At Stephanie Perkins’ press conference at National Book Store in SM Aura last Tuesday, the author expressed her love for her Filipino fans. “This is just magic. Thank you for being such amazing readers. In the United States, we are very, very, very aware of the excitement and energy and the friendliness of the Philippines. It’s a thrill to be here, to be hanging out with all of you in person.”
Here are other highlights:
Étienne St. Clair, who came to her in a dream, remains her favorite character. “He was the one who gave me a career. I will always be grateful to him.”
She spent ten years writing “Lola and the Boy Next Door.” “It was really bad. I worked on it for seven years and had only 70 pages. I had to go back to this broken thing and turn it into something pretty.”
She has the same editor as John Green. “Her name is Julie Strauss-Gabel. She’s really, really good at what she does.”
She’s now working on a horror book. “It’s time to kill some people,” she said. But there will still be a love story in her scary book. “I can’t escape it.”
She might return to the world of Anna, Lola and Isla in the future. “I can’t answer that question but I hope my non-answer is an answer. I’m kind of done with them for a while. But I can absolutely see myself a few years down the road returning to them.”
Lola’s dads are inspired by her own parents. “My parents are straight, but Lola’s dads are basically my parents. And some of the mistakes she made were some of my worst mistakes as a teenager.”
Stephanie met the love of her life at a young age. “I keep writing these teenage love stories because I met my husband when I was their age. [It was] the best thing that ever happened to me, and I just want to keep talking about it again and again and again.”
Jarrod, her husband, is a combination of the boys in her books—Étienne St. Clair, Cricket Bell and Josh Wasserstein. “Whenever my mom reads one of my new books, she goes, ‘Oh, Jarrod is everywhere in here.’ A lot of the things they say I pull directly from his mouth.”
Fans will find out how tall Étienne is in her next book. “I got a satisfaction from making my readers fall in love with someone who is short. A lot of times, I’ll get fan art and they’ll still have drawn him way taller than Anna and I’m like, ‘No no no, you like someone short. Admit it. He’s really sexy. Accept it.’ I love it.”
She wishes the word “kilig” had an English counterpart. When National Book Store’s purchasing director Xandra Ramos told her that it meant “a romantic thrill,” Stephanie said, “I wish there was a word for that in English. We have swoon but we don’t have that thrill, that’s a great addition.”
