Christine: I have been a book editor for 20 years, so I’ve been on the other side of things. I worked at all the major publishing houses and published a lot of wonderful writers and books, including Jo’s last novel, Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win, which is how we met. I never really had a burning desire to write something until this opportunity and idea came together.

Jo: I’ve been writing books for a little over 10 years now. I’ve been a journalist my entire life, which evolved into digital journalism, then podcasting and now book writing. So I’ve written both fiction and non-fiction. And as Christine said, we met when she was my editor at Simon and Schuster.

Christine: I had this idea simmering for a while but as I say, I hadn’t had a real desire to write. Yet after all of the gruelling headlines of police violence over the last few years, it just coalesced into this idea of what would happen if two best friends (one white, one black) were in the middle of something like this. If they were personally involved, how would it transform or affect their friendship? That was the nugget of the idea that I went to Jo with, in 2018, after we had just come away from working on her novel. It seemed like the stars aligned and we had an opportunity to take this provocative idea but also create something different by writing a book that would be informed by both of our perspectives. We knew it would be a better story than if either of us wrote it alone.

Christine: There were phases to it. There were a lot of early conversations about the book and getting to know our characters, from who they were to how they met. Next, we created a really detailed outline that we could follow, which was critical. We then had a roadmap and we knew where we were going.

From there we would each just take a stab at drafting chapters and getting something on the page. Jo did a lot of heavy lifting as she was much less intimidated by the blank page than I was. We would then pass the chapter back and forth, which really means both of us were going into the document, whenever we were free to do so. It was a living, breathing Google document. Jo and I have never lived in the same place or even in the same time zone, so we worked by talking when we needed to and leaving each other detailed comments. It was ever-evolving, sentence by sentence and chapter by chapter.

Jo: We faced so many challenges. Figuring out how to collaborate with someone on a novel is almost like figuring out how to live with someone. You have to work out how to communicate and do so really clearly, so the other person doesn’t feel like their creative process is being trampled on. I remember the first time I wrote an entire page and Christine deleted it and rewrote it. I felt terrible and I thought she hated my work. In fact, not only is she a great writer, she is a great editor. So she was just editing and I had to learn not to take it personally. It’s just so different to writing alone.

Jo: We always knew that this was going to open the book, in the same way that we also had the title from the very beginning. Christine thought of the title in the middle of the night – she always wakes up at like three or four in the morning with ideas. Amazingly our title has stayed the same throughout all of the publication, as has our prologue, which is rare. We knew that we wanted to really catch the reader’s attention in an incredibly visceral way and we didn’t want the shooting to just be a device. We wanted to give Justin some agency and we wanted to see that shooting through his eyes.

Christine: We wanted a title that was memorable and stood on its own, even if you didn’t know what the book was about. Beyond that, we wanted it to resonate with the themes of the book. One of those is the divisive nature of our society at large right now. Everybody is so tribalistic and wants to identify with groups – whether they be political or social – and belief systems and so on. Yet on a more positive note, it also reflects the friendship that Jen and Riley have. They feel like they’ve created a special bond from being friends since childhood that not everybody has. It’s quite rare to remain friends from childhood to adulthood, so the sentimental aspect implies ‘we are not like that’ and that they have a unique connection. So the title works on a few different levels.

Christine: We knew we wanted to do that from the beginning and it was one of the critical structural decisions we made. It was really important to get both of their perspectives as that’s where the drive of tension is. We wanted their perspectives to be equal and for them to have equal billing on the page, which meant being pretty rigid about the amount of cage time that they both got. That was the tricky part, as certain plot elements needed to happen in certain chapters for the timeline and the momentum of the book. It was a little bit of a puzzle to match and that’s where the outline we’d made came in really handy.

Jo: We’ve always wanted this book to spark difficult and uncomfortable conversations about race that I think a lot of white people are afraid of having. As we’ve been talking about this book, we’ve seen that if you haven’t grown up talking about race and or developed that muscle and that language, it can be hard. I personally was scared because I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I didn’t want to inadvertently say something insulting or even stupid.

