Across the pond in America, Lily King is a major literary star. Since releasing her debut novel in 1999, she’s sold over a million books and regularly features on the New York Times bestseller lists. Yet, readers here have been missing out, with just two of her first six novels available in the UK before last year.
The first was 2014’s Euphoria, which follows three talented anthropologists caught up in a passionate love triangle on the sultry shores of Papua New Guinea in 1931. The next, 2020’s Writers & Lovers, is an intimate portrayal of a struggling, 30-something novelist, exploring some of the author’s own shame and doubt experienced in the early stages of her career.
Excitingly, however, a new Lily King novel hit UK shelves in October. Heart the Lover is an insightful and immensely readable tale of first love and how it can evolve over the years to become something else entirely.
As the title suggests, King sets her sights on the heart, not just as her subject but, it seems, as her audience, too. Over 250 pages of pared-down but evocative prose, she speaks directly to it – stirring, warming, wrenching, and breaking it.
We sat down with King to explore the new novel, her path to publication, and her advice for aspiring writers in later life.
“I was never really good at anything else, and I was never really interested in doing anything else”
Credit: Winky Lewis
King knew she wanted to write from an early age. “I was never really good at anything else, and I was never really interested in doing anything else,” she says. “So it was an easy trajectory for me.”
Her journey began in high school, where an innovative English teacher ran creative writing workshops inspired by his time at university. King and her classmates had to submit a brand new short story each week, which they’d read and discuss in class.
“It was real workshop criticism, and it was amazing,” King says. “The learning curve was so fast because, when I took it as a junior, there were seniors in the class, and they quickly made it clear what was good writing and what was bad.”
King went on to study English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, followed by an M.A. in Creative Writing at the prestigious Syracuse University. Here, she learned just as much from her fellow students as from her professors – especially one classmate, Laura McNeal, who also went on to become a successful writer.
“She really taught me a lot about lyricism and taking your time with a moment,” says King. “I also watched her work ethic, which was really impressive. I didn’t have any kind of structure to my writing or any real sense of discipline. And I saw her, and how seriously she took it, and it really affected me.”
Interestingly, King has never lost her enthusiasm for seeking the opinions of her peers. She’s been in the same writing group since the early 2000s, and they’ve offered guidance on nearly all of her novels before publication. “Their feedback is so essential to me,” she says. “It’s so much harsher than any critic I’ve ever had, knock on wood, but it’s so useful.”
Speaking about the value this type of collaborative creative atmosphere offers writers at any stage, King says, “You need to develop a thick skin. You need to develop the habit and the ability to give your work to someone and receive their response. And you learn to take what means something to you and leave the rest, but not to be devastated by every negative opinion.”
“I felt like the train had left the station, and I was not on it. But at the same time, I was not going to give up”
After completing her master’s degree, King began writing her first novel, which would take eight years to complete. During this time, she moved all over the U.S., working in bookstores, restaurants, and teaching jobs – even spending some time in Valencia.
“I had friends who were getting office jobs, getting married, and having babies,” King says. “I felt like the train had left the station, and I was not on it. But at the same time, I was not going to give up. I would’ve stayed waiting tables until I was 50. I just know that would’ve been my choice.”
Speaking about the publication of her debut, she says, “I definitely doubted myself and whether it would ever happen. Especially in my early 30s, it caused me some extreme anxiety. But then life just kind of takes you up and brings you somewhere else that you don’t expect.”
King’s perseverance paid off when The Pleasing Hour was published in 1999, earning accolades like the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and a Whiting Writer’s Award. Since then, she’s released a steady stream of novels and the short story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter.
“My books are always a response to the last thing I wrote; a kind of running away”
“My books are always a response to the last thing I wrote; a kind of running away,” King says. After finishing Writers & Lovers, she began working on a political murder mystery. This venture into new genre territory was inspired by pandemic politics and the despair she felt about America’s political climate.
