Alex Aster Went Viral on BookTok With a Fantasy Novel. Now She’s Venturing Into Romance: “It’s a Very Hopeful Genre”

Alex Aster, the author behind the viral Lightlark fantasy series, is stepping into the world of adult romance.

After achieving success on BookTok — her post of a mock trailer for her fantasy novel Lightlark generated more than 20 million views on the social platform at the time — THR exclusively reported in 2022 that Universal will develop a Lightlark adaptation in partnership with Temple Hill. Aster will executive produce.

Also an author of a middle-grade fiction series Emblem Island, Aster was ready to venture into a new genre for her next novel with Summer in the City, available now.

Aster’s contemporary novel follows Elle and Parker as they navigate a modern enemies-to-lovers story filled with self-growth, time jumps and memories in the Big Apple, that Aster says “will make you want to have a summer day in New York City, and will make you hungry for pizza and thirsty for coffee.”

Inspired by rom-coms from the ‘90s and early 2000’s, the author hopes for a romcom resurgence because of the nostalgia and lighthearted tone to the stories.

“It was not afraid to just be a love story, and just be something that you watch and feel better,” Aster tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Also feeling inspired from rediscovering her love of New York City after seven years of living there, Aster immersed herself in the city to bring each scene she wrote in the book to life. “I went and did a lot of the stuff they do in the book for research and to sit there and just kind of get little observations so that it would feel hopefully that people are in the middle of New York City,” she explains. “I wanted to write a character that didn’t like the city so that she could slowly fall in love with it.”

Filled with angsty moments and a complex lead character, Summer in the City takes readers on the journey of a not-so-smooth authentic love story. “People see a story where you can be flawed and still find love and you don’t need the other person to fix you, but you can grow with another person, which I think is a beautiful way to fall in love when you grow yourself, and then also you grow with the other person.”

Before her book tour, The New York Times bestselling author took time to chat with THR about working on Summer in the City, the relatability of romance novels and a potential on-screen adaptation.

Do you approach book writing, saying, “This is a book I would love to read or characters I would like to see”?

A hundred percent. I only write what I love to read first of all, because I was really only writing for myself for so many years. I wrote six different books that will never be published, and they were just rejected over the years. You kind of learn that, okay, it’s probably not going to be published, so I’m mostly writing for myself. Second of all, I just think it would be so miserable to write a book that you don’t like because you have to reread it so many times, not only when you’re writing the first draft, but through edits, you have to reread it. And then when the book is about to come out, I always reread it to kind of highlight lines that I think readers will like or that I’m going to put in my post.

You started off in the fantasy genre with Lightlark. How was that transition for you going from fantasy to romance?

The first thing that really surprised me is all of my previous books are in third person. This one I wrote in first person, and I really wasn’t expecting how different the writing experience would be. But when I was writing in first person, especially because it was contemporary rather than fantasy, so much of my own personality really came out. I never thought of myself as a voicy writer, but in this, you can’t help but be voicy because it’s really through a first person perspective. I also did not anticipate how much freer it would feel to write with references like cultural references. In fantasy, it’s a totally new world that you’ve invented. So you can’t say, “This looked like this thing you’ve seen on TV, or this sounded like this song,” or you can’t relate things to other things in the way that you can in contemporary.

It’s really cool to look back at the process because it really informs the writing. Whatever you’re watching, whatever you’re reading, whatever you’re working on can sometimes bleed into what you’re writing, even if it’s your own other book so it was really fun. I smiled every day that I wrote this book.

In Summer in the City, you decided to set it in both the summertime and New York. Why specifically were those background details important for you?

I wanted it to be a love story for [Elle], not only with Parker, but with the city itself. And in terms of summer, I think I love summer in the city. I just think it’s so fun. People are outside reading in the parks and there are lots of outdoor restaurants, and it just feels like the city has a vitality that isn’t really there in the winter because it’s so cold people are rushing around and obviously New York City’s famous for people just rushing around. Everyone’s too busy. But I do feel like in the summer, people slow down and they really are trying to enjoy the little nature we have here. They’re trying to enjoy coffee shops and people just feel different…I also think that I’ve seen a lot of summer books that are in tropical locations or something, so I was like, let me see if I can show my love of the summer in New York City.

