The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy
The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Brigitte Knightley on The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The gap a finished fic left openThe 199,000-word Dramione fic that brought Knightley to publishing had given her one version of enemies-to-lovers: two people with a shared, painful history who change across time. Once she’d finished it, she could name exactly what that version couldn’t give her.
I wanted enemies to lovers that were like systemically enemies to lovers. I wanted them to hate each other just by virtue of what they were.
Rather than adapting the fic that made her career, she started from scratch with a single structural question. The question forced her to commit to leads so incompatible that the outcome had to be genuinely uncertain.
When I started writing THE IRRESISTIBLE URGE TO FALL FOR YOUR ENEMY, I had a blank page and a question: ‘What happens if the irresistible force falls in love with the immovable object?’
The uncertainty mattered to her as a condition of the premise. She pushed the incompatibility far enough that even as author she couldn’t guarantee the ending, which is not a device but the whole gamble the book makes.
Twenty-five years of fan fiction had trained her to spot the gap between what a story gave her and what she wished it had done. When she finally wrote without an existing fandom, that habit shaped the book just as much as it had shaped everything before.
I would be watching shows or media or something, and I’d be like, ‘You know what? I don’t think those two characters should have ended up together. And I think I could write something better, pairing them with someone else.’ It was this urge to sort of, maybe, ‘fix’ things, or explore things that the canon hadn’t quite done for me.
How she wrote it
A conquest that never happened, and an outline that kept splittingThe setting required Knightley to decide what Norman influence had done to England and then erase it. Without the Conquest’s linguistic impact, more Old English vocabulary survives. Without the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, ten petty kingdoms called the Tīendoms remain at war. The deviation compounded from there: because seith, the book’s form of practical magic treated as science rather than mysticism, handles travel through waystones and carries messages through familiars, there was no pressure to develop steam engines or telegraphs, even though the story is set in the equivalent of the late nineteenth century.
Building a fantasy world will leave you with both a god complex and new and exciting agonies. On one hand, you are the all-powerful creator; on the other, as you progress through the project, you suffer the consequences of your own stupid decisions. It’s wonderful. I highly recommend it.
Knightley set up her two leads, the assassin Osric and the healer Aurienne, as professional and ethical opposites. Partway through drafting she found they shared something she hadn’t planned, which changed how she wrote the antagonism.
Funnily, I set Osric and Aurienne up to be polar opposites, but as the story progressed, I discovered that they were also very similar: highly competent in their respective fields, and consequently arrogant and self-important. It was fun to have them navigate this realization at the same time as I did!
Even with that shared arrogance in place, the structural opposition between healer and killer held. Knightley treated that opposition not as background color but as the engine the plot ran on.
This healer/killer dichotomy and its built-in animosity was the principal driver of the story. It set Osric and Aurienne up to be one another’s antithesis on basically every plane possible (professionally, ethically, systemically) and prepared the terrain for some delicious slow burn yearning and angst for when feelings (forbidden!) start to develop.
Knightley outlines, but the outline for Osric’s arc forked in two directions and stayed that way through most of drafting. The question of how much redemption he deserved couldn’t be settled in advance, so she carried both possibilities simultaneously and let the characters decide.
Osric’s redemption was something I went back and forth on throughout the writing process: To what extent should he be redeemed, to what point should he become good? It was a tension I wrestled with throughout the writing. My outlines were bifurcated by it: If Osric becomes good, then do X. If Osric remains bad, then do Y.
The resolution came not from Osric changing fully but from Aurienne growing enough to accept him as he was. That shift moved the problem from his arc to hers, which is how the book closed the fork.
Even after the outline question settled, the characters pulled against her control. She described this happening at multiple points across the drafting, not as a loss of discipline but as a necessary concession to the logic the story had built.
At several points during drafting, I had to loosen my grip on the steering wheel and let Osric and Aurienne take hold of it. (NB: Neither of them has got a license; I was alarmed.)
What she wants us to sit with
Suffering, slowly, as the whole pointWhen asked what she hopes readers carry away, Knightley’s answer is deliberately unambitious about large themes. She names something more immediate and specific.
Several hours of entertainment; an appreciation for the beauty of the natural world; a few laughs if our senses of humor align!
Below that modest answer is a more precise investment. The slow burn in her work is not a path toward the payoff; it is what she actually loves to write, and she constructed this book to hold as much of it as the story could bear.
Genuinely there is little I love more than writing the yearning stage of an enemies-to-lovers tale, especially when paired with angst – and there’s an ample serving of both in this novel. I like to make characters suffer & grow light-headed at the brush of the other’s fingertips.