It took place on a small island in Maine during the first summer of COVID and featured a dead senator in the opening chapter. But 90 pages later, King admitted something wasn’t right. “I just didn’t care,” she explains. “I didn’t care who did it, I didn’t care why. I just wasn’t interested in the format of a murder mystery.”
Around the same time, the manuscript for Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake (2023) arrived on King’s doorstep and nailed the point home. She says, “It felt like she was so free and having such a good time.” Inspired after reading just six pages, King flipped to the back of her notepad and began drafting the opening scene of Heart the Lover. “It just went from there. I didn’t have any idea that that’s what I was going to do.”
“I’m really interested in time, how we all carry memories and carry them differently”
Heart the Lover is out now
Heart the Lover centres around an unnamed narrator and her relationships with two men, Sam and Yash, first in college and then, via a time jump, in mid-life. As the plot progresses, their bonds form, break, and re-form under the weight of their constantly evolving and diverging lives.
“I’m really interested in time, how we all carry memories and carry them differently, and how love evolves from one thing to another over time,” Kings says. “And really, how people who we’re so close to when we’re young have a huge impact on our lives, whether we see them again or not – and what it feels like when we reconnect.
“There are all these things, when you’re young, that you just don’t have the capacity to communicate. There’s just so much that gets left unsaid because you can’t even articulate it to yourself. You’ve just come out of childhood in a particular environment, and you have no idea that your home life is just an alien culture to everyone else. Then you plop in with everyone else who’ve grown up in these alien places, and you try to communicate with each other. It just takes a long time.”
“Novels, more than any form I can think of, get us close to what it is to love”
Credit: Winky Lewis
Considering the troubling events of the last few years, both in America and worldwide, King wondered, upon finishing Heart the Lover, if her political murder mystery would’ve proved more timely than a book that so unabashedly celebrates love in all its forms.
There’s a scene in the university section where two of her protagonists debate humans’ capacity for moral progress. One argues that we’re improving, citing better women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and the spread of democracy. The other counters, saying, ‘More people have been killed in this [the 20th] century in wars and by their own government than in all previous centuries combined.’
It feels like King is working through her own internal conflict on the page here – whether to be optimistic or sink into the dark waters of pessimism. Ultimately, she chooses the former and celebrates it in Heart the Lover.
“I’ve come to realise that, honestly, all we truly need is love,” she says. “I’ve been sort of leaning in hard to this concept of love and how novels, more than any form I can think of, get us close to what it is to love, what it feels like to love.
“What you read can really reverberate with your own life and remind you of all the people you love and how you love them, and I just think we all truly need to remember that right now. We can’t lose our ability to connect with each other and love each other – right now, in particular. Because really cruel things are happening in this world.”
“I would always want to encourage someone to never feel that it’s too late – because it isn’t too late”
While King didn’t get her literary start in later life, she’s keen to encourage older adults to put pen to paper if they feel the urge.
“There have been so many amazing novels written by authors over 50,” she says. “I would always want to encourage someone to never feel that it’s too late – because it isn’t too late. You always have things to say, and you have more to say when you get older. I hope that anyone who has a real impulse to do it can just let go of those fears, plunge in, and have fun – because it really can be fun if you just let go of everything else.”
King’s main advice to aspiring writers is to create a schedule and stick to it. This can help you push through critical and negative feelings that so often arise when beginning new projects.
“It’s not necessarily going to feel good, especially when you’re first starting out. And you have to leave your emotions and [inner] critic outside the door. You really have to push through a lot to start writing. It might take a couple of days, a week, two weeks, but I can promise you that once you get over that hurdle, if you can stay on track with your schedule, you will never look back.”
As for her own writing, King is looking forward to her next life chapter to embrace the learning mindset that marked her early career.
“When I wrote my first book, I was so in deep with literature, and I was such a student,” she says. “For a lot of my books, I’ve been raising kids, and they have always been my first priority, so I don’t feel like I’ve been able to be the student that I would always like to be. Now my kids are grown and out of the house, I feel like I can get back to that a little bit more.”
Have you read Heart the Lover? Or are you inspired to after reading this? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.