The inception of every book is different, and The Plus-One List was woven together out of a few different threads that came at a few different times in my life.
In the book, the plus-one list is the vehicle used to bring Eloise and Agustín (the hero and heroine) into each other’s orbit—it is a list of eligible men who can serve as dates to a wedding. Eloise needs a date, and Agustín is on the list. It sounds exactly like something created for a romance novel, right? But fun fact: the plus-one list is real.
I was at a party a couple of years ago with my now-fiancé and some of his work friends, and I was talking to one woman, and somehow, we got on the topic of weddings. She told me how, in her circles, it’s pretty much required to bring a date to a wedding, so she and her friends began circulating a list of men, with little descriptions, so that anyone in the group could have a trusted recommendation if they needed a plus-one. My author brain immediately pounced.
“That belongs in a romance book!” I cried. Then I asked if she’d mind if I used it. She very graciously said I could and even sent me the list itself, which was really fun to see. Of course, the list in the book is entirely of my own creation.
But the plus-one list is just an element, not an entire plot, and so I tucked it away in a drawer in the back of my mind while I worked on The Irish Goodbye, the romance book I was publishing at the time. When that was done, and I was thinking about what to write next, I had already begun creating Eloise and Agustín. I knew I wanted to draw on some of my own life experiences — Eloise, like me, is a New Yorker who struggles with anxiety and rescues senior dogs (something I am deeply passionate about). Agustín, like my fiancé, immigrated to New York from Mexico City. It was very important to me to write an immigrant story after witnessing the man I love work so tirelessly to achieve his dream (and in my opinion, immigrants make this country great). Eloise and Agustín are very much not myself and my fiancé, but we have similar roots.
I had the characters, and I was really beginning to understand and love them, but I had a conundrum. Eloise is deeply introverted, whereas Agustín is quite the extrovert. They would never meet in real life — and if they did, Eloise would never engage with him or let her walls down. She needed a strong push, some external force to get her outside of her comfort zone. But what? How could I possibly bring these two polar opposites together?
And then the drawer in the back of my mind rattled. The answer came to me.
The plus-one list.
