A book critic and an author spark an unlikely romance in “Bad Words”

This post was originally published on Audible.com.

Note: Text has been lightly edited and does not match audio exactly.

Patty K. Rivera: Hi listeners. I'm Audible Editor Patty K. Rivera, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Ríoghnach Robinson about her adult debut, Bad Words. With a title like that, I knew we were in for some good banter, but Parker and Selina certainly have a lot more than a few choice words between them. Their romance takes us behind the scenes of the book world, while asking some interesting questions about what happens when the person who gets under your skin also happens to be the person you can't stop thinking about. Ríoghnach, I'm so excited to dig into Bad Words with you. Welcome.

Ríoghnach Robinson: Thank you so much. It's such a delight to be here.

I spent my birthday with Bad Words. I can't think of a better birthday treat for myself than to spend the day just immersed in a world that's all about books and a world that feels kind of meta. Like, Bad Words, yes, it's an amazing romance, but for a publishing person, it's so meta. I haven't read or listened to something so meta since R.F. Kuang's Yellowface. It gave me some Yellowface vibes, but more happiness, more love.

More love, more love. I have been really gratified that book people seem to enjoy the book because I guess I'm always chasing the feeling when I'm reading that I can turn off my author brain and I'm not thinking about the text as a text, or I'm not critically reading at all. That's the best feeling, is when I can actually, really escape into something. And for me, I feel as though it's maybe sort of a big ask for publishing people to pick up Bad Words and be like, "Great, this thing that you spend all of your time thinking about and doing? Time for you to get plunged back in there. Have fun!"

No, I get it. It's an interesting place for us to be in. I get it. Especially preparing for this conversation, I'm like, "Ooh, I'm enjoying this so much," but then I'm also like, "Ooh, okay. Wait, wait, wait. Pay attention. You have to prepare for an interview." So, Selina is a book critic, and Parker is an author, which puts two people who experience books from very different sides of the conversation at the center of a romance. What made you want to explore that dynamic through a love story?

I think the author/critic dynamic is interesting to me in a million ways. One thing that's interesting about the author/critic dynamic is that it can be so acrimonious. You can really have the sense of being somebody's kind of mortal enemy. I know many writers who, they've gotten a cruel trade review or maybe even seen a mean review from a reader floating around online or been taken down by a critic in some way, and the book world is pretty small, so that creates hard feelings. It creates a sort of enemies dynamic, which is something that, romantically speaking, I think the enemies-to-lovers framework is fun, because you are definitely filling a whole book with dramatic material if there are two people with a genuine reason to feel antipathy toward each other.

But I think it’s rare to find a situation in which two people can hate each other so much, or at least, there can be such hard feelings, and yet there's not really a moral charge to it, basically. You can think that somebody's a bad person if they are a critic and write a really devastating review of your work, but that is their job. So, in my mind, both characters are right. Both characters are fundamentally good people, trying their best. But they're in this framework, they're in this dynamic that it's almost predestined that you're going to hurt feelings, you're going to make enemies, you're going to step on toes in a very small industry where things are very personal and very painful, and where there's a lot of financial precarity involved, because this industry's not bursting with money. So, yeah, there's a lot there that appeals to me.

I have to go back to something you said, which is there is a job involved, and Selina really does touch on that at one point in the book. I'm not going into spoiler territory, I will do my best here, but there is one part where she says, "But he hasn't even refuted anything I've said."

It was really important to me that Selina not have to back down on her feeling toward the book, I guess, because I do think that we feel differently toward a book every time we read it. Sometimes you're feeling more generous. Sometimes you're in the right head space. Sometimes you've experienced something that a book speaks to. Sometimes you have not yet lived what you might need to have lived to understand a book properly. Sometimes you're too young.

I've recently had this experience rereading Moby-Dick. My feeling is overwhelm at the beauty of the language and the vibrancy of the language. In high school, I was assigned Moby-Dick for a long-read project, and we were supposed to keep a reading diary. Essentially, I spent the entire diary talking about how much I despised the book and how long and pointless I found it. So, you know, we can have these huge turnarounds on books.

I don't think that my current admiration and appreciation for [Herman] Melville erases my past feeling. I think they're two valid feelings at two different stages of life. I think, for me, there was never a world in which Selina was going to have to recant her feelings because her feelings were too painful for Parker to deal with. I just think that wouldn't be interesting to me.

I really do love that you touched on the very real reason why it wouldn't make sense for her to recant anything. She says, "Oh, it would cause doubt on our editorial process." And I love that she chooses herself in that regard.

Selina is nothing if not a person who's able to draw a hard line and stick to it.

I could learn a thing or two from Selina, honestly.

