A Q&A With Podcast Host and Author Becca Freeman
Plus: It's awkward holiday conversational exchange season!!
Per the subject line above: We’ve made it to awkward holiday conversational exchange season, people!
Each year when this time rolls around, I find myself volleying the same fluffy back-and-forth with casual acquaintances — the kind of people to whom you wouldn’t honestly answer the question “So, how are you?” for fear of scaring them — as we stand by the bar at holiday parties or wait outside shivering for Ubers or loiter semi-awkwardly by the coat check stand:
Me: “I can’t believe it’s the holidays already.”
Them: “I know, right? Wasn’t it just Labor Day?”
Me: “I know, right? Time just flies these days.”
Them: “I know, right?”
Me: “Right! I know.”
*Cue not-really-laughing laughter as we both stare off into the void*
Whenever this happens, I think about how cliché I’m being, like commenting on the weather or asking someone if they have any summer travel plans. But the thing is…I kind of actually mean it. Time, for me at least, has only started to whip by faster and become more amorphous as I get older. I often forget exactly how old I am — am I 32 now? Or am I turning 32 next year? — or when we went to that one wedding at that one rustic barn place where they danced to that one Leon Bridges song — was that last year? Or in 2021? (Hint: It was every wedding ever.)
Before someone ships me a LifeAlert necklace, let me assure you — I am of (somewhat) sound mind. But it does occasionally feel like someone is dumping a soft serve machine into my skull, my brain scrambling to process more and more gooey matter. There are a million people who can write smarter and more nuanced pieces about burnout and overstimulation than I ever could (hello, AHP), so I won’t go there, but I am writing this as a reminder to myself and to you: The end of the year is a scramble. The holidays are one long marathon of chit-chat. Take care of yourself and that goopy soft-serve brain.
One way I do this? By curling up with a little treat of a book! And that brings me to today’s interview with Becca Freeman.
Becca hosts a great podcast called Bad on Paper, which you might remember dominated my Spotify Wrapped this year, along with my BFFL Mozart. She also just released her first novel, The Christmas Orphans Club, which is about four friends who have a tradition of celebrating the holidays together every year. This book is like a feel-good holiday movie and a Frasier Fir candle had a baby and then raised it in a snow globe — aka ultimate cozy, fun Christmas vibes.
Here, Becca and I chat writing about platonic instead of romantic love, her author influences, and book recs:
How did you get the idea for your book?
In a lot of ways, I credit my Instagram followers and podcast listeners. So I have always been a really big fan of Christmas movies. And honestly, the worse, the better. Like, the more Vanessa Hudgens you can cram into one movie, the better, in my opinion. Are you royalty of a fake country? I'm watching. And because people knew that I was such a fan of Christmas movies, they started asking me what Christmas books I recommended. And I realized that I didn't have a lot of great recommendations for them — even though I've read a bunch of Christmas books, none really resonated with me. They tend to be really small town, very family oriented. And for me, my mom died when I was a teenager, and I have a very small biological family — that was my experience of Christmas. So I started mulling — if none of the Christmas books that existed resonated with me, what would I want to read? A lot of writing advice is very much “Write the book you would want to read,” and that's how this came to be.
As a big rom-com reader, how did you decide to make the focus of this platonic instead of romantic love?
I always get so excited whenever I find a friendship book — there are so few of them. So I'm a rom-com reader because not very many friend books exist. I find it really fascinating thinking about the ebbs and flows of long-term friendships. I have a group of friends from college who at this point in my life have known me longer than they haven’t. And that comes with a lot of baggage — they know the good, the bad, and the ugly. And that's so interesting, versus rom-coms that focus on the initial meeting — you meet somebody, you have feelings for them, you try to get together, but it doesn't explore a longer period of time in many cases. And because the book is about tradition, I really liked the idea of exploring something that took place over many years because all these people don't have biological families to celebrate Christmas with. It became a book about found family.
The book’s also multi-POV. Was there one perspective that was harder to write?
You know, it's so funny — Hannah is a straight cisgender woman, as am I. And Finn is a cisgender gay man. And I honestly found it slightly easier to write his perspective, only because I feel like a lot of the feedback I got throughout the process was that Hannah was too unlikable. She's holding very tightly to these friendships, and there is a certain immaturity to that, but I think there's also something that I could really identify with, and I really wanted to portray that. So finding the right balance between having her be a character that people wanted to read about and exploring the things that I wanted to explore, while making her sympathetic, was a really, really difficult tightrope to walk. Whereas I think Finn is naturally a little bit more fun and exuberant, and that came easier.
The book also touches on an inflection point that happens when people hit their late 20s and 30s, where friends find partners or start families and become a little busier in their lives, which can often mean drifting apart. Was that drawn from your own life?
