Check out our chat with Christina Lauren about their latest novel Roomies, what inspired the story and characters, as well as what other projects they have coming up!

Related: Roomies book review: Christina Lauren’s take on a marriage of convenience is absolute perfection

About ‘Roomies’ by Christina Lauren:

Marriages of convenience are so…inconvenient.

Rescued by Calvin McLoughlin from a would-be subway attacker, Holland Bakker pays the brilliant musician back by pulling some of her errand-girl strings and getting him an audition with a big-time musical director. When the tryout goes better than even Holland could have imagined, Calvin is set for a great entry into Broadway—until he admits his student visa has expired and he’s in the country illegally.

Holland impulsively offers to wed the Irishman to keep him in New York, her growing infatuation a secret only to him. As their relationship evolves from awkward roommates to besotted lovers, Calvin becomes the darling of Broadway. In the middle of the theatrics and the acting-not-acting, what will it take for Holland and Calvin to realise that they both stopped pretending a long time ago?

Q&A with Christina Lauren:

Even though the marriages of convenience trope isn’t new, Roomies felt very fresh and original. Can you talk about what inspired the storyline?

When we’re on trips together or brainstorming new ideas, we’ll mull over what types of stories we’ve tried, what types we haven’t, and what tropes we love that would be fun to play with. The marriage of convenience trope isn’t one that you see in a lot of contemporary romance novels set in the U.S. When we decided we wanted to try writing one, we had to think about what circumstances might make someone marry a relative stranger for convenience, and the Broadway/New York setting just sprouted from there.

Let’s be real, Holland is kind of a hot mess, but that’s what I love most about her. Is her character inspired by anyone or is she purely from your imaginations?

We’ve written the driven and ambitious Chloes and Saras and Rubys and Evies, but we’ve also written the characters that haven’t entirely found themselves yet, like Mia, and London, and Holland. There’s something wonderful about being able to go back to that time in our own lives, when we weren’t really sure who we were or whether the choices we were making were ultimately going to lead us down the right path. More than for any of our other characters, though, Holland’s journey is really about figuring out who she needs to be in order to become her own best friend. It was almost more a Holland-Holland love story than a Holland-Calvin love story. And it was incredibly rewarding to write.

Calvin is a dreamy Irishman, but he’s not your first hero that comes from overseas! What do you love about writing characters with different backgrounds?

This is such a good question! The easy answer is that we love accents. Ha! But the more complicated answer is probably about breaking away from the idea of a typical alpha male, and that feeling somewhat easier with cultural norms that lean European. It might also just be about wanting to feel the larger world in our stories, even if what we’re writing takes place around four square blocks in Manhattan.

There’s a lot of roadblocks for Calvin and Holland along the way to their HEA, what would you say was their biggest problem?

The first thing that pops to mind is communication, but that’s not quite right, is it? It’s about self-awareness, really. It seems that if Holland had been more settled in who she was and what she wanted, she would have been able to be honest with Calvin earlier about her feelings. In turn, Calvin may have felt comfortable telling her earlier about the issue with his family. Not to put it all on Holland, but it does seem that she wanted to be ready for a relationship, but because she wasn’t yet in a committed relationship with herself, it would have been impossible for her to find solid footing with Calvin.

It Possessed Him is a big part of the storyline, but there aren’t much details about it in Roomies. Can you give readers an overview?

So glad you asked! In fact, we wrote a piece about exactly this for Broadway World!

What would your dream cast be for It Possessed Him?

Oh, man, this question, ha! Because there are two of us writing together, we almost always find models or (rarely) actors to provide faces for our characters so that we can describe them similarly, but we rarely see them as that actor for very long after we start writing. For Calvin and Holland, we chose models. But we also want to leave it to the readers to figure out who works for them. Does that make sense? The uncles are easy — one of our readers said that Jeff Goldblum and Idris Elba need to be Jeff and Robert, and we were like YES—EXACTY! Who do you see for Calvin and Holland?

Did you do any special type of research to learn more about Broadway or was it already a comfortable topic?

Having been to a few shows, we knew the experience from the audience side, and Lo was in a youth symphony for many years, so the music aspect was easy to write. But for the behind-the-scenes aspects, we relied on research and a few people in the Broadway world to ensure we got the details right. Anything we messed up is 100% our fault, though.

How would you describe Roomies to someone that hasn’t read it before?

It’s a modern-day novel where a marriage of convenience meets Broadway!

Can you give us any teases about your upcoming projects?

Oh so many upcoming projects!

Well, our first women’s fiction novel is out in April. It’s called Love and Other Words, and we would say it’s in our top three favorite things we’ve ever done. It’s a story told in Then and Now timelines, and is about two friends—Macy and Elliot—who meet when they are both 13. They are book obsessed and shy, and even though they only see each other on weekends, holidays, and during the summer, they fall in love as they grow up together. In the Now chapters, they’ve been out of touch for 11 years, and over the course of the story you find out why.

We love it because it’s sweet, and super sexy even when things are angsty — even as the tension of the rift starts to approach in the Then sections, Macy and Elliot in the Now sections are already starting to gravitate back toward each other, and the chemistry between them just seemed to press up from the pages as we typed. It’s commercial women’s fiction, so yeah it’s a bit less sexy than, say, Beautiful Stranger, but it’s by no means unsexy (come on, it’s a CLo book)—and at its heart it is such a pure romance.

And of course we have more romance coming! We haven’t announced the others yet, but the book that follows Love and Other Words will be a perfect pick for readers who loved Beautiful Player. It has that same playful, lighthearted, sexy feel to it and we can’t wait!

Roomies by Christina Lauren is available now! Order your copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or iBooks. And don’t forget to add it to your Goodreads!