Looking for your next WLW read? We have the perfect summer adventure for you: a riotous lesbian gallivant through love and loss in a dazzling Florida retirement home. What’s not to love? Dive into the BTS writing process that brought your new favourite retirement resort and its wonderful characters to life, in this Q&A with Nonchalant’s Lauren Hurrell and author Grace Flahive on their new novel, Palm Meridian.
First up, the setting, aesthetic, vibes and the characters at Palm Meridian Retirement Resort are sizzling with energy. Your writing beautifully captures every person and their world in vibrant detail. Was there anything or a place in particular that inspired this setting for your novel? Is it based on somewhere real?
Thank you so much! The inspiration for the resort came from an unlikely place (or a very obvious one, depending how you think about it!) One winter when I was five, my family and I escaped the sub-zero temperatures of Canada to go on holiday in Florida, and we stayed at a Disney World resort called All Star Music – a really camp, really colourful place (picture sun-drenched, Technicolor 90s design, with bongos and xylophones three stories tall).
When I knew I wanted to set a novel in Florida, this felt like the perfect basis for a larger-than-life retirement resort. I took my nostalgia for that time and that place, and the way that memory had smudged it a bit, and it helped me create this fictional place that feels slightly surreal. Palm Meridian ended up being set in 2067, exactly 70 years after I first set foot in Florida on that first family trip!
In your own words, how would you characterise this story and what it’s about?
To me, Palm Meridian is about how completely absurd it is that we’re alive at all! And the equal absurdity that we’ll die someday. What a ridiculous situation to be in! By choosing to focus on a character on the last day of her life, I was able to put things in starkest relief – a person and her community grieving deeply, while also sipping espresso martinis and snogging each other. They’re doing their best to grapple with mortality.
These extremes for me – heartbreak and joy – are at the centre of the story. As the hours count down on Hannah’s final day, she looks back on the kaleidoscopic life she’s lived and recalls the kind of moments that you truly would not forget, even on your deathbed. Some of these are the best experiences of her life – like meeting the love of her life, over shrimp, in a Manhattan snowstorm – and some of these are the worst – I won’t give spoilers! All of these defining moments, whether heartbreaking or joyful, are times when Hannah felt her most alive.
“If you took La Camionera or Goldie Saloon on a Saturday night, and aged everyone up to 80, soaked it all in tequila and love and grief and a bit of climate apocalypse, and what would that look like?
There is some wonderful queer yearning in this story, elapsing over decades. Why did the futuristic, flashback-style structure feel like the best way to tell this story? What did you want the reader to feel, and were there any key influences that inspired this?
I had so much fun writing a story with so much sapphic yearning! In early drafts, I made some structural decisions that I hope have helped crank that yearning up as high as it can go. Taking a bit of inspiration from stories like The Notebook, I wanted that emotional pay-off of seeing the same character at both ends of a long life, and of seeing a love that’s endured over all those years.
I knew I’d need to grapple with several decades to do this, but I didn’t want to cast the story backwards from our present (both because I didn’t feel equipped to write historical fiction, and because telling a queer love story in our past would require different parameters). What ended up happening was a kind of thought experiment – what will me and my friends, and the rest of our generation, be up to forty-something years from now? If you took La Camionera or Goldie Saloon on a Saturday night, and aged everyone up to 80, soaked it all in tequila and love and grief and a bit of climate apocalypse, and what would that look like?
Without giving too much away, are there any characters you really root for besides Hannah, and why?
Definitely Esme. She’s the campest, most colourful friend in the friend group, and she lives her life however she pleases, while also being extremely kind and caring to everyone around her. In so many ways, she embodies the whole resort.
I also have to give a shout-out to small Eileen – I think she’s the funniest person in the story!
If you could have anyone we know in the real world, from a popstar to a politician, orto someone you know, who would you add to the Palm Meridian whirlwind?
This is the best question ever. I have a long list of iconic queer people I would love to see sitting poolside at Palm Meridian, so it’s hard to pick just one, but I think it’s got to be Jodie Foster. She’d fit in so perfectly – I can see her sitting in a lawn chair, sleeves cut off, with her muscled Nyad bod all tanned, smoking a cigarette. Perfect sapphic cool.
(When I first read this question, a very different image popped into my mind automatically – Jojo Siwa, age 75, doing the Karma dance by a cluster of palms. She’d still be giving it her all decades later!)
