Being seen as a trailblazer doesn’t sit right with her - she’s just here to show you a good time. She keeps a lot of her life private - “At the end of the day, I’m just a person who rides the subway and eats my Trader Joe’s meals” - and is eager to acknowledge the authors who paved the way for queer love stories like hers. McQuiston is a little ambivalent about the attention. Meanwhile, Brooklyn indie bookstore Books Are Magic recently posted a photo on Instagram of boxes containing over 1,500 copies of One Last Stop - its most preordered title ever, the store confirms - and held a midnight launch event to celebrate its release. Red, White & Royal Blue, the sweet but extremely horny story of America’s First Son and Buckingham Palace’s bachelor prince falling in love, is in its 22nd printing, is getting developed into a movie, and has inspired a whole mini-Etsy economy of unofficial merch. “I want that moment you read a really good kiss in one of my books to feel like you’re watching 10 Things I Hate About You and Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles are kissing in the parking lot and Letters to Cleo is playing on the roof of the school,” she says. They can be achingly earnest at times but never sickeningly sweet. Her books play with classic rom-com structures - sworn enemies fall in love, a chance encounter with a girl turns into a sprawling adventure - but are littered with enough nods to group chats and Lana Del Rey that they feel both entirely of the moment and like a relic of a bygone era of movies. In person, McQuiston, who is 30, shares some of the qualities of her characters: Namely, she’s wearing a sick leather jacket of her own and is quick to dispense a pop-culture reference to make a point. I miss figuring out scams with my friends. Banging on the ceiling because the neighbor was practicing his trombone too loud, you know? Dumb shit. One Last Stop is a tribute to the “dumb, small life things,” as Jane - in possession of a heartbeat but not quite of this world - longingly refers to them: “My dim sum place. “There’s a lot about feeling isolated and feeling trapped and emerging back out into the world, blinking into the sun,” which is exactly what we are doing on this day: sitting at a street-side table, vaccinated and maskless, enjoying Lorde-tier onion rings and gin-and-tonics, dusting off the cobwebs of our personalities and having flashbacks to when meeting up with friends did not require Olympics-level logistics coordination. “I think I accidentally wrote a quarantine book,” the author says shortly after sitting down. If you, too, have been fantasizing about putting your lips on a stranger’s - or at least that dish from the restaurant you haven’t been to in months - then One Last Stop has arrived at the perfect time: a kind of how-to manual for your hot vaxx summer that McQuiston started working on in 2018. (A chocolate chip bagel with peanut butter eventually does the trick.) Later, they discover an even stronger memory trigger - kissing - and start making out up and down the Q train, trying to help Jane remember what it felt like to be alive. So August - in a bit that’s part 50 First Dates, part Groundhog Day, with a little bit of Rent’s “Seasons of Love” - starts showering her with new combos of carbs and caffeine to jog her memory. Jane barely remembers who she is or what life was like before. In the book, lifelong loner and college super-senior August discovers that her subway crush, a leather-jacket-wearing butch bombshell named Jane, is mysteriously trapped on the subway after being transported in time from the 1970s. The stories McQuiston tells have felt warmly familiar but dreamily out of reach - literally a spicier version of my own life.īagel orders also play a small but crucial role in her latest rom-com novel, One Last Stop. When she shares this on a gorgeous May afternoon at Julius’, widely recognized as New York City’s oldest gay bar, it makes perfect sense to me as someone who prefers toasted everythings with sausage and egg, no cheese. The author of Red, White & Royal Blue - the candy-hued queer-romance novel you have most certainly spotted in a bookstore by now - likes a toasted everything BEC with pepper jack and hot sauce. Casey McQuiston believes you can tell a lot about someone by their bagel order.
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