September may have come all at once this year, but you can evoke the spirit of sapphic summer with The Charm Offensive author Alison Cochrun’s brand new fourth novel, Every Step She Takes.
Set in sunny Portugal, the romantic comedy follows 35-year-old Sadie, a chronically single antique furniture shop owner from Seattle, as she attempts to walk the famous Camino de Santiago in place of her injured influencer sister. However, tackling the historic network of pilgrimage routes is far from the relaxing stroll Sadie expected: a mixture of bad dates with men, some alarming turbulence and the extremely hot woman sitting next to her on the plane bring Sadie to the conclusion that she’s probably a lesbian.
When the hot woman – revealed as a ridiculously wealthy vineyard heiress named Mal – just so happens to be part of the same sapphic walking group Sadie is signed up to, the pair join forces to help Sadie relive her queer adolescence. As you can imagine, one thing leads to another, and bad haircuts, flirting lessons and “practice kissing” quickly turn into something more.
The delayed coming-of-age novel explores the highs and lows of coming out in your thirties, set along the backdrop of the Portuguese coastline. Though the tale is a work of fiction, it does somewhat mirror real life. Author Alison Cochrun discovered her queerness and came out as a lesbian in the 30s, just like Sadie. She also solo-walked the Camino de Santiago herself, taking the exact route of Sadie’s tour group, in an attempt to get out of a creative rut.
“I was in a not so good place in my life in terms of my mental health, and I kind of just needed to do something to get myself a little bit unstuck,” she tells PinkNews. “I was having a really hard time writing my third book (Here We Go Again), so I fairly spontaneously decided to do that. And it could have gone horribly but then very luckily did not.”
We caught up with Alison Cochrun to find out more about Every Step She Takes, her coming out story, her debut #BookTok hit novel The Charm Offensive and more…
PinkNews: How much of your experience walking the Camino de Santiago made it to the final book?
Alison Cochrun: A lot of the details I use I would say are things that I really experienced, especially related to food, and they stop in most of the same places like I stayed. I was like, ‘That’s what I know and I won’t be able to realistically write about these small towns in Portugal and Spain if it’s not the ones that I actually went to.’ But in terms of what she is there for, what motivates her and what her personal journey is on the Camino, that wasn’t anything like my personal journey there.
PN: Were the Pride flag benches that featured towards the end of the book really there?
AC: Yeah, that was real. I think it was a community centre right outside of Santiago. The last day of walking, it was a long long last day, and I just happened to walk by and they had all of these benches [painted in pride flag colours]. I loved them. I took tons of pictures, there was a lesbian bench and a non-binary bench, a trans bench. They had painted crosswalks as well, and it felt like, ‘You’re welcoming me. Thank you.’
PN: Every Step She Takes has a take on the ‘practice dating’ and ‘practice kissing’ trope, which also featured in your first book, The Charm Offensive. What are some of your favourite rom-com tropes that you’ve already explored in your writing?
AC: Obviously I do love kissing for practice or for science or all of those kinds of tropes. I love fake dating, but I don’t think I have the chops or I haven’t had the right concept for a full fake dating book. And so I feel like practice dating is kind of like a micro trope that you can do instead. That hits some of those same buttons.
But I love force proximity. All of my books have two people being forced together, usually in a pretty tight timeline in a pretty intimate setting. That’s just one of my favorite things, always. And then I love opposites attract – anything about two people who are externally very different but over time discover that internally they have a lot in common is one of my favorite things to write about.
And Every Step She Takes doesn’t have it, but I’m a sucker for a second chance romance. I don’t know why but my brain feels like there is something inherently queer about it. Even though I personally don’t have anyone from my past that I’m like, ‘she was the one’. I didn’t know I was gay back then. But I love writing second chance romance too.
PN: Are there any tropes that you haven’t covered yet that you’d want to tackle?
AC: I mean, I would love to write a true fake dating book. I think I would just need to find the right characters and concept to make it believable because I feel like it’s a hard sell. I love true enemies-to-lovers too. I feel like I’ve had books where the characters are, like, dislike or rivals to lovers. But to write a true enemies to lovers book would be really fun someday.