Perhaps by then we’ll have a better idea of what’s happening between her and Chris! Was there a favourite part of the story for you to write, where it felt easy or most exciting to get words on the page?
Without giving anything away – the ending! I knew from my first draft how I wanted the last few pages to go, and it was one of those rare writing moments that felt like ‘Yes! That’s it!’ Then I had the fun task of working backwards and thinking, ‘Okay, if that’s how it ends, then how did we get there?’ When it came to actually writing the text of that ending, I knew I had to pick and place each word and image perfectly, to achieve the effect I had in my mind.
What were your survival techniques in writing an entire novel?
Writing a novel always involves a bit of amnesia – I find when I start at the beginning again, I always forget how difficult that climb has just been! But there are two survival techniques that have helped me. The first (and it took me a long time to figure out) is that I have to be excited about what I’m writing. This isn’t just for my own morale, but for practical, story reasons – if I’m not excited to write a scene or a chapter, it usually means I haven’t found the right way ‘in’ yet.
I think this is why first drafts can always feel particularly dismal to write – because you haven’t found the right way into anything. Second drafts are much more encouraging – you know more, so you can do more, and things start to make sense and to open up. So looking for the exciting, the fun, and the interesting is my first survival technique.
The second one is setting time boundaries. I’ll commit to writing for a set period of time, like three hours, and I’ll give myself permission to potentially write zero words in that time. If need be, it can just be three hours of sitting and staring off into space in front of my laptop! But inevitably, after 20 minutes or 45 minutes, my mind settles and words start to come. And the more regularly I commit to those dedicated sessions, the quicker those words always start to come.
Do you have any significant creative influences or stories you take influence from? Are there any books or authors you would suggest as must-reads to Nonchalant readers?
I think in a lot of ways, Palm Meridian has been influenced by film as much as fiction – more than anything I’ve written before, it was very visual and cinematic in my head. As I’d roll through a scene, I’d almost picture my POV like a camera moving between the characters, and then swooping high up above the lawns of the resort.
Speaking again of endings, there are so many gut-punching film endings whose emotional ‘Oh my god’ factor I aspire to in my storytelling – like the last scene of Carol, or the final frames of Moonlight, to give two wonderfully queer examples! I love how the right ending to a story can impact everything that came before it, and when I watch a good film, I’m always taking mental notes.
On the books side, there are too many incredible stories and authors to possibly name, but the last few books that truly blew me away were Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, Death Valley by Melissa Broder, and Isaac by Curtis Garner.
Isaac is next on my reading list! What has been the most exciting part or moment of bringing Palm Meridian to the world so far?
When my agents and I were selling Palm Meridian, I found myself in the extremely fortunate position that three publishers in the UK and three publishers in the US were interested in the book – genuinely a dream come true scenario I had never foreseen for my little book about septuagenarian lesbians! The auction took place over one week, and I was checking my email practically every few minutes, with bated breath. After a few rounds, the final offers were set to come in on a Thursday at the end of the working day.
At 5pm, offers came in from the UK, and we accepted with the brilliant Dialogue Books! My wife and I celebrated on the spot, going out to an early dinner at a restaurant nearby. After that, we still had a couple of hours to wait until the end of the day in the US. We went to the pub next door and nursed pints, me feeling like I was going to be sick with anticipation, waiting for my phone to buzz with a new email.
Almost at 10pm on the dot, final offers came in from the US – I read the message and immediately burst into tears. I’d found a home with Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader Press! I was ugly crying in a sports pub with Justin Timberlake playing in the background, and it was a moment I’d dreamed of my whole life.
Is there anything exciting on the horizon you’re looking forward to that you would like to share about Palm Meridian or all things writing?
There’s some really exciting Palm Meridian-related news that I’m not able to share yet, but I’m looking forward to being able to share it soon, hopefully! Keep your eyes peeled on my Instagram: @graceflahivewrites
Palm Meridian by Grace Flahive comes out on 29th May in the UK and 10th June in the US. You can grab your own copy via Bookshop! Curious for more book stuff on Nonchalant? Explore our other queer book reviews.
Nonchalant x
Lauren is a writer and editor based in Peckham, covering all things queer culture, books, travel, arts and lifestyle, fashion and creativity. She was previously a features editor at New Statesman Media Group and now works freelance and part-time hoping she may never work 9-5 ever again.