Not necessarily. Within my closest group of friends, it's very 50/50 between people who are parents and people who are not and people who are coupled and people who are not. But in some ways, doing the podcast is research in terms of the questions that we get and knowing that this is such an emotional and angst-ridden time for people. You start to see everyone else leaving the dance floor, or your friends are moving away for jobs, and you feel a pull between wanting things to go back to how they were and needing to, in some ways, grow up. So that's really what this group is struggling with — figuring out how they grow up without growing apart.
Had you ever written fiction before you started writing this book?
For the most part, no, not at all. In early 2020, I started working on the first season of RomComPods with my co-creator, Rachael King. It was kind of a pandemic hobby: We wrote four audio fiction podcasts, which are like a radio play, or like a TV show, but without the visuals. So writing RomComPods was a crash course in telling a story because we follow the same structural three-act plot beats that you would have in a book. And so that was my training ground. But there was more of a safety net — I had a co-writer, so when things got hard, I had somebody else to help brainstorm. And it was much shorter. But outside of that, it was truly just reading.
What was your writing process like?
I started writing the book in December 2020. I took a full year to write the first draft — I was also working as a marketing consultant, and I had a full client load there. We did two seasons of writing, directing, and producing RomComPods during that same year, and then I had Bad on Paper, my weekly podcast, as well. So the book was very much a side project. During that year, there were full months I didn't work on it. I set the goal that I wanted to finish it by the end of the year and held really tightly to that, partly because I said it was one of my resolutions on the podcast. That was the part that I liked the least — with the first draft process, it's really hard to keep coming back, especially when it's in this nascent stage where everything feels bad and it's not living up to the idea in your head.
I finished that at the end of 2021, and then I spent the first half of 2022 revising it. And I personally liked that part a lot better — you can constantly see the book getting better as you go. So instead of just vomiting out more crap, you're like, “Oh, it's actually improving!” And then at the end of my third draft, kind of mid-year, I sent the book to a handful of beta readers for feedback and I also sent it to my now-agent — I was very, very lucky that my agent found me through my podcast. We took the book out on submission in September of 2022. Selling the book in October 2022 and having it come out in September 2023 is truly warp-speed for publishing. Once we actually sold the book, things moved very, very quickly.
Who are some writers who influenced you while writing this book?
For me, Emily Henry is always the North Star. I think her writing is so best-in-class in the rom-com genre. Her writing is so funny, it's so specific. And I reread most of her books as I was writing mine as an example of what I wanted it to be. And I also read a lot of Christmas books to see what other people in this genre were doing. Because even though, [due to] my own personal circumstances, I couldn't relate to them, I also wanted to know what readers were expecting in this genre and what was already out there.
Do you have a favorite Christmas book?
Oh my gosh, yes. My absolute favorite Christmas book is One Day in December by Josie Silver. It's so fantastic. And it's not overly Christmas-y either. The book is about a woman who has a love-at-first sight experience and spots this man through a bus window and is convinced this is the person for her, only to have him turn up in her life two years later as her best friend's new boyfriend.
What are some other books you’d recommend to readers right now?
The first one is The Good Part by Sophie Cousens. It’s about a messy 20-something who wishes to fast forward to “the good part” in her life only to have that wish granted, and she wakes up in her life as a 40-something having no idea who her husband is or who her children are, or how she got there. It’s a really fun time travel book, but also has the message of you’re right where you need to be. I found it really, really heartening to read, and I think no matter what age you are or circumstances you're dealing with, it's a very warm hug of a book.
And then the second book that I can't stop recommending is called Meet the Benedettos by Katie Cotugno. It’s pitched as Keeping Up With the Kardashians meets Pride and Prejudice, and basically on that pitch alone, I was sold. It’s completely hilarious.
What about fellow debut authors — any books you’d recommend?
Adelaide by Genevieve Wheeler is absolutely incredible. It’s about a woman who’s in a relationship with a guy who just maybe doesn't love her enough, and she's really giving her all to this relationship. It’s very reminiscent of relationships that I had in my 20s, so I found it very cathartic and relatable.
And then I also loved You, Again by Kate Goldbeck, which came out in early September and is pitched as a gender-swapped version of When Harry Met Sally. My short pitch for it is Emily Henry, but for bad people.
And you’re writing a second book. Can you tell us a bit about that?
It’s based on the Taylor Swift song “‘Tis the Damn Season.” And it's about two high school sweethearts who are both too big for a small town. She wants to be a famous actress, he wants to be the president. And fast forward to today, she actually is a famous actress while he's still trying to find his path, and they reunite when she comes back for Christmas and decide to have a fling.
A million thanks to Becca, and a million thanks to YOU, for reading!
xo Mimi