Welcome back to a new installment of Bookmarked, a series in which our favorite authors, readers, and otherwise bookish people share their best book recommendations and reading rituals.

Romance as a genre is definitely having a moment right now, and today, I’m featuring someone in the space that we all need to know. Yulin Kuang is the talented director, screenwriter, and debut romance author of How to End A Love Story, which is out today. Besides writing an entire novel, Yulin is booked and busy these days, having written the screen adaptations for not just one but *two* of Emily Henry’s extremely popular romance books. Whew!

In today’s Bookmarked, Yulin shares with us what it was like to adapt the cult favorite EmHen novels for the screen, the best tea to sip while reading a book, an under-the-radar romance that reminds her of Bridget Jones, and much more. We also geek out about fan fiction a little. If you know, you know. :)

I hope you enjoy it! Have thoughts on one of her recs, or one of your own to share? Would love to hear in the comments. –Alisha

Get to Know Yulin Kuang, Author of the New Romance Novel, “How to End A Love Story”

Hi, Yulin! Please give us a little teaser about what your new book is about.

How to End a Love Story is about a novelist and a screenwriter who are linked by a shared tragedy in their past, and what happens when they meet again 13 years later in a TV writers room.

What inspired it?

I wanted a vehicle to explore my feelings on the art of adaptation and to see what kind of original story I would tell if I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to tell it first.

Where did you start in your writing process - i.e. did you have the overall seed of the plot, the characters, and/or the setting in your head first?

I started with characters and setting—I knew I wanted to write about a novelist and a screenwriter, and I knew their archetypes in high school would be the overachieving, editor-in-chief of the school paper and the class president/homecoming king. The setting of a TV writers room felt like a natural fit to have these characters in forced proximity.

You are, of course, a big romance fan, and it’s your life’s work. What brought you into the romance genre? What’s in your romance genre “canon,” be it books or movies?

I’ve always been drawn to art with a romantic bent to it, in every medium. I first explored this thematic vein through fanfiction and then in seventh grade, I was handed the historical romance novel, Halfway to Heaven by Susan Wiggs. It awakened something in me that I forced into  dormancy until 2016, when I was looking for some escapist literature and remembered how I felt with that first one. I decided to try Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas, and I’ve been an avid romance reader since. 

With regard to movies, the deeper cuts to get to know my taste would be:

Down with Love (2003, dir. Peyton Reed, screenplay by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake)

Hors de Prix (2006, English title: Priceless, dir. Pierre Salvadori, screenplay by Pierre Salvadori and Benoît Graffin)

Far From the Madding Crowd (2015, dir. Thomas Vinterberg, screenplay by David Nicholls, based on the 1874 novel by Thomas Hardy)

But of course I also love the classics—I named my car after Nora Ephron and I’ve sought out every non-fiction book she’s written. You’ve Got Mail is my favorite Nora, though I have a soft spot for her Bewitched reboot.

You’re currently adapting and directing not one but two of Emily Henry’s novels into films! Please tell us everything. What has that process been like?! How did you two first connect? What does the creative process look like when you are working with a well-beloved book and its author?

I never had the chance to discover Emily Henry’s work organically in the wild. People We Meet On Vacation was sent to me for consideration to adapt before publication, and I raised my hand to pitch on it after reading and loving the manuscript. 

I’ve been joking to her that our respective industries cast us in a professional marriage of convenience, and one of the joys of working with Emily has been getting to know the voice of the author behind the books everyone loves so much.

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Both of the EmHen adaptations I’m working on are in the feature space, so the writing has been a bit solitary compared to the TV writers room experience that I portray in How to End a Love Story. It’s a lot of me sitting at my laptop staring into space, and occasionally texting Emily things like, What is Poppy’s middle name? We check in with every official studio draft and it’s so helpful to have an author like Emily to parse studio notes with, as she has such a deep understanding of her own characters and why she made the choices she did in the source material.

That said, I believe the primary purpose of adaptation is to bring new audiences to the source material, rather than pleasing the die-hard book fans. This means that as the adapting filmmaker, my loyalty bends more towards the screen adaptation than the source material. I look at the films as a way to convey what I love best about the books. Adaptation done well always feels more like a love letter than a copyist echo to me.

You mentioned in a past interview that you’ve been a journal keeper since you were very young. It’s a habit many of our readers want to get into. Do you have any advice for wannabe journalers?

I journaled extensively between ages 8-18, then took a lengthy break before resuming at age 26. The diary entries written in adulthood all begin the same way - with the date, and then the sentence, “I am sitting in ______” so I can log the room where I’m writing from, and then I go wherever my inner monologue takes me from there. I find journaling useful to get the voices in my head out before starting my professional work for the day. My journals are also a good reference for when I want to convey a story beat in a way that feels emotionally true—it helps to see how I captured a feeling in my own words, when I was living through it.

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You wrote fanfiction back in the day and I, too, (regrettable) grew up on the Fanfiction.net site. What were your first fanfiction fandoms?

Harry Potter, and more specifically Marauders-era Lily/James fic. I dabbled in some Harry/Ginny one-shots, and I was just starting to read a lot more Draco/Ginny when I fell off (went to college and started focusing on life IRL.) I also read some Phantom of the Opera, West Wing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and JAG fic back in the day, I’m pretty sure.

Anything else you’d like to share about HOW TO END A LOVE STORY?

There are extra credit assignments for the reader baked into the text. The Target special edition includes a numerical page guide to finding them, in the back.

Yulin’s Reading Rituals

What does your reading routine or ritual look like?

