McQuiston is unabashedly a Very Online person, and she’s continued to expand the canon around Red, White & Royal Blue, making expertly crafted playlists for key characters publicly available on Spotify, regularly reposting fan art, and even publishing a love letter “written” by one of her main characters this past Christmas. The whole phenomenon is impossible to think about “without your brain exploding,” the author says - though she’s hardly sat idly by as the book amassed its cult following. The book also cultivated a fandom: Dozens of Tumblr accounts are dedicated to the novel’s protagonists, Alex and Henry the #RWRB hashtag on TikTok has over 36 million views fan fiction sites like AO3 and Wattpad are flooded with posts about the two leading men. But unlike with the vast majority of releases, its initial hype didn’t die out: the book has sat on the New York Times bestseller list for over two months of 2021 so far, two years after publication. Finally she settled on writing a romance - and boy, are her fans glad she did. “I bought stuff to make soap, I was gonna make lip balms, I was gonna make candles, I got into lap loom weaving for a minute, I was gonna have an aquarium,” she says. Sending it to press was less of a lifetime wish-fulfillment and more of a happy accident: the whole thing came about after a 2015 breakup, when McQuiston was trying one identity crisis-fueled hobby after another. The stakes were a lot lower back in May 2019, when she released her debut novel Red, White & Royal Blue - an unlikely love story between the prince of England and the son of the first woman president. “That's when you start to really get freaked out.” “It’s definitely a little bit of a mindf*ck no matter what expectations you have for your second book, especially when people assign the word ‘hype’ to you,” McQuiston tells me.

But given the unending excitement for its publication earlier this month, you’d think it was her twenty-second.

Pithy and energetic, she almost seems like an amalgamation of the protagonist and love interest from her brand new novel, One Last Stop.Ī sapphic romance about an unmoored 23-year-old who falls for an immortal, subway-bound woman from the 1970s, One Last Stop is only McQuiston’s second book. When the bestselling romance author arrives at our meeting spot in Queens on a sunny 75-degree day, she’s toting two cups of coconut fruit ice from a nearby stand.Īs we chat, McQuiston riffs at a fast clip with animated hand gestures, weaving in self-deprecating asides and pop culture references.

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