The Love Hypothesis
The Love Hypothesis
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Ali Hazelwood on The Love Hypothesis
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Exorcising the lab, one chapter at a timeThe book did not begin as a book. It began in the final year of a neuroscience PhD, when the daily weight of academic culture and institutional sexism became material she needed somewhere to put. Writing fiction was the outlet, and grad school was the subject.
I think I started writing fiction when I was in the final year of my Ph.D. and I was writing my dissertation, and I was feeling very much overwhelmed by the academic culture and the sexism... There was this feeling like I just wanted to take my experience and my struggles and make fun of it a little bit: write about it in a way that would exorcise some of the worst parts of it.
The act of writing gave her something academia did not: a controlled outcome. Where the dissertation and the lab hierarchy were ungovernable, fiction was a space where she could set the terms, including the ending.
It feels to me like if I can take these hardships and these difficult moments that I experienced and put them in a context that I can control and can make a little bit fun of, and if I can give my characters a happy ending, it can kind of be cathartic for me.
She arrived at fiction through fan fiction, and she is direct about what that lineage means: without fandom, she would not have written at all. The community taught her craft before she had any professional framework for what craft was.
The truth is that I didn’t write before fan fiction. I never would have thought that fiction was something that was approachable to me before a fandom. I feel like everything I know about writing, I really learned from fan fiction.
When she describes choosing a STEM setting for her fiction, she is clear that it was not advocacy logic but autobiography. The question of whether she was making a statement about women in science came up repeatedly in interviews, and her answer was consistently the same.
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.
How she wrote it
A fandom conversation turned into a novelThe path from fan fiction to finished novel ran through a literary agent who was also a fan fiction reader. Hazelwood had left herself a breadcrumb in her own author’s note, and Thao Le followed it. What came after that note was less a clean adaptation than a long negotiation between the original text and what a standalone novel required.
I took the fanfiction of mine that I thought was the most reworkable and I sent it to her and then I signed with her.
That was the beginning of what she described as approximately seventy billion more revisions before the book landed at Berkley.
Because the original fic was posted serially, readers were predicting plot beats in real time, and those predictions changed what she wrote. The two-hotel-rooms scene, where Olive arrives at a conference expecting the romance staple of a shared room only to find Adam has booked separately, exists because readers in the comments announced they were expecting exactly the opposite.
I never would have thought to include that if the story hadn’t been fanfiction originally. I was posting it chapter by chapter and I was writing it chapter by chapter. And I remember all the comments saying, ‘They’re going to go to the conference and there’s going to be only one bed.’ So it started as just like a conversation with other people in the fandom, who were at the same time writing fanfiction about other iterations of the same characters.
One scene that did not survive the revision process was a sexual encounter in Adam’s hotel room when Olive goes to end their arrangement. Her editor and agent agreed it should become a kiss instead, and she accepted the reasoning even while mourning the cut.
The fanfiction ho within me was like, ‘I wish we had kept that sex scene.’ But honestly, we talked about it — my editor, my agent, and I — and it was a good call from a story-structure perspective.
The fake-dating setup, in which Olive kisses a stranger to convince her friend she has moved on and then recruits that stranger, Adam Carlsen, to maintain the fiction, gave her a structural gift she used deliberately. She could commit to the trope and put her characters in a position to comment on it from inside the story.
It was so much fun to be able to write an entire book that was based on fake dating and just kinda leaned into the trope and also made fun of it a little bit... Having the characters call out the fact that they were fake dating was just such a great experience. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The science was never just settingShe did not decide to write about scientists because she saw a gap in the market or wanted to make a political point about representation. The SDCC panel where she addressed this directly came after her second STEM romance was already out, meaning the question had followed her across two books.
I think the reason I started writing about scientists is just that it’s my own personal experience. I don’t think that I set out to like make a statement or write something that was, you know, like, I’m doing something different now. It was more of a this is just my lived experience and I’m going to try to like put it on page. [paraphrased from audio]
BookTok’s discovery of the novel was not engineered. By the time she heard about the viral attention, it had already happened without her participation, and her account of learning about it captures both the speed of the spread and her distance from it.
I remember not fully knowing what TikTok even was when my friend was like, ‘Did you know that The Love Hypothesis has 2 million views?’ There were these influencers who found the book and they were amazing. That was just a stroke of luck, being at the right place at the right time.
What she wants us to sit with
Feeling seen in a lab coatThe timing of the novel’s release, September 2021, placed it in a specific cultural moment that she believes shaped how readers received it. She frames what the book did for readers not as a literary achievement but as a practical one.
I think The Love Hypothesis came out at a time that was really rough. It was kind of like the middle of the pandemic and a lot of people needed a little bit of a distraction... I think The Love Hypothesis was part of kind of that wave of books that came out at the right time and had the right type of feel-good content that people were craving. [paraphrased from audio]
When she talks about what reader response has meant to her, she returns to a specific kind of message: women in STEM writing to say that Olive’s world matches theirs. The comment she made on this occasion was about her STEM fiction as a whole, but the weight of it lands squarely on the book that introduced Olive to the world.
There have been so many people who have told me, I read your story about a woman in science and I am a woman in science myself, I really feel seen, or it resonates with me because I have lived a similar experience, or this rings true based on what I know. Hearing all these things is such a blessing. It’s such an honor to know that something that I’ve written speaks to someone who’s in a similar situation.