Below, read more of Glamour’s conversation with Kennedy Ryan in which she talks about her new book, Can’t Get Enough, intersecting personal experiences into her work, and potential casting choices for Before I Let Go’s television adaptation.
Glamour: In Can’t Get Enough, we get to see Hendrix and Maverick’s relationship develop. Was it intentional to have the book focus more on their relationship?
Kennedy Ryan: In the first book, Before I Let Go, there was so much history with that couple. A lot of that story was laying a foundation for the fact that, yes, they were married. These things happened that broke them up, but then they really couldn’t come back together unless they did a lot of individual healing.
In the second book, This Is Us, there’s so much about self-love, which is unusual in a romance novel. With Can’t Get Enough, everybody’s invited to the party, but I’m really celebrating Black women and centering softness and joy for Black women. Hendrix has her luxuries and sits courtside and she’s on the yacht and she is living that life. At the same time, we see her pouring into her community, establishing and running a venture capital fund for Black female founders, and meeting resistance.
There’s a moment where Hendrix and Maverick experiment in the bedroom. Why was it important for you to include this as a part of their sexual relationship?
I like for my books to feel like real life. A lot of Black women who are dating Black men will recognize those conversations. There was a version where maybe there was a little bit of pegging, and my next heroine is bisexual, and we see her in a queer relationship with a woman, and we see strap-ons. I am interested in this spectrum of what sex and sexuality look like.
A key theme in Can’t Get Enough is Hendrix and Maverick being vulnerable with one another, something that you do as an author by including real-life stories (autism in This Could Be Us, Alzheimer’s in Can’t Get Enough). How do you decide which parts of your life to include in your books, and which ones to keep for yourself?
When I started writing Before I Let Go, in the middle of it, I got so bogged down with what I thought was writer’s block, but it was actually depression. It was serendipitous that the book that I had chosen to revisit happened at the same time when I was diagnosed with depression, and then I could bring the healing that I was experiencing in therapy to that story to make it better.
With This Could Be Us, I’m an autism mom, but I had never written about autism. I was like, I will know when it’s right. I will know the story when I want to write about autism, which is an extension of my experience.