Young Sheldon and Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage star Raegan Revord has added author to their resume with the debut YA novel Rules For Fake Girlfriends now out in bookstores.
The story follows Avery Blackwell, a young rom-com connoisseur who experiences her own love story when she decides to postpone her plans to attend Columbia University as a pre-med student and travel to Brighton in England for freshman year at her late mother’s alma mater. She makes the decision when prompted by a postcard from her mom that leads to a scavenger hunt on campus. On the train to school, Avery meets Charlie, who asks her for a fake-dating favor to make Charlie’s ex jealous. Charlie also agrees to help Avery with the scavenger hunt.
“There’s a part of me in the very beginning that [thought], ‘What if it’s enemies to lovers [and] fake dating?’ One day, I will write that,” Revord told Deadline ahead of the book’s publication. “I [thought], ‘That might be a bit too much with the scavenger hunt for this book. Let’s have them like each other.’ The book does make fun of other tropes. It was fun to be able to incorporate that and contradict them at the same time. The chapter headings say one rom-com trope, and then the chapter [unpacks how] ‘Well, this is not how real life works.’”
Revord worked on the novel while shooting Young Sheldon, and they traveled to England twice, in addition to using a lot of Google Maps, to get a sense of Brighton. In the below interview, Revord breaks down their inspiration for the novel, including references to of some well-known book-to-screen romance adaptations like To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before and Heartstopper, how she arrived at the ending and more.
DEADLINE: You’ve said before that a close friend of yours inspired this story. Could you talk more about that and how it transferred into the book?
RAEGAN REVORD: The main inciting incident in Rules [for Fake Girlfriends] is that the main character, Avery’s mom, passes away, and they had a tense relationship. They were not similar people. Avery is the very much OCD, straight A’s, stick to the book, rule-follower person. And then her mom is very whimsical, loves Tarot, is very much like, do whatever you want, go with the flow. So Avery never really felt connected with her mom, and then in my personal life, that’s not how I was with my friend. We were really close, but my friend, who I had known for a while, told me very suddenly that she had a heart issue, and it could potentially later on become a bigger thing. That was very shocking to hear, because obviously, I didn’t know that, and she’d always seemed really healthy. I was very surprised by this, and then it made me start to think about how that news could impact other relationships. And I’d already had the idea for Avery. I didn’t really have any, plot or anything to put her anywhere, but I had this idea for a strenuous mother-daughter relationship that kickstarts something. So I put Avery in that mother-daughter situation and then started brainstorming, really. And here we are.
DEADLINE: It started with the mother-daughter relationship. It’s also a rom-com. How did you want to balance Avery going to Brighton, meeting Charlie, meeting her friends, and having her life there while it’s all because of the scavenger hunt?
REVORD: My editor really had to keep me on track because I love the romance stuff so much. I’m such a hopeless romantic myself. If you read the dedication, you can tell. I really wanted to just write the romance part of the book. And my editor [said], “No, there’s this whole thing going on. You gotta remember this.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, you’re so right.” So I kept having to remember to balance it in the first place, but I think what’s so fascinating about having this scavenger hunt and the romance plot interweave is [that] the scavenger hunt — if you’ve read the book, you know — the scavenger hunt follows Avery’s parents’ romance. It’s their summer fling turned serious relationship and shows their love story, and then Avery is living her own love story and it’s her first time she’s ever dated anyone. It was really interesting to me to be able to interweave that because Avery gets to learn about this history of her parents that she was never told and that she never really knew. It helps her connect with her mom, and she learns that she is more like her mom than she thought. It was really interesting to me that those two stories followed each other even though they were separated by 20 years.
DEADLINE: There’s another moment where I picked up on the inspiration of your friend’s story with another character. Was that purposeful, or was that separate from the whole thing?
REVORD: It definitely was purposeful. Whenever I’m saying the inspiration for the book, I always refer to the mom and Avery’s relationship. That’s not a spoiler. It’s the reason the book happens, you find out on like the second page. Whenever I talk about the inspiration, that is true, that that did inspire Avery and her mom’s relationship, but a lot of that story with my friend also goes into Avery and Charlie’s relationship because a mother-daughter relationship is so different than say, a peer, same age relationship. Even though it’s different where Avery and Charlie were dating, and the person [that inspired the plot] was just my friend, that’s still that peer mentality. So it is a different relationship, and it’s a different mentality that you see. It definitely did play a part. I had a good reaction to my friend. I didn’t leave her in the dust. I was very supportive, and I was there, but [I definitely felt] Avery’s shock.
DEADLINE: Avery doesn’t finish the scavenger hunt. How does that lend itself to the ending?
