Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Lily King on Heart the Lover
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A murder mystery that stopped workingThe book that became ‘Heart the Lover’ arrived only after a different book collapsed. King had been ninety pages into a political murder mystery set on a Maine island during the pandemic, with a dead senator on the first page, when she read a manuscript that made the gap between where she was and where she wanted to be impossible to ignore.
She is having fun. She is having so much fun. I am having no fun in my chair. [paraphrased from audio]
She quit the murder mystery that day and opened a new notebook to a college classroom scene, with no narrator name and no plan.
The narrator’s identity surfaced as an accident roughly fifteen to thirty pages in, while King was using the back of her notebook the way she always does: as a scratchpad for future-timeline notes.
I had turned to the back of my notebook to make a note about the future, when this character was married, and instead of writing her husband I wrote ‘Silas’ then stared at the name, realizing who she was.
The losses that gave the novel its emotional architecture were not visible to King when she began. Two friends she describes as the great loves of her youth died of cancer in 2019, in separate cities, a month apart, three years after her parents’ deaths. She did not sit down to write about grief. The grief found its way in anyway.
I wasn’t aware of needing to process and express all the emotions I had about big losses in my life until I started writing this novel. In 2019, I lost two dear old friends, my two big loves of my youth, to cancer. They died in separate cities a month apart. My mother and father had died three years earlier.
Once she could see the full shape of what those losses had deposited in the manuscript, she could articulate what the novel’s arc was actually tracing.
I think all that informed this book and the arc of this book — what love feels like when you’re young and how it feels to lose people you loved and lost and regained and lost again.
How she wrote it
The college section that ate the bookKing writes all first drafts in pencil in spiral notebooks, and she began this one expecting the college scenes to be a brief overture. The book she thought she was writing was a reunion story: three characters in a hospital room thirty years later. The college section had other ideas.
The third part was supposed to be the whole book. [paraphrased from audio]
By the time she finished, the college section had expanded to more than half the final novel.
The card game ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster,’ which gives the novel its title, started as a practical solution to a scene problem: she needed something for the characters to do after pizza and refused to reach for a generic college standby. She based it on a real family game called Sir Hinkum Funnybuster. The King of Hearts in that game is ‘Heart the Lover,’ and the title’s weight grew from there, though it came with a warning from her daughter.
This card just took on more and more meaning. And it kind of snowballed. [paraphrased from audio]
Part Three resisted King for years. Her husband, working from a screenwriting structure book, kept pressing her to give the narrator a secret she carries into the hospital reunion. King held out for a year. Then, twelve days before the manuscript was due to go to production, something shifted.
I really honestly kept on saying there’s no fucking secret... with 12 days to go, I was like, fine! And I walked away. I walked into my study, and I opened up the last page of the first section, and I changed five lines. And I had the secret. And then I had 11 days to rewrite the entire rest of the book. [paraphrased from audio]
The scenes that readers describe as the novel’s most emotional felt, from the inside, like a technical problem. King was working at the level of construction, not catharsis.
I wasn’t thinking tearjerker. I was just thinking, how do I land this plane?
The personal thread
The physics of being twenty-twoKing’s interest in the early twenties as fictional territory is not nostalgic. It comes from what she sees as the specific cognitive condition of that age: a person acting on full emotional force with almost no self-knowledge, the childhood damage not yet named, the pattern not yet visible.
God, youth. It becomes more miraculous the farther you get from it. You’re acting from such a strange place of impulse and ignorance and with no idea how your childhood has impacted you and your response to the world.
The kind of love she wanted to write about has a specific combination of registers that she finds rare and worth chasing, both in fiction and in her own experience.
I’m very drawn, in fiction and in real life, to the triple whammy of physical, emotional, and intellectual attraction. That is a thrilling state of being.
What she wants us to sit with
Love as a subject worth the full weightKing has watched ‘Heart the Lover’ get filed under ‘campus novel,’ a category that describes one setting in the book’s three-part structure and nothing else about what she was attempting. She accepts she cannot control the label, but she names the mismatch plainly.
This book I wrote about the many kinds of love—the protean shape of love—in the span of a lifetime, and about time and memory and loss becomes…a campus novel. That’s out of my hands.
Part of what she is pushing back against is the reflex that treats love as a lesser fictional subject. She makes the case for it on physiological grounds: the novel is one of the few forms that can reproduce, in the reader’s body, what falling in love actually does.
Falling in love produces all of these great feelings and chemicals and hormones. The extraordinary thing is that you can read a novel and feel those same things.
Her description of what she wants a reader to carry away is less about this book’s specific argument than about what fiction, at full stretch, can do to a person sitting alone with a story.
I want to take the reader on an emotional journey. That is always my goal. I want the reader to feel things, remember the range of their own emotional life, feel compassion and joy and fear, feel their humanity in its great fullness.