Things We Never Got Over
Things We Never Got Over
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Lucy Score on Things We Never Got Over
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A grumpy hero, a runaway bride, and grief she didn’t see comingScore had a clear commercial premise in hand before she sat down: an opposites-attract romance set in a rough-edged Virginia town called Knockemout. What she did not have was any warning that the book’s true subject was about to arrive from outside the manuscript entirely. The sudden death of a close friend, just before serious drafting began, broke the project open in a way no outline could have prepared her for.
When I started writing that book, I didn’t know what it was about. I was like, ‘Okay, it’s this grumpy hero and this opposites attract heroine who shows up in town.’ I thought that’s what the story was about, but right before I started with writing, one of my dear friends passed away very suddenly, and I struggled writing the book. I kept trying to just chip away at it, and something wasn’t working. Eventually I realized I was writing through my own grief, and once I accepted that, then the story really came together.
The book she thought she was writing became, without her permission, the book she needed to write. That shift from genre exercise to grief work is the reason the novel landed differently than her previous two dozen titles.
Missing her deadline looked, at the time, like a professional failure. Looking back from a book that reached the New York Times bestseller list, Score reframed it as the condition that made the book possible at all.
I’m really really happy that I actually couldn’t publish it when I was planning it. The timing was divine. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Writing a trilogy she mistook for a standaloneScore had more than two dozen self-published novels behind her when she started this book, so the structural misjudgment she made was not one of inexperience. She simply could not see, while inside the drafting, that the world she was building had enough people and enough story to carry three full books.
When I wrote Things We Never Got Over, that was a three-book series, but when I was writing it, I thought it was just a standalone and that made the writing a lot more difficult. It was painful. Learned some lessons. [paraphrased from audio]
The difficulty she describes was not writer’s block in the conventional sense. She was fighting the book’s actual architecture without knowing what that architecture was. Once the grief found its place on the page, the series shape came into focus alongside it.
What she wants us to sit with
The bravery underneath the rom-comScore is deliberate about separating the book’s surface from its argument. The genre packaging is intact: there is a love story, there is humor, there is a happily-ever-after. What she wants readers to carry out is the question the love story is actually asking.
Things is still a rom com, it’s still a love story, but underneath it is a theme of how brave it is to love someone when you know you’re gonna lose them.
That question did not stay contained to the first book. Score extended it across all three Knockemout novels, which follow different couples inside the same community, and she saw it accumulate into something that felt to her like a collective argument.
The series just maintained this theme of how much bravery it takes to love someone after you’ve been hurt or after you’ve lost someone special. That’s what that series was really saying to me.
Score wrote the book while actively grieving, which means she reached the theme through personal necessity before she could name it as craft. When the book found readers who were grieving at the same moment, she recognized something she could not have engineered.
It ended up being a story that other people needed at that same moment. And I think there was just like this magic kind of alchemy in that. I could never replicate it, could never set out to follow that same path. [paraphrased from audio]