So Christine and I really had to have a lot of uncomfortable conversations. I had to plough through my own anxiety and do my own work so that Christine didn’t feel like she was teaching me a PhD crash course or about 400 years of Black history in America. I put in the time to do a lot of self-examination of where my own biases and thoughts about my own white privilege came from. Sometimes it was a painful process and it’s an ongoing process. There’s no one ‘kumbaya’ moment but after three years of doing this together, I think we’ve gotten to a really great place in our friendship. I feel really grateful to Christine for going on this journey with me.

Jo: Absolutely. We really wanted to get Kevin’s character as accurate as possible but we didn’t want to paint him as a very clear cut villain, either. We wanted to show that there are shades of grey and there are nuances in all of these kinds of cases. In every instance, there is a human being behind these actions who is a complicated person. I have a lot of friends who are cops and we did a lot of interviews with police officers, police wives and even a therapist who was a police wife. We also interviewed council officers and we read a lot of books. We really did our due diligence to try to make all of these characters as fully formed as possible.

Christine: It’s hard because within that time we absorbed so much, from first-hand accounts to Lucy McBath’s memoir and a book called Black and Blue by a Black police officer – just to name a few important sources. There were podcasts and articles too, we really immersed ourselves in lots of different angles and personal accounts. There wasn’t just one or two that were fundamental though – immersed is the best word to use because we were talking, reading and listening constantly. It was an osmosis of inspiration in that way.

Christine: Totally, that is true and sometimes in discussing things, you start to understand it in a different way or you can be talked into a new understanding. Whereas if you’re doing this solo, you read an article, think about it and then move on. It’s not as dynamic. Jo and I often had different reactions to interviews or what we were reading and experiencing. You get double the impact and twice the amount of inspirational sources.

Jo: A couple of moments. One that really stands out is creating Riley’s family, who in the beginning felt very perfect to me. As someone that writes about a lot of dysfunctional families and comes from a dysfunctional family, when we were drafting them on the page they just didn’t feel real. However, it was really important to Christine that we avoid a lot of the tropes and stereotypes that are often placed on Black characters and families. She wanted to create a happy and unbroken nuclear Black family on the page. I didn’t understand it at first. I didn’t think this had anything to do with race – I just thought it had to do with creating a family that felt believable. I really had to come around and see how this had everything to do with race. It was vital for me to think about race with regards to everything when creating our characters, which I’ve never had to grapple with before in my books.

Jo: Totally. We need attention and validation there too. Romantic love gets so much airtime, and there are so many well-known rituals. We know what happens during break-ups, we know what happens during proposals and there are these distinct phases, markers and milestones that are all familiar. That doesn’t happen in the same way within friendships, so it makes factors more grey sometimes. Giving a friendship that level of nourishment was important for us to show on the page but it’s also so important for us to take that into real life. We hope our book is a reminder that friendships are just as nuanced and meaningful as other relationships.

Christine: Absolutely and so many people rely on that. You think, “we’ve been friends since first grade, so we’ll be friends forever.” A certain type of complacency sets in but you’re never going to be the same person you were in school or at 25 or 45 and you’ll end up in different places. That’s what Riley and Jen have to do too. They have to navigate those major life changes.

Jo: It was always our intention. We wanted to show the many things that could impact a friendship over 30 or so years. We really wanted to touch on class and what arises when one friend gets married and the other doesn’t, or when one friend has a baby. We wanted to explore how that all changes a friendship. As Christine said, we don’t have as much of a language when it comes to traditions or milestones around friendships. We wanted to convey the ways that female friendships get complicated, in all their good, bad, ugly and beautiful glory.

Jo: We’re under contract with HQ for another book!

Christine: It’s called You Were Always Mine, and we are continuing to look at race through intimate relationships. This is going to focus on a mother-daughter story about a Black woman who finds an abandoned white infant. It’s going to explore the collision course it sends her on in her own life, as well as the baby’s birth parents.