Lily King is interested in love in all its forms. Her seventh book, Heart the Lover, beautifully captures the thrill of a first love, but it’s also about the love between friends, the love between parent and child, and the love of a long-married couple. It’s the perfect companion to her New York Times bestseller Writers and Lovers, but King was actually working on a different book when the idea for Heart the Lover came to her. “I escaped into this novel,” she shared. “And I was so relieved to be in a different place with different people.” 

As a reader, you feel that initial joy King experienced while drafting this novel. Heart the Lover is about a young woman named Jordan in her final year of college, and the love triangle that develops between her and two young men: Sam and Yash. Sam and Yash are intellectually ambitious, reading Saint Augustine and James Joyce, and in their company, Jordan begins to find her own voice as a writer. There’s a great pleasure to these sections, in the characters’ whip-smart banter, their infectious curiosity, and the magnitude of their love and heartache.

But as graduation comes and goes, and the characters make decisions that will ripple through the decades to come, their story deepens and complicates. And like many novels that feel effortless, Heart the Lover was actually incredibly complicated to write. The final draft is King at her best: a wise, exquisitely written tale of loss and love.

I spoke with King about the allure of the campus novel, our disappearing canon, and what it takes to write a remarkable love story.

Rowan Beaird: This book perfectly captures the overwhelming nature of first love, but there’s also a depth to the relationship at the novel’s core that makes it impossible to categorize as only that. Why did you want to tell this particular love story?

Lily King: I had two similar relationships when I was younger. Big loves that, for reasons I’d never quite understood, just didn’t work out. And actually, both of these men—who didn’t know each other—died in 2019, a month apart. 

I was looking through my notes recently, and I was really struck by how in the first draft of this novel, I was trying to work through all kinds of things. It began with sort of an autobiographical pulse, but it changed really dramatically in the writing and the rewriting of it, and the shaping of it, and the understanding that these emotions alone don’t make for good fiction. It is amazing how the moment you start writing dialogue and characters, they become other people. They leave any sort of real life behind. But the emotions! You know, that’s what I try to do in my fiction—I’m trying to find the fictional form for all of these emotions that I’ve experienced.

RB: The three central characters meet during college, studying literature and religion and philosophy, and throughout the book, there are countless references to all three. How did you want this shared language to function in the book?

LK: As a shared language! Yes, that’s exactly it. It is such a thrill when you encounter someone who speaks the same language and responds to the same things—whatever that may be, whether it’s the mechanics of a car, or a symphony, or literature. And when you can speak that same language, particularly when you’re young and you’re absorbing so much—it’s so exhilarating. I really wanted to capture that feeling.

RB: I sometimes wonder if we as a society, as readers, are losing those points of connection, through no longer having a collective canon. What do you think it means to no longer have common points of reference?

LK: Yes, I fear that now, the shared canon is whatever we see on our phones, and it’s dividing us. It’s not bringing us together in any way, and it’s also not bringing us to a higher level of—I don’t want to say morality—but a higher level of being and thinking. And by higher I certainly don’t mean academic or intellectual or anything like that. I just mean closer to the great pleasures of life, the things that are really important.

RB: The campus novel is its own genre, in certain ways. This book is about much more than that, but why do you think we’re drawn to this particular chapter of life and place? 

LK: I’m so surprised by this term! It’s so funny. I mean, initially I thought that the characters would be in college for about 20 pages. I had a whole different concept of how this book would work, but now, suddenly, it’s a campus novel. 

I’ve never written about people in college before, and I didn’t know if I could do it. It was the same way I felt with Writers and Lovers—it had been so many years since I’d worked in a restaurant. But it was so fun to go back there, and I didn’t realize how much the language would change and the feel of it would change when you’re writing about a time like that. It was pleasurable for me to go back to that time without cell phones. When everything was new, and the future felt bright.

RB: How did you go back to that chapter in your life? Did you have any journals, or did you read books that you read during that period?