REVORD: Fun fact, in the earlier versions, she did finish the scavenger hunt. That got changed pretty close to finishing the book. I did not start off thinking she wasn’t gonna finish the scavenger hunt, and then I was talking with my editor, and we [both agreed that] she shouldn’t finish the scavenger hunt. I personally love that there is a piece of Halle somewhere in the world and no one knows who has it, we can’t find it, and she’s just out there. I love that, because I feel like that’s what Halle would want, and that’s something that Avery would want. Avery would want her mom’s art to still be out there and still be impacting the world. I really liked that, but the scavenger hunt in itself was such a complicated thing to conjure up and stay on top of and remember “Okay, this hint goes here.” But I love that it doesn’t finish. I think it works. I think it also helps Avery grow because her whole reason for going to Brighton was to do the scavenger hunt and to connect with her mom. But then she learns that she doesn’t need the scavenger hunt to connect with her mom. She has her memories, and even just being in Brighton, not even following the scavenger hunt, going to her mom’s college and walking the streets that her mom went and going to get coffee where her mom went, just that alone is helping her connect with her mom. Not finishing the scavenger hunt frees her from having to stay tied to, “This is the only way I can learn about my mom.”
DEADLINE: You reference many rom-coms in the book including some more recent ones like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Heartstopper and Red, White and Royal Blue. Could you talk more about how they inspired certain aspects of your book?
REVORD: I would say Heartstopper was my biggest inspiration. Not even just in the rom-com or romance aspect of it, but just in the entire book. Both in the show and the book, there’s a very profound found family aspect to it. They both have this big friend group, and they all love each other. I’m such a found family person myself. Whenever I first read and watched Heartstopper, that really stood out to me. One thing I love so much about Heartstopper is the way the portrayal of queer love in it is so innocent.
Whenever I’ve had people reference a queer piece of media, oftentimes Glee is the first thing that comes up, which, no hate to Glee. I haven’t seen it, but that is what gets referenced. Heartstopper just portrays it — especially as a teenager growing up in modern times — it portrays queer love so well, and it’s just so beautifully done. It covers so many topics that I think are so important to me and to other teenagers. After reading Heartstopper, I always wanted to write something like that. Whenever I started doing the rom-com, I [thought], “I have to incorporate these things that are so important to me and that I love.”
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To All the Boys – fake dating, obviously. It’s so good. All of them are so good, and I love it. But the biggest obvious takeaway from To All the Boys is the fake dating. I’m a sucker for fake dating. How can you not love it? The tension, it’s so amazing. The fake flirtiness, when your main character is like, “Was that real? What happened there?”
DEADLINE: Did you have input on the cover? The little leaf and heart remind me of Heartstopper, too. Was that intentional?
DEADLINE: It’s not. The leaf is me loving fall. Originally, we went through a bunch of different possible cover designs, and one that we were gonna do was something similar, but more like, whenever you picture a rom-com book, like Red, White and Royal Blue, how it’s fully drawn out, and you see the characters and everything. It was gonna be something a bit more like that, where you see like fall leaves on a cobblestone road and then their shoes, or them holding hands. So that was the little fallen leaves kind of thing. And then the heart, romance, of course. But I’m going to now start saying that it’s because of Heartstopper.
DEADLINE: Did you approach the romance element as wanting to infuse it with something new? What makes yours different?
REVORD: My favorite thing is — I feel like in every every rom com — the main character, especially if it’s a college[-set] one, the main character is going to school and gets the nicest dorm room, but they’re broke. And I’m like, “Babe, you wouldn’t have this huge apartment,” especially in places like New York or London. There’s just not that room. One of the early early chapters — the fourth one — the chapter heading is “The heroine is broke, but has the nicest apartment.” And then in the chapter, it’s Avery decorating the apartment and hiding mold spots. She’s dealing with a leaky faucet. I was like, this is such a college experience, where you put a rug over a patch of mold in the corner, like, “Let me just put this here real quick.” That was so much fun. I even asked my friends who have been to college “What were your dorm rooms like? What did you hate about them?” One of them even said their window wouldn’t shut all the way. So I almost put that in, but that felt too inconvenient. I was like, “Poor Avery,” because apartment is falling apart enough. Let’s give her a window that works.
DEADLINE: You’re a part of the Hello Sunshine Collective. Have you talked with them at all about possibly adapting the book?
REVORD: I haven’t talked with them about making it into a movie or adapting it or anything.
However that is a hope of mine. I’m talking with people right now. We’re about to start taking it out and doing meetings, which I’m very excited for. I’m a very cinematic person. And I see things that I write very cinematically. I think that’s because I come from film and acting and stuff. I already have that in my brain. Writing it, I saw it as the movie, but now I’m like, “Is this possible? Could it happen?” I know as much as you guys do, but I’m just fingers crossed over here, because I want to go film a movie in England.
DEADLINE: Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage, Season 2 is coming out soon. Can you tease anything for Missy and your role this season?
REVORD: I actually just finished filming [an episode] on Tuesday. What I can tell you about this episode — I don’t know the full season arc or anything, they tell me as the episodes come — but for the episode I was just in, you get to see the gang back together. Zoe’s in it, Pastor Jeff is in it, It’s a lot of fun. There’s some angst to it. There’s some tension. I loved it. It was great. I missed being with everyone.