Elle describes Parker as her “twisted muse.” Break down the psychology of that because going from writer’s block to being able to draft out a whole screenplay based off the time she spent with him, it’s clear something is going on here.

I think I always am so fascinated by the writing process and not just for books, obviously I only really write books, so that’s the process I know. But I’ve heard of, for example, songwriters when they go through a really bad breakup or something, they have so much to use. I think I heard a famous singer talk about how she didn’t know what she would do if she was happy or not going through breakups because you have so much to draw upon when you’re so full of emotion and feeling.

I really wanted to dig in what if she just hates him so much that hatred is feeling something because Elle is just not feeling anything. She’s not inspired, she’s just kind of going through life like a zombie, but he just kind of tears that down because she hates him so much. And so hatred is a very strong emotion, or at least she thinks she hates him. I wanted him to be her twisted muse of she just can’t help but feel in those feelings, even if they’re negative, they drag the words out of her. Because I do think writing is sometimes a very emotional process.

You’re trying to make sense of the world through words, and a lot of times that happens when you are in a vulnerable or emotional place…So I liked that dynamic as what if the cure to your writer’s block is the guy that you met in a stairwell a few years ago?

I’m starting to see little cracks maybe in her past or her character. What is it about Parker that she hates?

Parker does just kind of symbolize something that she does dislike. Sometimes you don’t really dislike someone or hate someone or anything, but it’s just the fact that they remind you of something and that they represent something like your worst fear. I wanted him to represent her worst fears and also her insecurities that as much as she tries to run from her feelings by writing and by succeeding in this way, she’s never going to really truly be whole because she always has this gap.

Healthy people don’t really determine their worth or their feelings based on external factors or success. And so the same way she kind of judges him thinking how he gets his self-worth, she’s actually looking into a mirror and it’s her. I wanted a dynamic where he would represent her biggest fear that people wouldn’t take her career seriously or that people would assume that she needed help, when she worked so hard to independently be her own support system and her own everything because of the way her mom raised her and what happened with her parents.

I think she’s very prickly. That’s why [her best friend] Penelope calls her a cactus. She’s one of those people that the second you say something, the walls come up. And I think it’s interesting because you would think Parker would be the character that’s determining his self-worth based on that. And at least through the journey of this book, he really doesn’t. She’s the one who does that, and she puts that on him as well.

And they actually had a conversation where Parker pointed out how Elle judged him. Even then, she was making excuses. Do you think that she suffers with a lack of self-awareness because of her positioning in her life? How has her life kind of built her up for this moment?

I love that you pointed that out because it really is. I smiled writing that because I was like, she’s being so hypocritical, and I like that he calls her out, “You literally did the same thing to me.” I think it’s because she’s the older sister. But most of all, because she’s a hermit, she hasn’t allowed people into her life except for Penelope. When you’re not around people a lot, I do feel like people lose their self-awareness because they just think everyone else is out to get them, but they don’t understand how their own emotions and their own actions can also do that to other people. So it’s not like she thinks of herself necessarily as a victim, but I do think that she just believes that he wants to hurt her and that she has not hurt him.

She doesn’t understand how her actions can be hurtful to him and I think that that is what she learns, and especially in the ending, she learns throughout the story that she can hurt him too. She just believes people like him are strong enough not to be hurt by stuff like that and I think that because she’s been hurt emotionally because she lost her mom and because she basically doesn’t really have parents, I think she just has this big wound. I think people that are hurting, they often cannot see the hurts that they also give to other people.

Why specifically did you want to use the “enemies to lovers” trope with Elle and Parker?

