May 30, 2024 • 36 mins
Yulin Kuang was born for this moment. Growing up, Yulin rewrote movies in her head to include more kissing scenes and transcribed romantic comedies into her diary before bedtime. In her career as a screenwriter and director, Yulin’s credits include “I Ship It”, “Dollface” and the forthcoming adaptation of Emily Henry’s bestselling “Beach Read.” Yulin’s lifelong love affair with the romance genre culminated when her first book, a contemporary romance novel called “How to End a Love Story”, was selected as May’s pick for Reese’s Book Club. Yulin sits down with Danielle and Simone to talk sexual awakenings and learning to sit with your feelings. You can find "How to End a Love Story" on Apple Books or wherever you get your books.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello Sunshine.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hey fam Today on the bright Side, we're joined by
author you Lean Kwang. She's the May pick for Reese's
Book Club, and she's here to talk all about her
debut novel, How To End a Love Story. It's so good.
It's Thursday, May thirtieth. I'm Simone Boyce.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from
Hello Sunshine. Simone. I came across this article on Cosmo
that I need to get your opinion on. So this
writer is endorsing getting drinks with an X, and I
know we all have strong feelings about that. She says
she thinks it's okay because of romantic nostalgia. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I agree. I have so many questions. This is raising
a lot of red flags for me.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
So I don't actually think that it's helpful to go
back in time very often.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
No, I can't think of very many instances where it
is helpful.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
I've done this multiple times. Okay, you know I have
multiple axes.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Well, you do. It also depends your current relationship status,
So did you do this while you were single in
a relationship?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Right? So I think if you're in a current relationship,
it's a little spici or trickier, because is that really okay.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I'm not thinking it's.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Disrespectful if you don't if you're not upfront about it
with your partner, oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
But also you need a really good reason even if
you're upfront. It's like, for why, exactly for why?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I'm trying to think if my husband was like, hey,
I'm just going to meet up with my ex that
I would be like why, why why are you doing that?
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Like, yeah, I don't understand the reason. But I've met
up with exes in the past when I wasn't in
a current relationship, and I felt so icky after nothing happened.
We just got a breakfast or a meal or a
drink or whatever, and I felt like I had so
outgrown them. It didn't take me back to a time
(01:52):
and place of myself. It took me to a place
where I was like, how could I have ever dated you?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
So tell me about the why behind and your ex meetups.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
It was usually at their request, and then I sort
of just said like sure, but first of all, you
have to go in looking amazing. You have to look fabulous,
and the outfit really matters, Like you don't want to
look like you tried too hard, but like you have
to try a little bit. I love like a gene
(02:22):
that makes your butt look really good with like a
simple white or black tanker T shirt and then great
simple makeup and some hoop earrings, so like a Calvin kleinad.
I mean, that's basically my wardrobe. But it's like a
dry hard, not try hard outfit.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Doesn't that part feel a little thirsty though, like as
you're getting ready, Yes, it feels thirsty, right, yes.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
It feels And then you change your shoes multiple times
because you're like, do I wear heels? Do I wear sneakers? No?
I definitely should wear sneakers. Why do I care? And
you start coming.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Through this is a case for not meeting up with
them because I don't think they deserve that much of
your time, your brain space. So when you met up
with the X, did you get a chance to say
something that you wish you had said? Did you get
like one more barb in.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Error My most recent ex, who is the only one
that I don't really talk to because he sucks. We
met up right before COVID happened, at his request, and
I still had really hurt feelings from the relationship in
the breakup, and I was like, this is my time
to communicate it and I got to get everything off
(03:22):
my chest.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
I cried.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
He looked so uncomfortable, like that is not what he
came here for.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I did not want this. I got way more than
I bargained for.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
I think he was looking to see if we would
hook up again, and of course he was.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
The only one reason why he's reaching out.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And I was like, this is a moment to have,
like a closure therapy session. And so after that, I
was like, I'm never doing this again.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
You would a therapy session.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
I was like, this is great. We get to like
have all of these unexpressed feelings. No, he was not
having it. I felt so dumb and I was like,
I'm never doing this again. Oh no, Yeah, But lesson learned.
Keep it for your journals, keep it for the book.
If you're going to write a book about your life,
do that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Watch the movies that remind you of it. You can
get your fill of romantic nostalgia in other places movies, music, TV.
Speaking of TV, we got to get into a platonic
or perhaps not so platonic situation. All right, So the
internet is investigating whether The Bear castmates Ioadebris and Jeremy
Allen White are a thing. Have you heard about this?
Speaker 4 (04:32):
No?
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Whoo?
Speaker 1 (04:34):
I love this. I love this for them.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
If you watch the show The Bear, they have this
incredible chemistry and a really tight relationship on screen, so
it would make a lot of sense if they did
have that off screen. I mean, fans of the show
have been rooting for these two for a minute. But
we got some new evidence. Okay, So a video of
Io and Jeremy at a Chicago Cubs game. Shout out, Chicago,
shout out, thanks for that out shout out Brigley Field.
(05:00):
This video, y'all, is adding more fuel to the fire.
I saw the clip. It is a video from above,
so like they're sitting further down in the stadium seats.
Someone captured it from.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Above, so creepy.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
It's totally creepy. Jeremy has his hand on Io's back
and he's like rubbing between her shoulder blades. Once you
see this video, you realize it is not platonic at all.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Disagree, and I haven't seen the video.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
You have to see it. Look up the video.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Once you see it, there's no way that they're just friends.
Oh yeah, that's not friendly. I don't you friendly. This
is on par with a thigh caresses. This is on
par with a forehead kiss in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Oh not quite a forehead.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Okay, maybe it's one degree back from a forehead kiss.
But I mean this is all but confirmed in the
school of school of thought of Simone boys.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
I wish I could say that they were doing this
because I think the new season is coming out and
it's like the great publicity that they're dating. But I
don't think they're tricking us.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I mean, I think it could really be real after
seeing this. Okay, right side, bessies, you have to go
watch the video. Let us know if we are de
Lulu or if this relationship is the Sululu After the break,
we're talking about another kind of love story. Yuleen Kwang
is here. She's the author of the May Pick for
(06:24):
Reese's Book Club. Her book is How to End a
Love Story, and we're getting into it.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Stay with us. We are here with the May Pick
for Reese's Book Club author Yuleen Kwang. Her debut novel,
How to End a Love Story, hit the shelves last
month and it is already becoming a fan favorite, and.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
I'm one of those fans. Danielle. How To End a
Love Story follows Helen Zang, a best selling author whose
Ya novel is getting adapted to a TV show. So
Helen walks into the writer's room on day one, and
who does she see? Of course it's Grant Shepherd, the
one person she hoped she'd never see after high school
and the one person who will always remind her of
(07:13):
her family's tragedy. I could not put this book down, y'all.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I swear.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
I blew through it in like a day.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
It took me too, but it was so good. And
in addition to her work as a novelist, Yuleene is
a screenwriter and director whose credits include TV shows like
Dollface and I Ship It. She's currently directing a film
adaptation of romance author Emily Henry's best selling novel bet Read.
Everyone's excited for that one, Euleene, Welcome to the bright Side.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Hi, thank you so much for having me. Can I
just say I was listening to your Michelle Kwan episode
coming in today because I figure skate, but I only
started as an adult.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Oh that's cool.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Yeah, I woke up this morning because I had a
lesson with my coach and I saw Michelle Kwan's face
and the bright side, and I was like, oh my gosh,
perfect listening.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
We all got you starting.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
I had been so obsessed with skating when I was
a kid, but my parents were like, oh no, honey, like,
we don't have the money for that, And so I
had disposable income for the first time in my life.