LK: I kept no journal in college, which just wrecks me. I kept a journal every other time of my life. I can’t really account for that except that I was really happy. I think what I was trying to capture in this book, what I was really interested in, is how a person can meet a couple of people, and their life can be transformed by them in ways that they really don’t recognize until years and years later. And I think college is such a great time for that. During those years, you’re formed enough, but you’re not formed completely.

There are also these emotions that we have—particularly close friendships and romantic love—that are so powerful at that time of life. I really wanted to capture how overwhelming a person can be to you at that age, in a way that they really aren’t as you get older and you get more in possession of your full self.

RB: There is a large time leap that happens roughly halfway through the book, and at one point in the novel, a professor mentions that what grants a character revelation is time and distance. Was it difficult to know when to leave these characters and meet them again?

LK: Initially, I was writing those college classroom scenes just to show how the characters met. And then when I started writing them, it just took over. And then, finally, I was able to make the leap of 30 years—the whole reason for my writing the book—and it just kept feeling flat.

I kept on trying to increase the tension and tighten the timeline, to rev up the engine, but I didn’t even have an engine. I revised and I revised, and then I read the last section again, and it was still flat, despite everything I had done to try to make it better. And I remember saying to my husband—twelve days before I had to hand in the draft to my editor—that it still wasn’t working. And he told me something that he told me for a year, which was, “She needs to go to the hospital with a secret.” And I kept on saying, “No, no, stop saying that,” but that day, I just stood up, and I went into my study, and I rewrote everything with that engine.

RB: I never would have guessed that was an eleventh hour edit.

LK: I feel like I need to proselytize now around the country—do not give up. Keep going!

RB: Without giving too much away, this is a book that’s as much about death as love, which is true of many of your novels. Why do you think they feel so intertwined for you as a writer? 

LK: I think death has probably always been a preoccupation of mine. I’m really interested in loss, and loss just isn’t as powerful if there is no love, so they are intertwined. And as I get older—I’ve lost a number of people who have been so, so important to me. So I think it’s only going to get stronger in my fiction. I remember, actually in college, reading The Odyssey and The Iliad, and talking about Greek mythology, and how there’s nothing at stake for the gods because they don’t die. That’s such a basic concept, but it is a striking difference. Everything about our own existence is fragile.

RB: Well, there’s that beautiful scene toward the end where Jordan is asked about the role love plays in her books, and it’s posited that she sees love as the ultimate form of hope. Do you think it functions the same way in your books?

LK: I think love works in so many different ways in my books, but I do feel that the strongest strain of it is hope. Our only hope of survival is love.

RB: What is the most difficult part of writing a love story?

LK: I think it’s just getting the characters to connect. You just want to find the chemistry between them so that the reader wants them to be together. I suppose I try to get at it mostly through dialogue. You know, my relationships are mostly verbal. There are little moments of physicality, but I’m not really a descriptive writer in that way. I don’t dwell on people’s bodies and on physical attraction. I just try to imply it so that the reader supplies the rest themselves. 

I remember asking Tessa Hadley, who is one of my favorite writers, how she made the attraction between her characters so strong. She has these men that—they just walk in and you’re immediately drawn to them. And she said that one trick was—it’s not necessarily writing about them, but writing about how others are drawn to them. I thought that was really interesting.

RB: I’m always hesitant to ask this question because I’m very conscious that it’s rarely asked of male writers who are fathers, but as this book deals with motherhood, I’m curious if and how being a mother has influenced your writing?

LK: It’s such an interesting question. I feel like being a mother has been so much more important to me than being a writer, to be honest with you. I’m conscious male writers would never say that, but that is where so much of my emotional energy goes on any given day. And I think that my love for my children infuses everything about my writing.

Weirdly, my novel that was most about children was my first novel—when I didn’t have children. I certainly haven’t and will never write directly about my children, but I feel they’re often sort of on the outskirts of my fiction. Motherhood is a completely different form of love, and I’m so interested in all of these different forms of love, and that’s really what I was trying to write about in this book.