When the concept for her upcoming novel “Expiration Dates” started percolating in her head, creator Rebecca Serle nervous at first that the idea was “gimmicky.”
“There was something missing,” she tells Variety over the cellphone, two weeks earlier than the ebook’s March 19 launch. The premise — based mostly on the query, “What if a woman got slips of paper that told her how long she’d spend in a relationship?” — felt prefer it verged on triteness. But the story developed past that preliminary worry when Serle discovered the ebook’s midpoint, a significant revelation that raises the stakes for its protagonist, Daphne, and introduces a sobering depth to an in any other case lighthearted idea.
“All of my books through ‘Expiration Dates’ have some kind of midway twist,” she says. “I discovered what that was, and then I started writing.”
Over the previous a number of years, Serle has constructed a popularity as a author of feminine characters whose private transformations are precipitated by small however vital hints of magic embedded within the worlds they inhabit. “In Five Years” — which spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller checklist — focuses on Dannie, who wakes up 5 years into the longer term and is all of a sudden confronted with the confusion of with the ability to perceive the multivariable outcomes of 1’s previous selections. In “One Italian Summer,” protagonist Katy travels to Positano, Italy, the place she meets a youthful model of her just lately deceased mom and is pressured to recalibrate her sense of their previous relationship.
Similarly, “Expiration Dates” builds on that signature, with the component of magical realism remoted to the notes that Daphne Bell — a 33-year-old movie producer’s assistant dwelling in Los Angeles — receives each time she’s about to go on a date with a love curiosity. The notes checklist stated love curiosity’s identify and the length of time the connection (or dalliance) will final. When Daphne receives a notice with a reputation and no finish date, she faces the fact of seeing a long-held need for a dedicated relationship come to fruition, whereas additionally questioning the mechanism that has influenced all the selections she’s made in her love life to date.
Serle says that she sees magic primarily as a option to “expedite the truth” of her novel.
“This is a story about the search for love, and what it means to be looking, and the deep truths not only about other people that we encounter when we’re going through that, but also ourselves,” she says. “The process of looking for a partner is continually having to be honest with yourself, with other people, with your ideas of what you want.” The notes, then, operate not solely as tangible markers by which Daphne can mark her personal set of romantic experiences, but in addition as litmus checks which push her to confront her personal beliefs about their veracity and the ability that they play in her life.
Which, in the long run, indicators an authorial preoccupation that Serle factors out is a mirrored image of her personal private quandaries.
“The essential question of the human experience and existence that I am most interested in, as Rebecca is the dialogue between fate and free will,” she says. “This idea of, is our fate predetermined? Is it coming no matter what we do? Or do we have control over it?”
It’s an existential musing that has resonated with readers and allowed Serle to amass a rising following — one which extends past print. Her 2014 younger grownup novel “Famous in Love” was become a Freeform present starring Bella Thorne, whereas 2010’s “When You Were Mine” ultimately turned Hulu film “Rosaline,” starring Kaitlyn Dever. The remainder of her initiatives, Serle says, are in “active development.” New Line acquired the rights to “In Five Years” in 2022, whereas Paramount owns movie rights to “One Italian Summer.”
“I think that one is going to be really fun,” she says of the potential “One Italian Summer” film. “I’m excited to go back to Positano.”
As for “Expiration Dates,” Serle says she and her staff are nonetheless within the optioning course of. But within the meantime, she’s primed to satisfy readers and promote her novel on an intensive ebook tour, kicking off with Tuesday’s occasion at The Strand in New York City and ending in Brentwood, Calif., on April 2.
“I really hope that this book speaks to people who are still searching and makes them feel less alone,” she says. “I was single for a really long time. I didn’t meet my husband until I was almost 36, and I just always remember wanting to know. If I could know that that person was out there for me, if I could know how this story ended, I felt like I could be present in the life that I was leading now.”
“Of course there’s no way to know,” she provides. “We aren’t Daphne. But as much as we can, being able to trust the timing of our lives, to know that even if maybe there isn’t a whole universal plan, there’s a rhyme and a reason to why things are happening.”