So I googled and I found a rink and then
I started skating as an adult.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
That is so cool. Good for you. Isn't it so
freeing to be on the ice?
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Oh my gosh, I love it so much. It feels
like the closest thing the flying.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
I think, yes, that's how I felt.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
That is so cool.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
You should probably reach out to Michelle Kwan.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
I would love to, Okay, listen if you can connect us,
because I took a lesson with her former coach, Frank Carroll,
because I had this like actress friend who she was
doing something called rejection immersion therapy where every single day
she had to ask for something where she thought the
answer was no. I guess the idea is you'll get
you steering now, or maybe sometimes you'll hear it.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yes, So I put in a request for.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Frank Carroll to coach me, thinking he would just like
do me the honor of projecting me, and he said yes,
And so I still remember like our first lesson together
where he was like, you have as much right to
be here as anyone else.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Show me your forward stroke.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
That's good. Oh so I like rejection therapy, have been
practicing it my whole life.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
It's so good.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So you've wanted to be a storyteller, I hear, ever
since you were a kid. What was the first story
that you wrote and shared. I would always.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Watch movies and kind of like rewrite them in my
head when I was going to bed. I wanted the
characters to kiss more, like I remember watching a few
Good Men and then wanting Tom Cruise and to me
more to kiss. So I would just go to bed
replaying that scenes and then just being like, what would
I have to adjust? I wrote a lot of like
hand scrawled things. Do you remember those Dear America books?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Tell me more about that.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
They were like diary entry type things where it was
the narrative of some historic event was in a diary
and so I wanted to do that with Pearl Harbor,
and so I wrote like a diary entree style novel
that was like my first one, and you know famously,
Pearl Harbor happens December seventh, nineteen forty one. And I
(10:15):
started my story in like nineteen thirty eight because I
thought we needed a lot of backstory. And then I
had a friend who told me, you know, this is
kind of boring. I think you should you should cut
to the chase. So I abandoned that effort, and then
I started putting together my next book. At this point
in time, I'm like in fifth grade. But then I
discovered fan fiction and that kind of altered my brain chemistry,
(10:39):
and that was where I really got started writing things
and sharing them with people.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
I love hearing that historical fiction peaked your literary interest.
That's how I got into books. I loved like you
could learn about something that you didn't know about and
read about these characters that you love. There was always
like a romance element, which.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
I know you really read with.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
You started your career with adaptations, and you're currently adapting
Emily Henry's novel People we Meet on Vacation and the
forthcoming beach Read into feature films. How did you approach
writing and adaptation. I look at.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Adaptation as kind of like a puzzle and a love
letter at the same time, because I personally can't adapt
anything that I don't love. So I'm looking at what
is it about it that deeply resonates with me, What
is the part of it that I'm kind of identifying,
and then I construct a love letter to that. And
that's when I go back to my roots when I
(11:36):
was a fan fiction writer, because that was where I
first discovered that people would play in these spaces that
were other people's worlds, but they were finding the parts
that they gravitated to most. And once I kind of
unlocked that part of my brain in the ways that
I approached adaptation, my career went a lot better.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Now there's something about your story that Simone and I
are both obsessed with. When we learned this about you,
we thought this should be on every social media handle
you have. You were once fired from a Hallmark movie
for being to quote unquote hip. What happened and how
did you learn from that experience?
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Yeah, So, my co writer Liz Scudlow and I we
were writing a Hallmark movie called Love on Iceland, where
these two characters fall in love on Iceland. And I
think we were writing a lot of jokes that the
Hallmark Channel just felt like we're off brand, Like we
had go Thomas Kinkaid joke, and they were like, no, no, no,
we don't want to touch with Thomas Kinkai joke.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
That might be too controversial.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
So I was like, okay, wait, I'm sorry Thomas Kinkaid
as in the guy who paints those moody pictures of
cottages nestled in the forest.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Yes, yes, that would be too controversial potentially. And then
I think we had maybe like a Georgiana and Maal
Clooney joke in there that they were like, this is
too much of a pop culture reference for our audience.
And so I think after one too many of those
types of notes where they kept telling us these jokes
are too hip for Hallmark, they called us onto a
(13:07):
conference call and then they told us we're.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Going in a different direction.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
You know, they hired other writers who got the job done,
and they went to Iceland and they shot that movie
and they still fall in Love on Iceland. So we
are still credited on that project.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
You mean this has to be at the top of
every bias, so when you walk out on a panel stage,
everybody knows this.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
You know.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
At the time, I didn't feel great about it because
it's to feel like professional failure. They're like very well
known hallmark in the space of romance, and as somebody
who loves kissing stories, I was kind of.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Like, is my career over? Yeah? Will I ever get
another chance?
Speaker 2 (13:48):
You definitely are just at the beginning of your career,
and I want to get into the reason why we're
all here, which is how to end a love story?
Which came first for you these characters or the storyline?
Speaker 4 (14:02):
I think probably the characters, because I always knew it
was going to be a novelist and a screenwriter. I
always knew I kind of wanted to explore an East
coast West coast dichotomy there, and I knew I wanted
to kind of give them that tension, and so I
really started there, and then I knew I wanted to
(14:24):
force them into a writer's room together because I love
a forced proximity trope.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
If someone were to ask you what this book is about,
I'm curious how you would describe it?
Speaker 3 (14:34):
How would I describe it?
Speaker 4 (14:35):
I mean, I would say it's the story of a
screenwriter and a novelist who find themselves in the same
TV writer's room thirteen years after this very tragic accident
that kind of binds them together forever.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
And then they're in this room trying to.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
Work through the work of adaptation, and then they go
on a healing journey together as well.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I read that you use the Anagram personality test to
help you develop these characters. Why do you find that
to be so useful? That's so interesting?
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Oh, I love it so much.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
So for anybody who doesn't know the Aneagram personality test,
there's like nine different personality types. It kind of centers
around what people's wounds are and how maybe the things
that they encountered and youth shaped them into a person
who has very specific fears, very specific once, and a
very specific drive. On some level, I think all personality
(15:32):
tests are kind of bullshit.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Can I curse on here?
Speaker 1 (15:34):
You can curse? And also what aneagram are you?
Speaker 2 (15:37):
So?
Speaker 4 (15:38):
I think they're all a little bit bullshit, But I
think that the anagram one is my favorite because it
tells you what a person is like when they're trending
towards health versus their most unhealthy. So I am an
Aneagram three, which is the achiever, and that is the
type that I gave to Helen, and I gave Grant
my husband's Enneagram type, which is number two, the helper.
