Interview with Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell is an American author of young adult and adult contemporary novels. Her young adult novels Eleanor & Park and Fangirl both received a great deal of critical acclaim in 2013.


Interviewer:What inspired you to write a misfits-in-love story like Eleanor & Park

Rainbow Rowell

I have always, always wanted to write a first love story. I feel like, when you're 16, you have the greatest-ever capacity for romantic love. You fall in love with every cell of your body. But, at the same time, at that age, you have so little to offer the person you love. You don't belong to yourself quite yet—you still have school and your parents, you don't even have your own space…And you also know that what you're feeling probably won't last. First love usually doesn't. There's a built-in tragedy to falling (truly) in love when you're 16. It's like every 16-year-old in love is either Romeo or Juliet. That is what I wanted to write about.


Interviewer:The jacket copy says: "Two misfits: One extraordinary love." Do you see Park as a misfit?

He is in terms of the music that he listens to, so he's a misfit in that John Hughes movie way. Eleanor, though, is "other" in another way: she's a person who can't be invisible.


Interviewer:Emotions run high in the novel. Is it realistic?

I feel like it’s realistic. I feel things very intensely. And I also think that real life is more romantic if you allow it to be, if you don’t act like it’s immature to get excited. I want to consume love stories, but 90% of them feel totally inauthentic. When I watch a romantic comedy, I feel like they’re selling something that doesn’t exist. Two beautiful, but extremely unpleasant, people are terrible to each other for an hour, accidentally kiss, then decide to like each other during an extremely vague montage. That isn’t how people fall in love.


Interviewer:You’ve said that in creating Park, you wanted a protagonist who was masculine but also capable of real feelings and tenderness. Is Park a fantasy?

No! He’s not a fantasy. They’re out there. In Attachments, which is told from a male point of view, people asked me if a man would really think that much about whether a woman likes him. But I have a husband and three brothers and they’re all like that. And I’ve worked in industries that were male-dominated, and I was surrounded by open-hearted men. They’re totally out there.

Interviewer:Park’s parents, though, are much more in the foreground than Eleanor’s. How did that happen?

I kept trying to expand Eleanor and Park’s world and add supporting characters, but when I did, it felt wrong. The only thing that worked was Park’s parents. You can’t be in Eleanor’s house too long, so I needed his home to feel like an escape. And, though I think Park would feel that he has a really hard relationship with his dad, as an adult and a parent, you can see the care there. Plus, in every book there’s one character I end up having a crush on, and here it was Park’s dad. I never planned to write so many scenes with him, but I realized that it was a way for Eleanor to have a relationship with an adult man who was different from the others in her life.