I read in bed, usually at night. I used to read on my iPad, but I was told that was “bad for me” so now I read on a Kindle. I prefer getting lost in a book and reading it in as few sittings as possible. I juggle books occasionally, but I try not to take on too many.

What's your ideal/dream reading setup?

Ideally, I would like to be in a small cottage with a large windowed seating nook, somewhere on a Scottish island where I can walk to a cafe nearby if I need sustenance. But it’s probably gently raining against the glass pane right now in my ideal scenario, so I’ll have to make do with what’s in the cottage kitchen, which is miraculously stocked with my favorite tea (Good Earth’s Sweet & Spicy) and homemade kettle corn that my husband made recently enough that it’s still warm. And maybe some cotton candy grapes. Someone please make me a candle that captures this feeling (you can leave out the cotton candy grapes.) If it’s relevant to your scent profile research, my signature perfume of choice is Gris Charnel by BDK.

What’s your favorite indie bookstore?

I’m a big fan of The Novel Neighbor in St. Louis, MO, even though I have yet to set foot in it, because my dear friend Kassie King works there, and her taste is immaculate.

How and where do you discover new books to read?

I like the ‘Read More Romance’ page on Sarah MacLean’s official author website, where she lists her romance recommendations in no particular order. I was blindly making my way through the backlists of historical romance heavy hitters (I began with Susan Wiggs and Sherry Thomas, then discovered Mary Balogh and Courtney Milan, which ultimately led me to Sarah MacLean) before I found MacLean, and her recs page sent me down so many wonderful rabbit holes. Her podcast Fated Mates (which Sarah hosts alongside romance critic Jen Prokop) is another great source of recommendations for me.

In my downtime I also like to read celebrity memoirs and literary biographies—I especially enjoy when a memoir is read by the author, because I like to hear the memory in their voices. The podcast Celebrity Memoir Book Club, hosted by Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton, is a terrific resource for recommendations in that space.

Can you show us where you read, if you’ve got a picture of your favorite spot?

Let’s say it’s here.

Yulin’s Book Recommendations

A book you’d recommend to all your friends:

Beach Read by Emily Henry, mainly so we can discuss their informed thoughts on my adaptation when the time comes.

A book that impacted you during your childhood:

Titanic: The Long Night by Diane Hoh. It was probably the first historical romance novel I read without realizing it, because it was technically marketed to the Scholastic Book Fair set and featured characters mostly in their teens. I found it deeply romantic, specifically a scene where the starving artist shows up in a turtleneck and kisses the wealthy heroine against a wall in the first class passageways. It was like a somewhat age-appropriate Titanic with a HEA (happily ever after), and I imprinted hard.

A book that helped you turn your brain off recently, in a good way:

Does the Dramione (Draco/Hermione) fic “Manacled” by SenLinYu count? I had stepped away from reading fanfic for a long time before I picked that one up. I saw so many rave reviews for it on TikTok, yet I avoided Manacled for years because of my aforementioned preference for Draco/Ginny at the peak of my fanfic reading years. Then I was recently sick in bed with a cold and blitzed through it, and it really reconnected me with my roots as a fanfic reader in a way I found deeply meaningful. I’m very much looking forward to SenLinYu’s Alchemised when it comes out—transplanting such a full-throated story from the soil of its fandom origins into the world of traditional publishing is a feat of adaptation, and I’m curious as both a fan and an adaptation technician to see how the same story in the hands of the same artist will play out differently, in a new literary context.

On the traditional publishing side of things, I’ve been savoring I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue. It feels like the best parts of Bridget Jones (the book version) meets The Office (the US series version), and a whiff of Severance (my new obsession of a TV series on Apple+).

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A book that would make a great book club pick:

Luck of the Draw by Kate Clayborn is a contemporary romance I would very much like to see appreciated in its time as a boundary pusher of the genre. Clayborn always writes beautifully on heavy, real world topics, and this was the novel that first opened my eyes to what’s possible in the contemporary romance genre. I’d love to be able to talk to more people about this one, so please pollinate every book club you can with it.

A book that made you think recently, or has really stuck with you:

The Rainbow Comes and Goes by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt has stayed with me for a long time after reading it. The structure is an interesting one—it’s kind of a memoir written as an epistolary work of non-fiction, using e-mails back and forth between a mother and son. They’re having an ongoing conversation that covers questions they never thought to discuss before and I deeply admired their vulnerability and emotional honesty on full display with every e-mail. Plus, Anderson and Gloria are both people who’ve lived fascinating lives full of interesting choices, and I love reading other people’s introspection on lessons learned in another lifetime I’ll never get to experience first-hand.

A book that gave you all the feelings:

The Black Hawk by Joanna Bourne is a historical romance I think about often, years after reading it. It follows spies who worked together during the French Revolution, and takes them from their youth to their maturity in their mid-to-late thirties, when the love affair has long since ended and she shows up on his doorstep gravely injured. I’m a sucker for a decades-spanner, and this one has my whole heart.

A go-to comfort read:

In my 20s, my answer would have been the Jane Austen canon (probably starting with either Persuasion or Pride & Prejudice, depending on my mood), but in my 30s, I’ve become more of a Brontë sisters evangelist. My auteur filmmaker dream is to someday do my Wuthering Heights adaptation that absolutely no one else wants, where I’d focus on the next generation cast of characters (Cathy Linton, Hareton Earnshaw, and Linton Heathcliff.) I wrote some Cathy/Hareton fanfic back in high school that I don’t think ever made it out of my LiveJournal drafts, but I had so much fun doing it, and I love returning to those characters with every read.

Thank you, Yulin!

• Buy Yulin’s debut novel, How to End A Love Story on Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your local bookstore. It’s also available as an audiobook most everywhere.

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P.S.

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