Splitting the World: An Interview With Emily Henry

Today I’ll be talking about a book you’ve probably drooled over because hello, just look at that gorgeous cover. Yes, that’s right, today I’m talking about THE LOVE THAT SPLIT THE WORLD by Emily Henry as part of the THE LOVE THAT SPLIT THE WORLD blog tour!

The Love That Split the World
Author: Emily Henry
Series: None
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Fantasy, Mystery
Release Date: January 26, 2016
Publisher: Razorbill

Goodreads | Amazon | TBD

Summary:

 
First Sentence: The day before my last official day of high school, she comes back.

1. Hi Emily! Can you tell us something we don’t know about you, something we won’t discover from a simple Google search?

After writing, my second love is modern dance! I studied it in college and was in my school’s affiliated dance company, so that was how I spent most of my time despite being a Creative Writing major.

2. What was your first thought when you saw your book’s cover?

It was pretty much that spinning wheel of color that pops up whenever my computer’s overwhelmed. There weren’t really words! I’d heard how little input authors usually got into that sort of thing so I’d thoroughly prepared myself for anything. Except, apparently, a perfect cover. It was so exactly what I wanted it to be. It really felt like Anthony, the designer, had dug through my brain. I set the as my phone’s background and stared at it all day. Whenever I looked for too long, I’d start crying!

3. In five words, how would you describe the romance between Natalie and Beau?

Electric, tender, complementary, messy, abiding.

4. What’s that one thing you just can’t seem to get right the first time when you write?

Hmm… maybe foreshadowing. I tend to dive into writing before I have any idea what a book is about, so I usually don’t know exactly where things are going until I’ve finished a first draft. Then I usually have to weave back in other elements and cut the stuff that doesn’t make sense anymore. Really, there’s a lot I don’t get right the first time I write because of my process, but it’s really important to me that I get the characters right in the first draft because everything builds off them!

5. What inspired you to write The Love That Split the World?

So many different things collided to push this book out of me. It was summer, and I’m always incredibly nostalgic in summer. My boyfriend (now husband) and I were both sort of stuck in weird in-between phases of life, the kind where you really miss stuff from the past but also feel so eager to move forward. We went out for a walk one night, and it was humid and buggy and golden, and I felt an overwhelming swell of both nostalgia and deja vu regarding the summer I graduated high school. I had such similar feelings at that time–a desperate wish to hold onto what I was leaving and an eagerness to move forward, to find myself. With those feelings came a strong desire to write. I had a different book out with publishers at the time, but I’d never felt so excited or nervous to start something as I felt with The Love That Split the World. I wanted to capture all of the feelings of that summer in particular, but also of all the summers I spent in Kentucky as a kid.

I’d also always wanted to write about hypnopompic hallucinations, a dream state in which your body is awake but your mind isn’t, because I’ve had on occasion throughout my life. I think I had more my senior year of high school than during the rest of my life combined, so maybe that was why the two ideas became synced in my mind. I just wanted to explore a fantastical or scientific reasoning behind why you would encounter these sorts of things when you’re stressed out, to sort of play with the idea of the hallucinations as windows within times when we’re pulled in a lot of different directions and trying to anticipate where all those different paths could lead. Basically I wanted to create a magical exaggeration of what those in-between times in life feel like.