PN: I feel like to do that, you’d have to have one of them be at least a little bit evil for them to be true enemies.
AC: Which I also kind of think would be fun. I feel like I want to write an evil lesbian. So I don’t know, someday.
PN: You note in the acknowledgements of Every Step She Takes that many of your characters, including Sadie, are partly based on you. Does that usually apply to just one of your main characters and then you write a completely different love interest for them or do you pull from your experiences from both?
AC: I usually find that one of the characters is more like me and that’s definitely the case in this book. I gave Sadie my late bloomer storyline, because I didn’t come out until I was 33 and didn’t even question my sexuality at all until I was 30. I knew I wanted to write about somebody figuring out their sexuality in their 30s, and so I gave Sadie a lot of those pieces of me. And I don’t know if this is bad writing, but I usually find that I have to give all of the characters some little part of myself in order to emotionally connect with them. And so even though on the whole Mal is a character who is so vastly different from me and my life circumstances and external personality, I had to give her little nuggets of myself in order to be able to then extrapolate and figure out who she is and what motivates her. I’m trying to write a book right now where I have less in common with both of the characters, and so it’s fun but I’m trying to find their voices and it’s definitely different.
PN: Is there anything else you can tease about the book you’re currently working on?
AC: My books change so much throughout the drafting process. So, right now I’m working on my fifth book. I think I’m about to sign a contract, so then everything will be official and I’ll be technically allowed to talk about it. But right now, I pitched it as My Best Friend’s Wedding Meets Delila Green Doesn’t Care. I don’t know if you’ve read that, by Ashley Herring Blake?
PN: I have!
AC: And so it’s going to be about a wedding. It’s going to be set all around a wedding and these characters who are trying to sabotage a wedding. But yeah, and then who knows? All the details could totally change, but I think those parts will stay the same. It’s about a wedding.
PN: Do your finished books often look quite different to what you pictured at the beginning?
AC: Yeah. I’ll pitch something to my editor and then what I turn in is so incredibly different. For Every Step She Takes, before I decided that Sadie’s story should take place on the Camino, Sadie and Mal were teachers at a study abroad program. The book was originally called Study Abroad. The external plot was totally different. Their internal journeys were still pretty similar, but yeah, I make a ton of changes as I go along and figure out who the characters are and what their story actually is.
PN: Both Every Step She Takes and your third novel, Here We Go Again, were rom-coms but they also featured heavier themes, like illness, loss and grief. Why did you want to explore these themes within this usually more light-hearted genre?
AC: That is such a great question and I wish that I had a really profound answer. I think a part of it is that I don’t know how not to write about less traditional rom-com topics. I like to write about characters who are dealing with mental health or mental illness, characters who are neurodiverse, and characters who are dealing with the heavier things in real life. I think that’s partially because I’m mentally ill and I don’t know how not to do that but also because I think, to me, that makes love stories all the more sweet. I like to write about characters who are pretty messy, and who are often still figuring their lives out, much older than what we assume is an acceptable coming-of-age age. And I think there’s something really special about finding love at a time in your life when you’re kind of a mess having somebody see all those less polished parts of you, kind of see you at your worst, and still find the beauty in you and help you get back on the road to becoming a better version of yourself.
PN: After realising she’s not straight in her 30s, Sadie tries to relive her ‘queer adolescence’ with the help of Mal. Why did Sadie feel like the right character to explore that concept?
AC: Sadie as a character existed because I knew at some point I wanted to write a late bloomer story about somebody who truly had no idea that they were queer until their 30s. That was my life. When I was going through that, I was like, ‘I can’t possibly be queer because I would know if I was, I’m in my 30s. I’m somewhat self-aware. There’s no way I could not know this huge thing about myself.’ And so I felt really alienated and lonely when I was going through that.