(15:59):
And I really like the enneagram for mapping what a
character is like in Act one when they're kind of
in their normal world, and then you take them to
an unhealthier place in the conflict section, and then you
bring them back to a healthier place, hopefully at the end.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
So now that we know that there's a bit of
you in Helen and a bit of your husband and Grant,
what is the most Helen thing about you? And what's
the most Grant thing about your husband? Oh, my gosh,
the most Helen thing about me.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
I think I resonated with that character so much because
I gave her all of my insecurities. And it's a
hard thing for Helen because I feel like she's so
prickly and uncomfortable all the time, and that's because I
just gave her all my baggage.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
I was like, do you want to just take this
all from me? Like that'll be a lighter weight for
me then.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
And then for Grant, I gave him like my husband's
ability to be very, very selfless, I would say, in
the ways that he wants to help others, and I
can see also how that can sometimes get him into
trouble where he's not prioritizing himself enough. So I really
liked how the partnership of Helen and Grant allowed me
(17:09):
to kind of examine what those dynamics are like.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
As someone who loves kissing in films in stories. What
is the secret to an epic love story to you,
I would say romantic tension.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
I think that we need tension in order to really
feel the narrative thrust of a story, Like we kind
of need to know why a couple can't be together
right now. And so if there're just two nice people
who could just be together.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Then I'm like, then I don't really want to watch that.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
I think they'd be lovely people to befriend and like
go to brunch with, But that's not necessarily the story
I want to go for Shakespearean.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
It's also my toxic love life anyway. I learned that
actually through the West Wing, because Josh and Donna were
never Oh my gosh, and Aaron Sorkin made that happen
right like for three seasons, and then he left the
show and the new showrunner and writer's room had them kiss,
and the show was kind of over.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
I was so obsessed with them. I remember there was
like a fan site where you could read every single
interaction that they had. It just like cataloged them all
and you could just read the transcript of each scene.
And I would just go to that like twenty times
a day.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Can you bring that show back, please? You'd be so
good writing it.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
I would love to ilimans my like forever crush.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Okay, I know he's like, you're hearing me.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Out, not even he's not even to hear me out.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
He is a straightforward yes.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, we get it.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, you don't have to hear her out.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
You're right.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
He's hot. He's hot and smart. It's a win when. Yeah,
your book is called How to End a Love Story,
but there's more than one love story in the book.
There's romantic love and family love. Why did you juxtapose
the love stories that exist within families with romantic love.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
I think because they often go hand in hand, you know,
I think your your family, those are often the people
that first teach you what you know about love. They
kind of define it for you through their daily actions,
and you spend all of this time in your childhood
and you're like just a person who's trying to make
(19:23):
your way through and find love and give love. And
then it becomes this thing where sometimes sometimes you'll stumble
and you'll be like, oh, why am I so activated?
Why are all these things happening that I don't understand?
And then you look back and you're like, Oh, it's
because of like this thing that happened in my life
at one point.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
I think those two for me are.
Speaker 4 (19:42):
Very, very connected because of how love is kind of
taught to us.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Okay, I want to ask you about the other horny
books you read, because I have a few in my
library and I want to cross reference.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
What did you call them?
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Mud?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
It's mutt, Yeah, smut smutty books.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
YEA Simone taught me that I'd never heard that term.
I prefer money books to like spice. There's something about
spice that to me sometimes feels like we're like whitewashing
it again, and I'm like, no, just called it smutt.
There is not a derogatory connotation to smut. To me.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, yeah, like it's okay for us giving ourselves permission
to love these books and all their yeazziness and raunchiness.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
For for a long time, I used to keep all
of my romance novels under a tab in my Kindle
called Trashy Romance Novels. And it was like a big
moment for me when I deleted the trashy and I
was like.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
No, no, no, this is literature. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Well, there are a lot of women around the world
right now who are fighting back against that stigma and
saying no, we are going to be unabashed in our
embrace of these stories and like let us live, like.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Let's exactly life, you know, truly.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
I have to ask you about something that I read
in the back acknowledgments of the book. You tell your
parents not to tell you if they've read certain chaps.
Why did you say that and what did you mean
by that?
Speaker 4 (21:04):
I mean they are all the chapters with any reference
to sex, Like one of them is like pretty tame,
even it's the one where she goes to his house
and I think he has the brief thought a couple
hours ago she came on my tongue, So I was
just like, yeah, no, that's that's too much for them.
I would say like sex was a very taboo subject
in my household growing up. It was like not a
(21:25):
safe space for those conversations. And I don't know, maybe
I had my sexual awakening too early. I feel like
I watched like Anastasia in a theater and I saw
Dimitri with his Adam's apple, and I was just like,
what's happening to me? So I was just like baseline,
pretty horny. And I remember watching porn really young. I
was maybe like fourteen fifteen. Actually that might not even
(21:47):
be that young. That might be about the age when
people discover it. And I was kind of curious about
sex because it was such a taboo topic that I
was like, where am I going to learn about this?
So I started going to porn sites just to you know,
educate myself. I was always a good student. And then
I accidentally downloaded a virus to the family computer and
(22:08):
so I came home one day and my parents are
sitting They're like, Uleen, we need to talk to you.
And they're sitting stone faced in front of the computer
and there is on the monitor I can only describe
as like a snake of pop ups that are all
just each one more graphic than the last, and my Dad's.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Like, we have to talk to you about something.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
My mom looks and she just bursts into tears and
leaves the room, and then my dad goes, you know what,
never mind, you can go. And that was about the
sex talk that I received. So I think with that
key memory in mind, I was just like, I'm not
going to subject them to this book.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
I can so relate to not having a safe space
to talk about sex. Growing up, we did not talk
about it.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
I had to figure it out on my own.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
My sexual awakening was watching Patrick Swayze gyrate his hips
in Dirty Dancing and a Sleepover. That was the first
time I got the tingles.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
I feel like maybe the reason I love historical romance
so much is because I was so repressed that now
there is something on like an id level that really
appeals to me about the fact that it's like we
mustn't like a single touch is too much, Yeah, and
we have to go recover.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, something something got hard coded into me.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
There's something there, for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
But I think that's why you're so good at inserting
romantic tension into the stories, because you know what it
feels like to suppress.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
Oh yeah, but we mustn't quality I'm very familiar.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
With you're the master, we mustn't.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
It's yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, well, thank you
to my parents for that.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
So I don't want to give anything away, but I'm
dying to know about writing a sex scene because people
are using into to see coordinators on screen these days.
How do you coordinate these scenes within yourself?
Speaker 4 (24:05):
It honestly would have been much easier for me to
write like a fade to Black romance, because I think
that's what I've would have been much more comfortable with.
And I think that's why I did decide to write
sex on the page, because I wanted to push myself
a little bit, and so I was chasing what was
appealing to me. It was kind of like a self
discovery exercise. I feel like a sex therapist should probably
(24:26):
tell people to write a scene that feels horny to them,
because I learned so much about myself and what turns
me on in the process of writing this, and then,
you know, it was fun because then I would hand
it to my husband at the end of every night
of drafting and I'd be.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Like read this, you'd be like, oh, interesting, this is.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
Feeling a little instructional, and so I think it was
good for us honestly.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
So we both are big fans of you and this book,
and we want to give our listeners a little window
into your words. Will you do us the huge honor
of reading us a passage from the book?
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Yes, of course.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Okay, Bessie's let's get to my favorite part of our
author interviews. Here on the bright side, Julien Kwang is
going to read us a passage from her book this
month's Reese's Book Club pick, How to End a Love Story.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
She pulls up her call log and her thumb hovers
over his name. He'd pick up, She's sure of it.
