Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It
Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It
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Brooke Averick on Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Tired of waiting to see herselfRomance novels were already part of Averick’s daily life before she wrote a word of fiction. What pushed her from reader to writer was a specific, accumulating frustration: the heroines she loved were not built like her.
I spent a lot of time longing to see a character with similar issues represented in the romance space, and eventually, I got tired of waiting. And so Phoebe Berman was born.
The book also has a more concrete trigger, a real incident Averick refuses to name because naming it would collapse the plot’s central surprise. What she will say is that she survived it by immediately converting it into narrative potential.
Something happened to me a few years ago, and I can’t go into detail without spoiling the book, but something happened — and it was not the most amazing thing — but I was able to cope by being like, ‘Wow, this would be a really good book.’
She logged the idea in her Notes app and left it there until she was ready. When she finally committed to writing Phoebe, that single note became the architecture of the entire novel.
The actual green light came not from a plan but from being overheard. Two literary agents at her talent agency, United Talent Agency, had been listening to her podcast, where she had spent years announcing that writing a novel was her dream. When they reached out, the effect was immediate.
I had a meeting with agents after saying on the podcast for so many years, like it’s my dream to write a book. And they were like, how about you just try it? And then I think that was the permission that I needed. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
One sentence, one old note, and no outlineAverick had no formal fiction training. She had studied Early Childhood Education at Boston University, and when she sat down to write her first novel, the credential gap hit her immediately. She broke through it not with craft research but with a single line she wrote before the story itself.
I was riddled with self doubt and imposter syndrome… and then I wrote my first sentence — the dedication. For the nervous pukers. If anyone was qualified to write this book, it was me. And so I started writing, and I didn’t stop until Phoebe got the love story she deserved.
Structurally, the book has almost no blueprint behind it. Averick began with a first sentence that survived into the published text and a single scene, pulled from her Notes app, that the whole story was aimed at. Everything between those two points was written in sequence, without an outline.
I just had this idea that was essentially a sentence and I was like, I know I need this to happen. And so it was just like, how do we get here. [paraphrased from audio]
For Phoebe’s anxiety, Averick used the only archive she had unrestricted access to. The challenge was keeping Phoebe from collapsing into autobiography, and the solution turned out to be behavioral: the two women share thought patterns but not coping styles. Where Averick goes slack under stress, Phoebe reaches for a laminated checklist.
I think that Phoebe’s thought spirals really mirrored my own, but the way that I was able to create a boundary between me and Phoebe was that she reacted to her thought spirals very differently than I do... I’m kind of a slob, I’m very unorganized and any sort of stress sends me into complete paralysis — I could just like, rot in bed for weeks in order to avoid something.
Averick had expected the book to match the comedic register of her public persona. What it became instead surprised her, and the surprise arrived while she was still writing, not after.
When I started writing this, I initially intended it to be a light summer romcom, but to my surprise, the writing process turned into a year-long, life-changing therapy session that made me laugh and cry along the way. Writing this book healed a part of me that I thought was broken.
For tone, Averick worked with a specific playlist of films running in the background throughout the year she was drafting. She was chasing a feeling the genre had perfected before she was old enough to watch it and that she felt contemporary romance had largely abandoned.
I was really trying to capture the essence of an early-2000s rom-com. I watched 13 Going on 30 a lot. Bridget Jones. He’s Just Not That Into You. Crazy, Stupid, Love.
The personal thread
Phoebe as a mirror that talked backWriting a character through her worst moments turned out to require a kind of compassion Averick had not yet extended to herself. Phoebe’s struggles looked different from the outside, and that distance changed something.
Phoebe became like a friend to me, and I saw her going through so many of the things that I go through, but with her, they didn’t seem like the end of the world. I felt very empathetic toward her, and that helped me approach myself with more empathy.
The logic that shifted Averick’s self-perception ran in one direction: if a character built from her own worst qualities was clearly lovable, the person those qualities came from might be too. Reader response then closed the loop. When audiences embraced Phoebe warmly, Averick felt it land on herself.
I didn’t know that those parts of me were lovable and so kind of seeing that through Phoebe has been very healing. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Everybody has their own virginityAverick wrote a book about one woman’s particular shame, but the argument she wants readers to carry out is more general. The word “virginity” here is her shorthand for whatever private thing a person is convinced marks them as broken in a way no one else would understand.
I think the message in Phoebe is that you might think there’s something wrong with you, and with whatever is wrong with you, that everybody is thinking about it. But I think what I’ve learned is that everybody has their shit — their own ‘virginity,’ so to speak, and no one cares.
The route toward that conclusion is not a speech Phoebe delivers but a logic Averick herself built while writing. She describes it as a chain of reasoning she fell into rather than planned, one that moved from fictional character back to the author sitting at the keyboard.
As I was writing Phoebe, I fell so deeply in love with her, and really, truly feel like there’s nothing wrong with this girl... And if what she hates herself for is this anxiety, and that’s what I hate myself for too, and she’s great, then I must be great too.
Averick also pushes back against how the book might be shelved or summarized. Phoebe has a love interest, but the relationships Averick weighted equally when she was writing were the ones with friends, family, and the preschool classroom where Phoebe spends her working hours.
I think it is a romance, but I would even call it a love story more than a romance, because there’s so many different types of love that this book is about.