the Jewish religion. At the same time I hadn’t set foot in a church until I went for a wedding when I was 15. Just kind of the dissonance of that. I feel like I was able to explore that through Caroline and then also her just trying to find a place to kind of have this part of herself and share that with this town that’s so Christmas obsessed.”
While Make My Wish Come True certainly carries the romantic comedy goodness torch from She Gets The Girl to new scenery with its holiday backdrop, it still holds very true to something that is key to all of their work. Strong side characters that give their leading ladies community to lean on.
Derrick explained it as “The A plot line in most young adult contemporary novels is usually some sort of romance and then there’s all these other plot lines. I feel like those other plot lines are what really makes the book. I think the most important thing, and with She Gets the Girl, I think the reason people liked it so much had a lot to do with the moms and the exploration there. We wrote the first draft and then we didn’t really even see all the parallels between Alex and her mom and Molly and her mom until our editor pointed it out. It just came out naturally and we explored it further. I think the more of those other plot lines you can get just the more depth it adds to your story and to your characters, most importantly.”
When it comes to how the leads get together in their stories, the authors care very deeply about how their characters relate as friends. “ I feel like the friendship thing is just, like with She Gets The Girl especially, that was very much how we fell in love. Just having a deep, real friendship first.” says Lippincott. Derrick agrees. “ I remember telling Rachael out loud in those two weeks from when we first basically talked to each other for the first time; in between that and when we realized we were dating when we were still friends, I remember thinking, ‘I haven’t had a friend like this maybe ever.’And well then came to realize that that was because she was not my friend.’” she laughed. “ It very much paralleled “She Gets The Girl in our real life.”
While this story is different from She Gets The Girl, both authors promise Make My Wish Come True is filled with the essential romantic tropes and fun that readers crave when they go for this genre, hence why the holidays were such a natural fit, says Derrick. “I feel like we’ve talked about writing a holiday rom-com for a while. It probably honestly came from you (Rachael) mostly just because I know you and your mom have watched a lot of Hallmark movies together. They do a lot of holiday Hallmark movies. I mean there’s nothing more magical than Christmas.”
“I feel like it’s just the ultimate fluff. It’s that time of year” says Lippincott. “And I feel like, especially with those movies or the marathons of movies that you can do every single year, you just know what you’re getting into, and that’s the safe and comfortable way, and there’s a coziness to it.”
The need for that comfort is one of the other reasons that both authors felt so compelled to write this story in the first place. While valid and sometimes necessary, so many LGBTQIA+ stories, including the happy ones, use trauma around bullying, abuse, or the pain of coming out. It’s a growing pain of the romantic comedy as we continue to cement our place in it as coming out is something cishet folks know is a part of our stories even if they’ve never experienced it.
But reaching for the tissues due to sad tears isn’t why most people enjoy the genre. We as queer people deserve fluff, and while this story certainly goes for the unrequited friends to lovers, will they or won’t they of it all, Derrick and Lippincott focused on bringing tidings of comfort and joy because right now, it’s what teenagers — and really all of us– need.
Lippincott remembers firsthand just how difficult it was to find age-appropriate and fun books when she was a kid. “I remember being in Barnes & Noble, I guess, over a decade ago, just looking for a single sapphic book. And what I really would have loved would have just been something like Make My Wish Come True, or She Gets The Girl as a young adult book that could meet me where I was when I was 16, wandering the stacks and ending up finding something like Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. Which is an incredible book, but at the same time, I was 16, and it would have been nice not to have to read a Victorian crime drama specifically and have something more modern with high school students.”
For Derrick, a big part of taking this story on was about adding to the mix so that variety can simply continue to grow and exist for LGBTQIA+ rom-com readers. “There’s just so many great straight rom-coms. I feel like I’m talking about movies, but so many different stories have been told. You can take those same stories and retell them sapphic, and it completely changes it. It’s new, and it’s fresh, and I think that’s being done a lot now.”
For this writer, and like many of their fans, the most important aspect of their version of “fresh and new” is incorporating Pittsburgh into these wonderful stories.
When it comes to connecting with their younger fans (and millennials like myself who may not always know what we’re doing on the app) TikTok was the answer to continuing a connection with them according to Lippincott. “I remember when we made one TikTok all the way back when we did She Gets The Girl that was something along the lines of it’s a sapphic rom-com set in Pittsburgh, and jokingly we had a Terrible Towel, and I put on my Pirates shirt or something and simply said it was set in Pittsburgh and people were really excited! It was surprising that TikTok did so well because people just love this city as much as we do.”
Derrick expressed similar gratitude, especially for those who really see themselves in her writing as an Asian American writer. “There’s not a lot of Pittsburgh rep in our genre. And then as far as the teenagers, who we’re really writing to – I feel like reading my Instagram messages especially is what makes me want to write more. I hear from queer Asian American girls and I don’t know. You grew up sometimes feeling so alone and just being the only Asian family in your town and then also a very closeted queer.”
That love for Pittsburgh and the fans they inspire and comfort with their work seems to be what could keep them rooted here for years to come.
As Lippincott put it, “I don’t think I ever saw myself living in Pittsburgh. I was way on the other side of the state, and I hadn’t even been to Pittsburgh until college, and then Alyson is so close with her family, and it was like we’re never leaving Pittsburgh, and I just really fell in love with the place. It’s special, you know? We met at Pitt. This is where we’re gonna raise our kids. This is where we tell our stories.”
To pick up your copy of Make My Wish Come True, Rachael and Alyson of course encourage you to shop local and hit up any of the numerous shops carrying their titles, but it is of course available at all major bookstores and online.
You can follow Rachael and Alyson on their Instagram accounts.
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