She'd call and he'd pick up, and she'd tell him
she's moved back into her old apartment in New York
that doesn't feel like home anymore, and she misses him
so much that her heart hurts all the time, and
she loves him so much she sometimes can't fathom a
world where she's ever truly happy again. He'd come back,
(25:37):
and she'd blow off her plans for a reconciliation dinner
with her parents tomorrow and she'd be able to touch
him again, and and she would make it impossible for
either of them to move on. Let him go, she
reminds herself sharply. He deserves a happy, normal life with
a happy, extraordinary someone. The kind of woman who deserves
Grant would have found him on the right coast, the
(25:58):
one he calls home. He would have opened his arms
and she would have fallen into them for the first
time and known it was her favorite place in the
world right away. She wouldn't have had to fight a terrible,
confusing mixture of compulsions to flee and burrow at the
same time, choosing ultimately to flee. The kind of woman
who deserves Grant would have known what she had when
she had it, and wouldn't have waited until weeks later
to weep and wallow over the loss of him in
(26:20):
a bathtub for so long she now knows what her
toes would look like if she drowned. The kind of
woman who deserves Grant would be capable of the kind
of love that keeps little sisters alive. Grant Shepherd deserves
a Hollywood movie ending with swelling music and sweeping camera
movements and kissing in the rain. This movie would have
an epilogue with warm lighting and dad jokes and family
dinners in the summer garden over the end credits, and
(26:42):
Helen Sang has never been built for that kind of
uncomplicated happily.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Ever after.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
You lean it closed my eyes and just let it
wash over me, and that was so great. I love
all the details that you add. It feels so real
to me.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
I like that section all lot. I kind of wanted
to say to readers, I am not trying to be
Emily Henry because I love Emily's work and I love
her writing so much, and I know exactly from the
adaptation work I do what kind of movie I want
to watch when I'm watching an Emily Henry book to
(27:18):
screen adaptation.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
And I think that passage was a little bit.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Of my ode to that where I'm like, I know
where this would go if if I were doing that,
But that's not what I am as an author, and
that's not who this character is either.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yuleen, we're having a blast with you, but we got
to take a quick break. When we come back, we're
going to learn more about who you are as an author.
With a little help from our bright Side Besties.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
We're back with Yuleen Kwang talking all about her debut book,
How To End a Love Story. We have readers with questions,
so let's get in it. Hi. This is Larissa from Toronto.
Speaker 5 (28:03):
I really loved this book, especially how generous you were
with writing what I like to call micro moments like
Grant playing with Helen's hair or caressing her jaw, or
Helen kissing Grant's fingertips. You were very visual in your
descriptions and it gifted the reader these tender, sensual snapshots
that practically suspended time.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
So I have two parts to my question.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
First, do you feel like your skills as a screenwriter
allowed you to get more visual when writing these scenes?
And secondly, how did you balance writing these beautifully steamy
moments while also managing to leave space for the grief
that Helen and Grant were grappling with.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Yeah, thank you for that question. I think my work
as a screenwriter definitely did help me in that way,
because I wanted to create a visual and I think
I was thinking almost about like giable moments, maybe not
like deliberately, but I just knew that as somebody who
consumes media very obsessively, there are certain moments that I
(29:02):
obsess over in movies and TV shows that I then
end up replaying over and over again. So when the
technology was invented that I could reblog that to Tumblr,
I was thrilled. And so I think when I was writing,
I was chasing those types of moments when you talk
about the caressing of the jaw and those types of things,
And then in terms of balancing those kind of steamier
(29:25):
moments with the more serious topics like grief and things
like that, I think that is how I experience life.
I think I am both horny and sad and happy
and hopeful and depressed, and so I wanted to write
a book that kind of reflected that experience.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Eileene, I can hear our producers giggling in the other room.
That's how hard they're laughing with you.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Perfect.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, all right, I'm excited for this next one. This
question is a bit controversial.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Hi.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
I'm Rachel from Connecticut.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
I absolutely we love the interactions between Helen and Grant.
They're so heartbreaking and raw. It's so so beautiful. My
question is about adaptation. You've said that this book is
a love letter to adaptation, but whenever people watch an adaptation,
they say that the book is always better. As a screenwriter,
(30:20):
what does that mean to you now that you've written
your book, And how does this question make you feel
as an adapt to yourself.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
What a tricky mindfield of question. No, I love it.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
I will challenge the idea that the book is always
better when you come to the movie, you have all
of these preconceived notions about it.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
But there are also a lot of books that get
adapted that are kind of flawed.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
But with a good screenwriter and a great premise, the adaptation,
I think can sometimes really really sing. I won't say
the adaptation is better necessarily, but the adaptation becomes the
thing that introduces people back to the book. Legally Blonde,
I think, is a really great example of that. Not
(31:09):
a lot of people know that is an adaptation, but
it is if you watch the opening credits as often
as I did as a child, because I was obsessed
with that movie and I liked the book. But I
think the movie is still what I think of definitively
when I think of Legally Blonde. When I approach adaptation,
I am always thinking about what will service this story
(31:31):
best in its new medium, Because that is my goal.
I'm not really chasing a strictly faithful adaptation of the book,
because the book will always exist. I don't want to
be compared to the thing and be found lacking every
single time because I was trying to be so faithful
that I betrayed the screen audience. So I think ultimately
(31:54):
the purpose of successful adaptation is to bring new audiences
back to the source material, rather than to please only
the book fans.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
So one of the goals of Reese's Book Club is
to uplift and empower female authors. You've posted that you
have been training for this moment your entire life. What
has it meant to you to be an RBC pick?
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Oh my god, It's like.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
It is hard for me to describe that other than
through that one screenshot of Ellwood's walking up to the
bulletin board to see her name on the list of
people that Victor Garber has selected to be in his
summer internship, and she's just likeing to he Yes. I
watched that movie so many times that I memorized it.
(32:44):
I remember writing in the back of an old Lisa
Frank diary my memorized transcript of the movie.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
You're kidding me.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Yeah, No, I was just kind of wanting to experience
the movie again in my mind before bed.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
You Transcrip drived legally Blonde in your journal.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
Yes, as much as I could remember it, and so
it was like perfect day by Hoku is playing blonde hair.
We followed down, yeah, and so there was that. I
love you literally so much.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Meant to be here right now. It is so cute,
e Lean.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
So your wildest dreams have come true. Ellwoods picked your
book for her book club, and you're making your debut
as a director with an adaptation of one of the
most popular romance writers out right. Now, what are you
most proud of? With all the success?
Speaker 4 (33:35):
I feel like I am a little superstitious about calling
it success because we don't know, guys.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
I mean, let's call it. Let's call it like it
is an absolutely success.
Speaker 4 (33:46):
I listened to your Michelle Kwan episode and somebody said
something about I didn't come this far, yeah, just to
come this far, and that is kind of how I feel.
I'm like, I don't know that I would define this
as success, and this all feels like part of the journey.
What am I proud of?
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Though?
Speaker 3 (34:02):
I have been working on.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
Feeling my feelings more because I grew up in an
immigrant household. And I don't blame my parents for this
at all, because they came from like such a totally
different world than me. But I don't think there was
a culture of sitting with our feelings. It was always
let's focus on what needs to be done, and emotions
often were seen as something that would get in the
(34:26):
way of being effective. For a very long time, I
feel like I was very removed from my body, from
my emotions. I didn't really know how I felt about anything.
So I think maybe the thing I am proudest of
is I am sitting with those emotions a lot more
throughout this process. Right now, for instance, I feel anxious
(34:46):
in their books and also joy.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Well, we are both so excited to see the success
of this and also all that is to come for you.
So thank you so much for joining us on the
bright side. Brought a lot of sunshine to us today.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Sunshine and laughter and legally blonde references.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
Ah, I love that. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yuline Kwang is the author of the may Reese's book
Club pick How to End a Love Story. Check it
out wherever you get your books.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
We'll be announcing the June pick for Reese's book Club
next week, so don't miss it, and you can only
send us your Reese's book Club questions to Hello at
the brightsidepodcast dot com.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, Award winning comedian, actor
and producer Alana Glazer is here to talk about her
new movie Babes. You don't want to miss it.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Simone Boys.