I just love enemies to lovers. I just love reading it. I like the idea that he feels like he has to make up for something that he did, but I do like that dynamic where the first impression or something that happened is they hate each other. Parker doesn’t really ever hate her, it’s kind of on her end that she makes all these assumptions about him. And I like kind of proving her wrong of like, “Oh, you thought this about him actually, he’s like this.” And also knocking her down a peg of you think that you are so great, but you’re judging someone. I think that it just lends to a lot of fun moments when you force proximity. The people who don’t like each other, you shove them together, so they’re sharing a wall. They live in the same floor.

How would you as an author describe Elle? Why did you want to make her so complex and slightly grumpy?

She’s just scared, I think, of being hurt. And this isn’t a descriptor, but I guess she’s just kind of living life on the sidelines and is starting to realize it. She’s like, “I wonder when I started noticing when my life is boring?” She is starting to realize life is passing her by, and she’s kind of on the outskirts and she’s writing stories instead of living them.

She’s very successful in her career. I wanted also to have someone display that sometimes you can look like you have everything together, but you really don’t. A lot of times it is real, whether it’s Parker [or] whether it’s Elle, that you pour so much of yourself into your job, that everything else suffers.

I think that’s cool too, because as we evolve and grow and change as people in general, sometimes there is some of that tug of war.

You want to change, but it’s hard. It’s so much easier, I would say, to just sit and stay in your apartment. It’s so much easier to just not. I think the isolation of the pandemic and of also being an adult and making friends is really hard. It’s very easy to just not have friends and to be alone and to just either use your career or something else as like a crutch. I wanted to also speak to kind of adult loneliness. She has Penelope, but when she’s in New York for the summer, she kind of realizes “If I don’t go and make friends, I’m going to be alone.”

It was important for me to have those friendships in there too, because I wanted to show that it wasn’t just her love story with Parker, it was with the city. It was with discovering the beauty of having friends and having a life outside your apartment, outside your career. I think it’s maybe common, unfortunately for people to just grow up and after college, after high school, it’s hard to make friends after.

If you were to bring this book to life via series or a movie adaptation, who would you want to play these characters?

This is one of my biggest things, why I’m so excited for the book to come out. I really want people to tell me what they think. [Fancasting on TikTok is] so good. I’ve seen for other books… I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you should work and casting. You did such a good job!”

You’ve utilized social media to help you when it comes to books and building that #BookTok community. What has that been like for you?

I feel really lucky to live in an age where I can directly hear from readers, because obviously that just didn’t exist before. When I was starting to write books, social media wasn’t a thing. I don’t think I ever imagined the role it would play in writing these books or marketing these books. I do feel very close to the reader in their comments. They comment and they ask me stuff, or they tell me things about the books, or they’ll DM me or they’ll tag me in a story. I do feel very close to them, and I do feel like we’re all the same. We’re all readers. We all like the same types of stuff in books. I grew up not having any people in my life, any friends who love to read and write so it’s also a way to see, wow, there are lots of people out there who also are writers and also our readers. It just makes you feel less alone.

In this day and age, I feel like a lot of people are just having a hard time. Do you feel like your book as a rom-com can kind of be a form of escapism?

I think books in general have always been escapism for me when I was preteen and you’re so dramatic and the world is ending every single day, nothing would get me out of my head more than a book. Just sitting down and being swallowed by these worlds in writing is also a huge escape.

I think that romance in general, there’s a lot of hope in these books. The romance genre means that there’s a happy ending and so I think that when you read books that end happily, even when you go through challenges and trials, and it doesn’t always look like it’s going to end up happy, I think there’s a lot of hope in that. I’m glad that romance as a genre, a lot of people are discovering it thanks to BookTok and thanks to the internet, even though, again, it has always been the biggest genre in literature, which is amazing. But I do think a lot of people, myself included, have more recently in the last few years discovered the joy of this genre. It really is joyful, but it also has flawed characters that grow and so you’re not usually guaranteed a happy ending for a story, but for romances you are. It’s a very hopeful genre in general.