Alison Cochrun
Alison Cochrun is a former high school English teacher and a current writer of queer love stories, including her debut novel, The Charm Offensive, and Kiss Her Once for Me, which won the Lambda Literary award for best LBGTQ Romance in 2023. She lives outside of Portland, Oregon with two big dogs, her small wife, and a vast collection of brightly colored books.
Q: How did the idea for KISS HER ONCE FOR ME come about? What drew you to write a holiday romance?
A: I actually didn’t set out to write a holiday romance at all! After I sold my debut novel The Charm Offensive, my agent and I started brainstorming ideas for book 2, and I got really stuck. It was June of 2020, just three months into lockdown, and I wasn’t feeling creative at all. So, to help me come up with some ideas, I brainstormed a list of my favorite romcom movies, and on the top of that list was While You Were Sleeping starring Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman. And I thought: what if I took that movie, but made it super gay? After all, Bill Pullman does look like a Portland lesbian in WYWS.
Kiss Her Once for Me is only loosely inspired by that movie (there’s no coma, for example). But I loved the idea of taking that classic love triangle between two brothers and making it about a brother and sister. Since that movie is set at the holidays, I decide to set Kiss Her Once for Me at the holidays, too. Even though I chose it on a whim, I loved writing a Christmas book! Sometimes I wish I could write another one!
Q: What was the process like writing this book while including major flashbacks and in a way telling two stories in both the past and present? I specifically loved how the flashbacks were done through Ellie's webcomic and found it a really creative way to go about it, was that something you knew initially you wanted to incorporate?
A: No, when I was first drafting the book, there were no flashbacks and no webcomics! I ended up writing the flashbacks initially as an exercise for myself. I was having a hard time getting into Jack’s character, since she’s not a POV MC, so I wrote the Powell’s meet-cute flashback just for myself, to help me understand their relationship better. Then, because I had so much fun writing that flashback, I kept writing other scenes, until eventually I decided I wanted to try to make the dual timeline work. When I turned my draft into my editor, one of her comments was that she wanted more about Ellie’s art and the webcomic series throughout the book, so in revision, I tried to incorporate the webcomics into the flashback structure of the novel. I was (and still am) worried people don’t get it, since I couldn’t put actual comics in the book.
These Sapphic Stories Book Club author profiles are compiled by founder Aliya Bree Hall. Aliya is a freelance journalist and author who founded the book club in 2021 to uplift sapphic stories and celebrate LGBTQ+ authors. This excerpt has been lifted from an interview Aliya conducted with our December 2023 author. You can read the full Q&A by joining the book club.