You can find me at Simone Boice on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's ro Ba.
Y see you tomorrow. Keep get on the bright Side.
Hello Sunshine.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hey fam Today on the bright Side, we're joined by
author you Lean Kwang. She's the May pick for Reese's
Book Club, and she's here to talk all about her
debut novel, How To End a Love Story. It's so good.
It's Thursday, May thirtieth. I'm Simone Boyce.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from
Hello Sunshine. Simone. I came across this article on Cosmo
that I need to get your opinion on. So this
writer is endorsing getting drinks with an X, and I
know we all have strong feelings about that. She says
she thinks it's okay because of romantic nostalgia. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I agree. I have so many questions. This is raising
a lot of red flags for me.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
So I don't actually think that it's helpful to go
back in time very often.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
No, I can't think of very many instances where it
is helpful.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
I've done this multiple times. Okay, you know I have
multiple axes.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Well, you do. It also depends your current relationship status,
So did you do this while you were single in
a relationship?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Right? So I think if you're in a current relationship,
it's a little spici or trickier, because is that really okay.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I'm not thinking it's.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Disrespectful if you don't if you're not upfront about it
with your partner, oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
But also you need a really good reason even if
you're upfront. It's like, for why, exactly for why?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I'm trying to think if my husband was like, hey,
I'm just going to meet up with my ex that
I would be like why, why why are you doing that?
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Like, yeah, I don't understand the reason. But I've met
up with exes in the past when I wasn't in
a current relationship, and I felt so icky after nothing happened.
We just got a breakfast or a meal or a
drink or whatever, and I felt like I had so
outgrown them. It didn't take me back to a time
(01:52):
and place of myself. It took me to a place
where I was like, how could I have ever dated you?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
So tell me about the why behind and your ex meetups.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
It was usually at their request, and then I sort
of just said like sure, but first of all, you
have to go in looking amazing. You have to look fabulous,
and the outfit really matters, Like you don't want to
look like you tried too hard, but like you have
to try a little bit. I love like a gene
(02:22):
that makes your butt look really good with like a
simple white or black tanker T shirt and then great
simple makeup and some hoop earrings, so like a Calvin kleinad.
I mean, that's basically my wardrobe. But it's like a
dry hard, not try hard outfit.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Doesn't that part feel a little thirsty though, like as
you're getting ready, Yes, it feels thirsty, right, yes.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
It feels And then you change your shoes multiple times
because you're like, do I wear heels? Do I wear sneakers? No?
I definitely should wear sneakers. Why do I care? And
you start coming.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Through this is a case for not meeting up with
them because I don't think they deserve that much of
your time, your brain space. So when you met up
with the X, did you get a chance to say
something that you wish you had said? Did you get
like one more barb in.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Error My most recent ex, who is the only one
that I don't really talk to because he sucks. We
met up right before COVID happened, at his request, and
I still had really hurt feelings from the relationship in
the breakup, and I was like, this is my time
to communicate it and I got to get everything off
(03:22):
my chest.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
I cried.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
He looked so uncomfortable, like that is not what he
came here for.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I did not want this. I got way more than
I bargained for.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
I think he was looking to see if we would
hook up again, and of course he was.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
The only one reason why he's reaching out.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And I was like, this is a moment to have,
like a closure therapy session. And so after that, I
was like, I'm never doing this again.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
You would a therapy session.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
I was like, this is great. We get to like
have all of these unexpressed feelings. No, he was not
having it. I felt so dumb and I was like,
I'm never doing this again. Oh no, Yeah, But lesson learned.
Keep it for your journals, keep it for the book.
If you're going to write a book about your life,
do that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Watch the movies that remind you of it. You can
get your fill of romantic nostalgia in other places movies, music, TV.
Speaking of TV, we got to get into a platonic
or perhaps not so platonic situation. All right, So the
internet is investigating whether The Bear castmates Ioadebris and Jeremy
Allen White are a thing. Have you heard about this?
Speaker 4 (04:32):
No?
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Whoo?
Speaker 1 (04:34):
I love this. I love this for them.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
If you watch the show The Bear, they have this
incredible chemistry and a really tight relationship on screen, so
it would make a lot of sense if they did
have that off screen. I mean, fans of the show
have been rooting for these two for a minute. But
we got some new evidence. Okay, So a video of
Io and Jeremy at a Chicago Cubs game. Shout out, Chicago,
shout out, thanks for that out shout out Brigley Field.
(05:00):
This video, y'all, is adding more fuel to the fire.
I saw the clip. It is a video from above,
so like they're sitting further down in the stadium seats.
Someone captured it from.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Above, so creepy.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
It's totally creepy. Jeremy has his hand on Io's back
and he's like rubbing between her shoulder blades. Once you
see this video, you realize it is not platonic at all.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Disagree, and I haven't seen the video.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
You have to see it. Look up the video.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Once you see it, there's no way that they're just friends.
Oh yeah, that's not friendly. I don't you friendly. This
is on par with a thigh caresses. This is on
par with a forehead kiss in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Oh not quite a forehead.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Okay, maybe it's one degree back from a forehead kiss.
But I mean this is all but confirmed in the
school of school of thought of Simone boys.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
I wish I could say that they were doing this
because I think the new season is coming out and
it's like the great publicity that they're dating. But I
don't think they're tricking us.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I mean, I think it could really be real after
seeing this. Okay, right side, bessies, you have to go
watch the video. Let us know if we are de
Lulu or if this relationship is the Sululu After the break,
we're talking about another kind of love story. Yuleen Kwang
is here. She's the author of the May Pick for
(06:24):
Reese's Book Club. Her book is How to End a
Love Story, and we're getting into it.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Stay with us. We are here with the May Pick
for Reese's Book Club author Yuleen Kwang. Her debut novel,
How to End a Love Story, hit the shelves last
month and it is already becoming a fan favorite, and.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
I'm one of those fans. Danielle. How To End a
Love Story follows Helen Zang, a best selling author whose
Ya novel is getting adapted to a TV show. So
Helen walks into the writer's room on day one, and
who does she see? Of course it's Grant Shepherd, the
one person she hoped she'd never see after high school
and the one person who will always remind her of
(07:13):
her family's tragedy. I could not put this book down, y'all.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I swear.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
I blew through it in like a day.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
It took me too, but it was so good. And
in addition to her work as a novelist, Yuleene is
a screenwriter and director whose credits include TV shows like
Dollface and I Ship It. She's currently directing a film
adaptation of romance author Emily Henry's best selling novel bet Read.
Everyone's excited for that one, Euleene, Welcome to the bright Side.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Hi, thank you so much for having me. Can I
just say I was listening to your Michelle Kwan episode
coming in today because I figure skate, but I only
started as an adult.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Oh that's cool.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Yeah, I woke up this morning because I had a
lesson with my coach and I saw Michelle Kwan's face
and the bright side, and I was like, oh my gosh,
perfect listening.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
We all got you starting.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
I had been so obsessed with skating when I was
a kid, but my parents were like, oh no, honey, like,
we don't have the money for that, And so I
had disposable income for the first time in my life.
So I googled and I found a rink and then
I started skating as an adult.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
That is so cool. Good for you. Isn't it so
freeing to be on the ice?