And then after coming out I learned that so many people have that experience. It’s especially more common from what I’ve seen in people who are socialized as women who grow up kind of with comphet [compulsory heterosexuality] and the pressure to have so much of their lives revolve around men that it can be really difficult to unlearn that messaging. I knew I wanted to put all of that into Sadie as a character, and then with the queer adolescence thing I wanted to give her a lot of the anxieties that I had as I was coming out. This feeling of being too late, this feeling of how could I not know this about myself?, this feeling of, like, ‘I’m some kind of freak because, what? I’m going to start dating women for the first time in my 30s? I don’t know what I’m doing.’ All of those kinds of insecurities that now I look back on because of years of therapy, I’m like, ‘those were silly.’ But at the time they were so real to me, I felt like, ‘my god, I’m too old. I’m way too old to come out.’ So I wanted to explore those through her.
Queer adolescence and timelines is something that I talked about a lot with my therapist as I was coming out and working through all of that. I liked the idea of having a character basically writing like a young adult coming out, coming-of-age story, but for somebody who’s much older and for somebody who is in their 30s and is figuring this all out and is realizing that it’s not too late. You can still have all of these beautiful experiences.
PN: The Charm Offensive had an amazing for gay pairing at the forefront, but then the rest of your books after that have focused on sapphic relationships. Is there a reason for that?
AC: I wrote The Charm Offensive before I was out, so it was very much like I wrote that book and then afterwards was like, ‘I think I’m gay and need to get to therapy.’ And it still took me a while to get to therapy, but eventually I did. And so I wrote The Charm Offensive when I did not feel I wasn’t ready to write about women falling in love. I guess I wasn’t ready to fully unpack my own sexuality and so I was like, ‘it’s The Bachelor but what if he’s gay?’ And then I made this character Charlie so much like myself, but disguised. So I was like, ‘No, no, it’s fine. That’s some tech dude with abs. I have nothing in common with him!’, even though I had everything in common with him. And so I think that book was really just me figuring a lot of stuff out about myself and writing a story that I needed at that time.
And then once I wrote that and was in the process of getting an agent and selling it, I was coming out and finally got into therapy. I started dating women for the first time right before that book came out. I knew that I would want my next story to be sapphic and there was a lot of power in that. I wrote my second book, Kiss Her Once for Me, at a time when I had never been in love with a woman, so I was kind of writing this wish fulfilment. It was very strange. It was like I was trying to write the story of – as my therapist would say – the love that I deserved for myself, but I was writing it through these fictional characters.
And so, yeah, I’ve just continued writing sapphic books because I’m a lesbian and married to a woman and I don’t know! Sometimes I have ideas for books that I think would be better suited to an MLM pairing, but I haven’t committed to that yet.
PN: Something else I really wanted to talk about is how desperately I want a TV studio to pick up The Charm Offensive and turn it into a series.
AC: My god, that would be a dream come true, wouldn’t it? Yeah. I always think about that and I’m always like, ‘Man.’ When I’m writing I sort of picture things like a movie or a television show. I think that’s just a form of media that I have a lot of exposure to. And so I always am like this would be perfect. Just make it into a movie!
PN: I think it would be so good because it’s set in so many locations, so you just have maybe a Hulu limited series and you’d have an hour-long episode in each location. Perfect.
AC: Yeah, exactly. Definitely let Hulu know about that. That would be a dream.
PN: You said you often think in terms of movies – do you ever cast your own characters in your head?
AC: I don’t, and that’s a thing that people are always really surprised about. I almost never picture celebrities when I’m writing. I sometimes have to when it comes time to describe characters for book covers, when I’m sending in stuff for the cover designer, sometimes I will be like, ‘this vibe’, and send a celebrity to make it clear what the character looks like but I am horrible at fan casting. I don’t ever picture real life celebrities as I’m writing.
PN: That’s fair. I think I usually picture a blank face.
AC: That’s kind of what I do and then I’m like, ‘Is that bad?’ I feel like I should have more of an idea of what my characters look like. And I like to picture how they physically move within a space, but I do think they’re kind of more generic in my head than they are on the page, if that makes sense.
Every Step She Takes by Alison Cochrun is out now.
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