Endless Love 1980s Author Commentary ebook

Many—I’d guess most—people assume that authors include things from real life in their fiction. Whether that’s our own lives or snippets of friends’ and family members’ lives, readers assume that authors fill their made up stories with real life stories.
Of course, the reality for me is: it’s complicated...

Character Names

I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but the primary characters’ names are mashups of people in Shakespeare plays and serve as little Easter egg clues.
Will Talbot - for William Shakespeare, because he’s a theater purist who loves language.
Kate Bishop - for Kate from Taming of the Shrew, because she’s a smart, strong woman in a man’s world who refuses to be cowed.
Lucy Minola - for the sister who mistakenly believes that she’s fallen in love with her sister’s husband in Comedy of Errors.
Ben Porter - for Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, because he gets caught in a fabricated plot.
Jessica Abraham - for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, one of the few (only?) Jewish heroines in the canon.
Cal Alonso - for Caliban in The Tempest, because he thinks of himself as a monster.
Bella York - for Isabella in Measure for Measure. This is an ironic choice, as Isabella’s self righteous piety is tested when her brother is sentenced to death for getting a woman pregnant out of wedlock.
Henry Smith - for Henry V, who transforms from a rebellious prince to a seasoned leader. I’m pretty sure there is a Smith in Shakespeare somewhere, but I needed Henry’s last name to be a very common one, so that it’d be even harder for Isabella to find him.

Will and Kate
Believe it or not, the “juggler incident” is based on an experience of mine. Thankfully, I didn’t create quite as much chaos as Kate did in the process, but I did make a friend. Harvard Square’s a very popular location for street performers, then and now. One lovely weekend day I biked there from my apartment in Waltham and was wandering around window shopping, when I stopped to watch a juggler. A handsome young man stopped next to me, and I may have been flirting with him a bit. Not sure if that had anything to do with it, but the performer began to taunt the two of us to the point that we literally backed away and then speed- walked out of sight as fast as we could, both of us laughing from the weirdness of the encounter. We ended up hanging out for a bit in the Square, and then biking back to Waltham together. Dave and I ended up becoming good friends and keep in touch to this day.
I didn’t date my juggler incident friend, but knowing him was instrumental in meeting my husband. Dave had studied film‐ making at Emerson, and wanted to be a director. While he worked on his demos, he earned money as a camera operator on films and commercials. He was the first behind-the-scenes person I’d gotten to know personally. On most of the commercial and industrial shoots I’d done so far, the “talent” was kept sepa‐ rate from the crew, and I was so focused on getting the job done, I hadn’t attempted to cross that invisible line.
Will and Kate met while he was working his “day job” but I met my now-husband on a three day industrial film shoot. Also called in-house or non-broadcast productions, these were big business in Boston back in the day. This one was a training video for a company that facilitated corporate moves. My character was one of the workers and I spent the entire first day in a car (I was driving down an actual street in a Boston suburb, no follow cars on this budget) while explaining why I loved the job. The camera operator sat in the passenger seat, and the producer and sound guy were in the back recording the three pages of dialogue. My previous on-camera jobs to this point were silent even if I was the central character (tasting Duncan Hines frosting, for exam‐ ple) so I was very nervous and barely noticed the man operating the boom.
The following two days brought a full ensemble of other actors and we shot inside a house, so I had a lot more down time. Now that I knew Dave, I often sat with the crew during lunch, where the makeup and hair person began dropping hints in my ear. I believe she literally said, “Someone on the crew likes you” just like in junior high. What I didn’t know until later was her match- making argument to my now-husband: “Just ask her out. She’s an actress; it’s not like you’re going to marry her.”
I ended up asking him out before leaving for the day, and I proved her very wrong. We married two years later. Then I gave her line to Alice when she’s trying to talk Kate into sleeping with Will.
In some of the books, I take an event from my life and change the ending to make it happier for the character, but Kate’s scarring college breakup is a good example of where I took a thing that happened to me—an upsetting incident with one of my college boyfriends—and made it much worse for her. Not just to torture her. Giving the character a much bigger obstacle to overcome raises the stakes, so when she gives Will a chance, she’s putting much more on the line.

My Theater Background vs. Will’s
In case it’s not obvious, I am much closer to Will on the Oppo‐ sites Attract spectrum between the first romantic pair in this quartet of romcoms.
I didn’t have the resistance to earning money at my craft to the level Will does, but in my twenties I was very passionate about the importance of live theater to society. It was my church.
I tried to be like Kate. I really did. My mother was a CPA and my dad’s in medicine. I took all the APs in high school: Chemistry, Physics and Math as well as English. I was an Economics major for the first three semesters of college, even though it drove me mad the way they’d go on and on about how economics is a social science, not a hard science. That we can’t predict human behavior, we can only look at past behavior and speculate.
Before going on to treat their data like it was sacrosanct.
I also tried really hard to leave the theater behind after high school. Didn’t try out for anything in the first semester. I spent my time going to parties and studying and trying to learn how to play polo (horse, not water, and unsuccessfully). But I didn’t last long. I auditioned for a play at the end of the first semester, was cast, and that was it for me. I eventually found a career counselor who made the argument that I’d get into a better MBA program with high As as a theater major versus high Bs as an Econ major, and convinced my parents that I was preparing to go into arts management as I acted my way through the next 3.5 years of school.