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Oh my gosh, I love it so much. It feels
like the closest thing the flying.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
I think, yes, that's how I felt.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
That is so cool.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
You should probably reach out to Michelle Kwan.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
I would love to, Okay, listen if you can connect us,
because I took a lesson with her former coach, Frank Carroll,
because I had this like actress friend who she was
doing something called rejection immersion therapy where every single day
she had to ask for something where she thought the
answer was no. I guess the idea is you'll get
you steering now, or maybe sometimes you'll hear it.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yes, So I put in a request for.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Frank Carroll to coach me, thinking he would just like
do me the honor of projecting me, and he said yes,
And so I still remember like our first lesson together
where he was like, you have as much right to
be here as anyone else.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Show me your forward stroke.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
That's good. Oh so I like rejection therapy, have been
practicing it my whole life.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
It's so good.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So you've wanted to be a storyteller, I hear, ever
since you were a kid. What was the first story
that you wrote and shared. I would always.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Watch movies and kind of like rewrite them in my
head when I was going to bed. I wanted the
characters to kiss more, like I remember watching a few
Good Men and then wanting Tom Cruise and to me
more to kiss. So I would just go to bed
replaying that scenes and then just being like, what would
I have to adjust? I wrote a lot of like
hand scrawled things. Do you remember those Dear America books?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Tell me more about that.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
They were like diary entry type things where it was
the narrative of some historic event was in a diary
and so I wanted to do that with Pearl Harbor,
and so I wrote like a diary entree style novel
that was like my first one, and you know famously,
Pearl Harbor happens December seventh, nineteen forty one. And I
(10:15):
started my story in like nineteen thirty eight because I
thought we needed a lot of backstory. And then I
had a friend who told me, you know, this is
kind of boring. I think you should you should cut
to the chase. So I abandoned that effort, and then
I started putting together my next book. At this point
in time, I'm like in fifth grade. But then I
discovered fan fiction and that kind of altered my brain chemistry,
(10:39):
and that was where I really got started writing things
and sharing them with people.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
I love hearing that historical fiction peaked your literary interest.
That's how I got into books. I loved like you
could learn about something that you didn't know about and
read about these characters that you love. There was always
like a romance element, which.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
I know you really read with.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
You started your career with adaptations, and you're currently adapting
Emily Henry's novel People we Meet on Vacation and the
forthcoming beach Read into feature films. How did you approach
writing and adaptation. I look at.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Adaptation as kind of like a puzzle and a love
letter at the same time, because I personally can't adapt
anything that I don't love. So I'm looking at what
is it about it that deeply resonates with me, What
is the part of it that I'm kind of identifying,
and then I construct a love letter to that. And
that's when I go back to my roots when I
(11:36):
was a fan fiction writer, because that was where I
first discovered that people would play in these spaces that
were other people's worlds, but they were finding the parts
that they gravitated to most. And once I kind of
unlocked that part of my brain in the ways that
I approached adaptation, my career went a lot better.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Now there's something about your story that Simone and I
are both obsessed with. When we learned this about you,
we thought this should be on every social media handle
you have. You were once fired from a Hallmark movie
for being to quote unquote hip. What happened and how
did you learn from that experience?
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Yeah, So, my co writer Liz Scudlow and I we
were writing a Hallmark movie called Love on Iceland, where
these two characters fall in love on Iceland. And I
think we were writing a lot of jokes that the
Hallmark Channel just felt like we're off brand, Like we
had go Thomas Kinkaid joke, and they were like, no, no, no,
we don't want to touch with Thomas Kinkai joke.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
That might be too controversial.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
So I was like, okay, wait, I'm sorry Thomas Kinkaid
as in the guy who paints those moody pictures of
cottages nestled in the forest.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Yes, yes, that would be too controversial potentially. And then
I think we had maybe like a Georgiana and Maal
Clooney joke in there that they were like, this is
too much of a pop culture reference for our audience.
And so I think after one too many of those
types of notes where they kept telling us these jokes
are too hip for Hallmark, they called us onto a
(13:07):
conference call and then they told us we're.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Going in a different direction.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
You know, they hired other writers who got the job done,
and they went to Iceland and they shot that movie
and they still fall in Love on Iceland. So we
are still credited on that project.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
You mean this has to be at the top of
every bias, so when you walk out on a panel stage,
everybody knows this.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
You know.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
At the time, I didn't feel great about it because
it's to feel like professional failure. They're like very well
known hallmark in the space of romance, and as somebody
who loves kissing stories, I was kind of.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Like, is my career over? Yeah? Will I ever get
another chance?
Speaker 2 (13:48):
You definitely are just at the beginning of your career,
and I want to get into the reason why we're
all here, which is how to end a love story?
Which came first for you these characters or the storyline?
Speaker 4 (14:02):
I think probably the characters, because I always knew it
was going to be a novelist and a screenwriter. I
always knew I kind of wanted to explore an East
coast West coast dichotomy there, and I knew I wanted
to kind of give them that tension, and so I
really started there, and then I knew I wanted to
(14:24):
force them into a writer's room together because I love
a forced proximity trope.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
If someone were to ask you what this book is about,
I'm curious how you would describe it?
Speaker 3 (14:34):
How would I describe it?
Speaker 4 (14:35):
I mean, I would say it's the story of a
screenwriter and a novelist who find themselves in the same
TV writer's room thirteen years after this very tragic accident
that kind of binds them together forever.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
And then they're in this room trying to.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
Work through the work of adaptation, and then they go
on a healing journey together as well.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I read that you use the Anagram personality test to
help you develop these characters. Why do you find that
to be so useful? That's so interesting?
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Oh, I love it so much.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
So for anybody who doesn't know the Aneagram personality test,
there's like nine different personality types. It kind of centers
around what people's wounds are and how maybe the things
that they encountered and youth shaped them into a person
who has very specific fears, very specific once, and a
very specific drive. On some level, I think all personality
(15:32):
tests are kind of bullshit.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Can I curse on here?
Speaker 1 (15:34):
You can curse? And also what aneagram are you?
Speaker 2 (15:37):
So?
Speaker 4 (15:38):
I think they're all a little bit bullshit, But I
think that the anagram one is my favorite because it
tells you what a person is like when they're trending
towards health versus their most unhealthy. So I am an
Aneagram three, which is the achiever, and that is the
type that I gave to Helen, and I gave Grant
my husband's Enneagram type, which is number two, the helper.
(15:59):
And I really like the enneagram for mapping what a
character is like in Act one when they're kind of
in their normal world, and then you take them to
an unhealthier place in the conflict section, and then you
bring them back to a healthier place, hopefully at the end.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
So now that we know that there's a bit of
you in Helen and a bit of your husband and Grant,
what is the most Helen thing about you? And what's
the most Grant thing about your husband? Oh, my gosh,
the most Helen thing about me.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
I think I resonated with that character so much because
I gave her all of my insecurities. And it's a
hard thing for Helen because I feel like she's so
prickly and uncomfortable all the time, and that's because I
just gave her all my baggage.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
I was like, do you want to just take this
all from me? Like that'll be a lighter weight for
me then.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
And then for Grant, I gave him like my husband's
ability to be very, very selfless, I would say, in
the ways that he wants to help others, and I
can see also how that can sometimes get him into
trouble where he's not prioritizing himself enough. So I really
liked how the partnership of Helen and Grant allowed me
(17:09):
to kind of examine what those dynamics are like.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
As someone who loves kissing in films in stories. What
is the secret to an epic love story to you,
I would say romantic tension.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
I think that we need tension in order to really
feel the narrative thrust of a story, Like we kind
of need to know why a couple can't be together
right now. And so if there're just two nice people
who could just be together.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Then I'm like, then I don't really want to watch that.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
I think they'd be lovely people to befriend and like
go to brunch with, But that's not necessarily the story
I want to go for Shakespearean.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
It's also my toxic love life anyway. I learned that
actually through the West Wing, because Josh and Donna were
never Oh my gosh, and Aaron Sorkin made that happen
right like for three seasons, and then he left the
show and the new showrunner and writer's room had them kiss,
and the show was kind of over.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
I was so obsessed with them. I remember there was
like a fan site where you could read every single
interaction that they had. It just like cataloged them all
and you could just read the transcript of each scene.
