Love, Theoretically
Love, Theoretically
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Ali Hazelwood on Love, Theoretically
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A trope turned inside outEvery fake-dating romance follows roughly the same architecture: two people pretend to be together and fall for each other in the process. Hazelwood wanted to keep the scaffolding but move the target, so that the person Elsie is performing for is not the one she ends up with.
I really wanted to write a fake dating story in which the main character is fake dating, not the person that she ends up with, but someone else. It’s a little bit of a twist on that trope.
The twist created a character problem she found equally compelling: if Elsie performs a different self for every client, someone has to be able to see past all of it. That person, and the tension of being truly seen, became the engine of the romance.
I also really wanted to write a story in which the main character is someone who sort of puts on a mask constantly, but there is this one person who was able to see through that mask and really see the kind of person she is.
The structural problem of the title came last, and unexpectedly. The book was already deep in edits when Hazelwood landed on a phrase that satisfied her. She described the discovery with some relief, because titles had always been a weak spot for her.
it was supposed to be a pun on Love Actually... because the main character is a theoretical physicist. So I was like, I was so proud of this title. I am really bad at titles. So whenever I get something that is vaguely funny, I’m like, okay, I’m a genius. [paraphrased from audio]
The pun does double work: it names Elsie’s academic discipline and signals the book’s central uncertainty, whether love can survive contact with the messy, non-theoretical reality of two people in the same room.
How she wrote it
Googling physics and chasing deadlinesHer first two novels drew on neuroscience, the field she spent years studying and teaching. With Elsie as a physicist, Hazelwood was working outside her own training for the first time, and the gap was real.
I don’t know very much about physics, so there was a lot of Googling going on …
Rather than mapping out character sheets before plot, or plotting before people, she found that the two developed together. The premise, an adjunct physicist moonlighting as a paid fake girlfriend, generated its own characters by asking who would realistically end up in that situation.
[For Love, Theoretically] it was a very organic process — I had the story idea, wondered what kind of people would be more likely to end up in that specific situation, and everything progressed side by side.
Around the time she was drafting the novel, Hazelwood was watching a lot of K-dramas, and their pacing left a visible mark on how the book accumulates tension. The technique she absorbed was patience: keeping two people in the same orbit for a long time before anything resolves.
I feel like the way K-dramas unfold and slowly build the relationship between the characters has inspired me sooo much.
Whatever her influences, the actual conditions of composition were chaotic. She has described her writing ritual with a specificity that suggests it is less a joke than an accurate account of how her books get finished.
My ritual is postponing the moment when I start writing a book as much as I can, thus creating an endless cycle of barely met deadlines and days spent having to write every second of every hour, even when I’m on the toilet or scarfing down a sandwich, just to avoid having to ask for an extension.
The personal thread
Academia, written from the insideBefore writing full time, Hazelwood held a PhD in neuroscience and worked as a professor, and the isolation she felt entering that world went directly into Elsie’s situation. Elsie adjuncts at three institutions and cannot afford insulin without her fake-girlfriend income. That financial precarity is not invented for plot effect.
I am very much writing about my own experience, which is of a white woman in STEM. It’s not an overall umbrella representation of everything that it is to be a woman in STEM. It’s very much a male-dominated field; STEM and academia can feel a little bit like an old boys club where there are certain unspoken rules and certain types of treatments of women.
She left academia in 2022, describing the attempt to hold both careers simultaneously as something she was genuinely bad at managing. The shift gave her distance enough to write about the environment with some irreverence, treating its frustrations as material rather than grievance.
More than wanting to represent women in STEM, it was about writing my own lived experience and making it more interesting. [Academia is] such a rough environment that it’s fun to try and see it as something that you can make fun of.
What she wants us to sit with
Permission to take the long way to yourselfThe Goodreads interview came out after the book’s publication, and Hazelwood used it to articulate what the novel’s architecture is actually doing: the theoretical-versus-experimental divide between the two physicists mirrors the question the plot keeps asking about Elsie, whether something unproven can still be real.
the title is Love Theoretically, and it’s a book about two rival physicists. She is a theoretical physicist, and he is an experimental physicist, and they both think their discipline is better. They end up falling in love, but it’s also a weird twist on the fake dating trope in the sense that she ends up with the brother of the guy she’s fake dating.
Hazelwood’s heroines tend to be high-functioning and self-concealing, people who have learned to manage how they appear at the cost of knowing what they actually want. She has been direct about what she is trying to give those characters, and by extension the readers who recognize themselves in them.
What I try to celebrate the most with them is that it’s okay to feel vulnerable. I try to let my characters voice their struggles and insecurities — it’s okay if they have to go through a long journey before fully understanding who they really are and what they need to be!
Elsie’s journey is long by design. The mask she wears for clients does not fall in a single scene; it erodes slowly, under pressure from the one person who refuses to accept the performance. That patience, built into the structure, is the argument Hazelwood is making.