And I would just go to that like twenty times
a day.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Can you bring that show back, please? You'd be so
good writing it.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
I would love to ilimans my like forever crush.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Okay, I know he's like, you're hearing me.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Out, not even he's not even to hear me out.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
He is a straightforward yes.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, we get it.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, you don't have to hear her out.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
You're right.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
He's hot. He's hot and smart. It's a win when. Yeah,
your book is called How to End a Love Story,
but there's more than one love story in the book.
There's romantic love and family love. Why did you juxtapose
the love stories that exist within families with romantic love.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
I think because they often go hand in hand, you know,
I think your your family, those are often the people
that first teach you what you know about love. They
kind of define it for you through their daily actions,
and you spend all of this time in your childhood
and you're like just a person who's trying to make
(19:23):
your way through and find love and give love. And
then it becomes this thing where sometimes sometimes you'll stumble
and you'll be like, oh, why am I so activated?
Why are all these things happening that I don't understand?
And then you look back and you're like, Oh, it's
because of like this thing that happened in my life
at one point.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
I think those two for me are.
Speaker 4 (19:42):
Very, very connected because of how love is kind of
taught to us.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Okay, I want to ask you about the other horny
books you read, because I have a few in my
library and I want to cross reference.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
What did you call them?
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Mud?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
It's mutt, Yeah, smut smutty books.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
YEA Simone taught me that I'd never heard that term.
I prefer money books to like spice. There's something about
spice that to me sometimes feels like we're like whitewashing
it again, and I'm like, no, just called it smutt.
There is not a derogatory connotation to smut. To me.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, yeah, like it's okay for us giving ourselves permission
to love these books and all their yeazziness and raunchiness.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
For for a long time, I used to keep all
of my romance novels under a tab in my Kindle
called Trashy Romance Novels. And it was like a big
moment for me when I deleted the trashy and I
was like.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
No, no, no, this is literature. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Well, there are a lot of women around the world
right now who are fighting back against that stigma and
saying no, we are going to be unabashed in our
embrace of these stories and like let us live, like.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Let's exactly life, you know, truly.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
I have to ask you about something that I read
in the back acknowledgments of the book. You tell your
parents not to tell you if they've read certain chaps.
Why did you say that and what did you mean
by that?
Speaker 4 (21:04):
I mean they are all the chapters with any reference
to sex, Like one of them is like pretty tame,
even it's the one where she goes to his house
and I think he has the brief thought a couple
hours ago she came on my tongue, So I was
just like, yeah, no, that's that's too much for them.
I would say like sex was a very taboo subject
in my household growing up. It was like not a
(21:25):
safe space for those conversations. And I don't know, maybe
I had my sexual awakening too early. I feel like
I watched like Anastasia in a theater and I saw
Dimitri with his Adam's apple, and I was just like,
what's happening to me? So I was just like baseline,
pretty horny. And I remember watching porn really young. I
was maybe like fourteen fifteen. Actually that might not even
(21:47):
be that young. That might be about the age when
people discover it. And I was kind of curious about
sex because it was such a taboo topic that I
was like, where am I going to learn about this?
So I started going to porn sites just to you know,
educate myself. I was always a good student. And then
I accidentally downloaded a virus to the family computer and
(22:08):
so I came home one day and my parents are
sitting They're like, Uleen, we need to talk to you.
And they're sitting stone faced in front of the computer
and there is on the monitor I can only describe
as like a snake of pop ups that are all
just each one more graphic than the last, and my Dad's.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Like, we have to talk to you about something.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
My mom looks and she just bursts into tears and
leaves the room, and then my dad goes, you know what,
never mind, you can go. And that was about the
sex talk that I received. So I think with that
key memory in mind, I was just like, I'm not
going to subject them to this book.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
I can so relate to not having a safe space
to talk about sex. Growing up, we did not talk
about it.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
I had to figure it out on my own.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
My sexual awakening was watching Patrick Swayze gyrate his hips
in Dirty Dancing and a Sleepover. That was the first
time I got the tingles.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
I feel like maybe the reason I love historical romance
so much is because I was so repressed that now
there is something on like an id level that really
appeals to me about the fact that it's like we
mustn't like a single touch is too much, Yeah, and
we have to go recover.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, something something got hard coded into me.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
There's something there, for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
But I think that's why you're so good at inserting
romantic tension into the stories, because you know what it
feels like to suppress.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
Oh yeah, but we mustn't quality I'm very familiar.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
With you're the master, we mustn't.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
It's yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, well, thank you
to my parents for that.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
So I don't want to give anything away, but I'm
dying to know about writing a sex scene because people
are using into to see coordinators on screen these days.
How do you coordinate these scenes within yourself?
Speaker 4 (24:05):
It honestly would have been much easier for me to
write like a fade to Black romance, because I think
that's what I've would have been much more comfortable with.
And I think that's why I did decide to write
sex on the page, because I wanted to push myself
a little bit, and so I was chasing what was
appealing to me. It was kind of like a self
discovery exercise. I feel like a sex therapist should probably
(24:26):
tell people to write a scene that feels horny to them,
because I learned so much about myself and what turns
me on in the process of writing this, and then,
you know, it was fun because then I would hand
it to my husband at the end of every night
of drafting and I'd be.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Like read this, you'd be like, oh, interesting, this is.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
Feeling a little instructional, and so I think it was
good for us honestly.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
So we both are big fans of you and this book,
and we want to give our listeners a little window
into your words. Will you do us the huge honor
of reading us a passage from the book?
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Yes, of course.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Okay, Bessie's let's get to my favorite part of our
author interviews. Here on the bright side, Julien Kwang is
going to read us a passage from her book this
month's Reese's Book Club pick, How to End a Love Story.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
She pulls up her call log and her thumb hovers
over his name. He'd pick up, She's sure of it.
She'd call and he'd pick up, and she'd tell him
she's moved back into her old apartment in New York
that doesn't feel like home anymore, and she misses him
so much that her heart hurts all the time, and
she loves him so much she sometimes can't fathom a
world where she's ever truly happy again. He'd come back,
(25:37):
and she'd blow off her plans for a reconciliation dinner
with her parents tomorrow and she'd be able to touch
him again, and and she would make it impossible for
either of them to move on. Let him go, she
reminds herself sharply. He deserves a happy, normal life with
a happy, extraordinary someone. The kind of woman who deserves
Grant would have found him on the right coast, the
(25:58):
one he calls home. He would have opened his arms
and she would have fallen into them for the first
time and known it was her favorite place in the
world right away. She wouldn't have had to fight a terrible,
confusing mixture of compulsions to flee and burrow at the
same time, choosing ultimately to flee. The kind of woman
who deserves Grant would have known what she had when
she had it, and wouldn't have waited until weeks later
to weep and wallow over the loss of him in
(26:20):
a bathtub for so long she now knows what her
toes would look like if she drowned. The kind of
woman who deserves Grant would be capable of the kind
of love that keeps little sisters alive. Grant Shepherd deserves
a Hollywood movie ending with swelling music and sweeping camera
movements and kissing in the rain. This movie would have
an epilogue with warm lighting and dad jokes and family
dinners in the summer garden over the end credits, and
(26:42):
Helen Sang has never been built for that kind of
uncomplicated happily.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Ever after.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
You lean it closed my eyes and just let it
wash over me, and that was so great. I love
all the details that you add. It feels so real
to me.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
I like that section all lot. I kind of wanted
to say to readers, I am not trying to be
Emily Henry because I love Emily's work and I love
her writing so much, and I know exactly from the
adaptation work I do what kind of movie I want
to watch when I'm watching an Emily Henry book to
(27:18):
screen adaptation.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
And I think that passage was a little bit.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Of my ode to that where I'm like, I know
where this would go if if I were doing that,
But that's not what I am as an author, and
that's not who this character is either.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yuleen, we're having a blast with you, but we got
to take a quick break. When we come back, we're
going to learn more about who you are as an author.
With a little help from our bright Side Besties.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
We're back with Yuleen Kwang talking all about her debut book,
How To End a Love Story. We have readers with questions,
so let's get in it. Hi. This is Larissa from Toronto.
Speaker 5 (28:03):
I really loved this book, especially how generous you were
with writing what I like to call micro moments like
Grant playing with Helen's hair or caressing her jaw, or
Helen kissing Grant's fingertips. You were very visual in your
descriptions and it gifted the reader these tender, sensual snapshots
that practically suspended time.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
So I have two parts to my question.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
First, do you feel like your skills as a screenwriter
allowed you to get more visual when writing these scenes?
And secondly, how did you balance writing these beautifully steamy
moments while also managing to leave space for the grief
that Helen and Grant were grappling with.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Yeah, thank you for that question. I think my work
as a screenwriter definitely did help me in that way,
because I wanted to create a visual and I think
I was thinking almost about like giable moments, maybe not
like deliberately, but I just knew that as somebody who
consumes media very obsessively, there are certain moments that I
(29:02):
obsess over in movies and TV shows that I then
end up replaying over and over again. So when the
technology was invented that I could reblog that to Tumblr,
I was thrilled. And so I think when I was writing,
I was chasing those types of moments when you talk
about the caressing of the jaw and those types of things,
And then in terms of balancing those kind of steamier
(29:25):
moments with the more serious topics like grief and things
like that, I think that is how I experience life.
I think I am both horny and sad and happy
and hopeful and depressed, and so I wanted to write
a book that kind of reflected that experience.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Eileene, I can hear our producers giggling in the other room.
That's how hard they're laughing with you.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Perfect.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, all right, I'm excited for this next one. This
question is a bit controversial.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Hi.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
I'm Rachel from Connecticut.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
I absolutely we love the interactions between Helen and Grant.
They're so heartbreaking and raw. It's so so beautiful. My
question is about adaptation. You've said that this book is
a love letter to adaptation, but whenever people watch an adaptation,
they say that the book is always better. As a screenwriter,
(30:20):
what does that mean to you now that you've written
your book, And how does this question make you feel
as an adapt to yourself.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
What a tricky mindfield of question. No, I love it.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
I will challenge the idea that the book is always
better when you come to the movie, you have all
of these preconceived notions about it.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
But there are also a lot of books that get
adapted that are kind of flawed.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
But with a good screenwriter and a great premise, the adaptation,
I think can sometimes really really sing. I won't say
the adaptation is better necessarily, but the adaptation becomes the
thing that introduces people back to the book. Legally Blonde,
I think, is a really great example of that. Not
(31:09):
a lot of people know that is an adaptation, but
it is if you watch the opening credits as often
as I did as a child, because I was obsessed
with that movie and I liked the book. But I
think the movie is still what I think of definitively
when I think of Legally Blonde. When I approach adaptation,
I am always thinking about what will service this story
(31:31):
best in its new medium, Because that is my goal.
I'm not really chasing a strictly faithful adaptation of the book,
because the book will always exist. I don't want to
be compared to the thing and be found lacking every
single time because I was trying to be so faithful
that I betrayed the screen audience. So I think ultimately
(31:54):
the purpose of successful adaptation is to bring new audiences
back to the source material, rather than to please only
the book fans.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
So one of the goals of Reese's Book Club is
to uplift and empower female authors. You've posted that you
have been training for this moment your entire life. What
has it meant to you to be an RBC pick?
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Oh my god, It's like.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
It is hard for me to describe that other than
through that one screenshot of Ellwood's walking up to the
bulletin board to see her name on the list of
people that Victor Garber has selected to be in his
summer internship, and she's just likeing to he Yes. I
watched that movie so many times that I memorized it.
(32:44):
I remember writing in the back of an old Lisa
Frank diary my memorized transcript of the movie.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
You're kidding me.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Yeah, No, I was just kind of wanting to experience
the movie again in my mind before bed.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
You Transcrip drived legally Blonde in your journal.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
Yes, as much as I could remember it, and so
it was like perfect day by Hoku is playing blonde hair.
We followed down, yeah, and so there was that. I
love you literally so much.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Meant to be here right now. It is so cute,
e Lean.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
So your wildest dreams have come true. Ellwoods picked your
book for her book club, and you're making your debut
as a director with an adaptation of one of the
most popular romance writers out right. Now, what are you
most proud of? With all the success?
Speaker 4 (33:35):
I feel like I am a little superstitious about calling
it success because we don't know, guys.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
I mean, let's call it. Let's call it like it
is an absolutely success.
Speaker 4 (33:46):
I listened to your Michelle Kwan episode and somebody said
something about I didn't come this far, yeah, just to
come this far, and that is kind of how I feel.
I'm like, I don't know that I would define this
as success, and this all feels like part of the journey.
What am I proud of?
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Though?
Speaker 3 (34:02):
I have been working on.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
Feeling my feelings more because I grew up in an
immigrant household. And I don't blame my parents for this
at all, because they came from like such a totally
different world than me. But I don't think there was
a culture of sitting with our feelings. It was always
let's focus on what needs to be done, and emotions
often were seen as something that would get in the
(34:26):
way of being effective. For a very long time, I
feel like I was very removed from my body, from
my emotions. I didn't really know how I felt about anything.
So I think maybe the thing I am proudest of
is I am sitting with those emotions a lot more
throughout this process. Right now, for instance, I feel anxious
(34:46):
in their books and also joy.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Well, we are both so excited to see the success
of this and also all that is to come for you.
So thank you so much for joining us on the
bright side. Brought a lot of sunshine to us today.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Sunshine and laughter and legally blonde references.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
Ah, I love that. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yuline Kwang is the author of the may Reese's book
Club pick How to End a Love Story. Check it
out wherever you get your books.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
We'll be announcing the June pick for Reese's book Club
next week, so don't miss it, and you can only
send us your Reese's book Club questions to Hello at
the brightsidepodcast dot com.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, Award winning comedian, actor
and producer Alana Glazer is here to talk about her
new movie Babes. You don't want to miss it.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Simone Boys.
You can find me at Simone Boice on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's ro Ba.
Y see you tomorrow. Keep get on the bright Side.
Hosts And Creators
Simone Boyce
Danielle Robay
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