As could I. I think, in my mind, maybe this is because I'm an inveterate, recovering people pleaser, but I feel that Selina is a bit of, for me, she's a bit of a fantasy. She's a bit of a wish-fulfillment character. I dream of having the level of self-possession that she has and her acceptance of losing approval from certain people. I think that's an admirable trait. I think it's difficult to do right now, in a world where everyone feels a little bit overexposed all the time, and it feels destructive to be disliked. But yeah, I think I could stand to be a little bit closer to her, I think.

Selina really was one of those characters that resonated deeper than I thought. Her relationship with her parents hit so home to me. Those were the chapters that I reread the most.

Oh, I'm so happy to hear that.

How she dealt with that, because I deal with that. That is my reality. You get me? I have parents that, when I was like, "Yeah, I know you guys came to this country, and immigrant experience and all the things, so that I can become a surgeon. I want to read books about romance, and I want to talk about them."

And here you are, doing surgery on books. There we go.

Right, right. And trying, even to this day, trying to explain that to them—I remember going to school and at some point being like, "This isn't for me." I failed chemistry three times. Like, "This is not for me." So, then, "Oh, I want to study English." And my parents, "You want to study English? You already speak English."

God, if only we lived in a world where getting into books and art and teaching were enormously overpaid jobs, and immigrant parents would be like, "What do you mean you wanna be a doctor or a lawyer? How about you go into publishing?" (laughs)

In an ideal world, right?

It would be funny, at least.

So, Selina has spent so much time of her life trying to be the person her family doesn't have to worry about, even when she's struggling herself. How did growing up in that role shape the way she approaches love and what she allows herself to need from Parker?

Selina is somebody who grew up with really intense feelings of alienation. Parker also experiences alienation but in a very different way. Selina's world, to me, feels smaller. It feels more intimate. It feels more curated, maybe appropriately, for a critic. But I think my sense is that she is somebody who has few people close. She tends to those relationships very carefully. She tends to everything in her life kind of carefully. We see her taking care of her home in kind of a similar way. She's pruning and watering and taking care of these relationships.

I think that this limited scope of human contact allows her a great deal of freedom of movement, of independence. She can spend her days doing what she likes, because in some ways, she's sort of unburdened. But then the feeling of being totally free and unburdened is also a lonely feeling, right? So, I think the counterpoint to that, Parker, who's very crowded with many friends, many people who need him, who simply enjoy being around him, who are not intimidated by him, his world is one that is loud and crowded. So, I think they have things to learn from each other, admire about each other, and envy in each other. I think one of the pleasures of writing the book was every moment in which they start to appreciate what the other has built for themselves, even as they recognize it in no way resembles their own life and their own choices.

You are absolutely right. I love that you touched on that, because there's a lot about Parker that we don't fully understand until much later in the story. I think knowing certain things about him too early would have completely changed the way that we experienced his character. I'm curious, how did you approach writing Parker so that we can get to know him before we got to know the whole story?

Both of these characters were very fun to write. I think Parker is somebody who's very earnest. He's maybe a little pompous and pretentious, bless his heart. But the thing is that he's a genuinely kind, nice person as well. I think sometimes people can think of these people-pleasing personalities as people who can't abide the thought of having done anything wrong or people who are trying to be manipulative, in order to polish, burnish their own reputations. I don't really see him like that at all.

I think he likes to help people. I think he likes to be engaged with other people's lives. I don't necessarily get too deep into his writing process, but I do think that his desires to engage with other people and his interest in them is something that translates to his interest in writing, where he can have his space to play creatively. He participates a lot in the world of people around him, and I think that probably enables him to do his work.

Timing things out from his side was a little bit tricky, actually, in the early going, because Parker is not constitutionally an angry person. It's actually an important part of the book that he is not typically like the way that he behaves online, early in the book.

Right. I think there's this one part where, after the initial confrontation, people were like, "This is so unlike you."

Yes, right.

Everyone was so shocked, that it was like, "Okay, who are you and where's the real Parker?"

Exactly, yeah. But there's limited space before all of the inciting action to get that sense across. So, a lot of that kind of characterization, I think, does have to come from these secondary sources. With Parker's mental health, I think if you are an adult person with mental health problems, and they're pretty well managed, I think they are background. They're not really a problem until abruptly they erupt back into your life and redeclare their presence. With Parker, I imagine that he does not actively think about his mental health for most of the book and most of his days. But sometimes those problems can change your dynamics with other people.

It's tough, because you do want to be vulnerable with people. You do want to have a support system. You do want to open up to people. But at the same time, once people know, they know. Once you behave a certain way, you can't unbehave that way. The intimacy that he has with his roommate in terms of being known to him in that way, I think Parker sees it as a blessing and a curse, where he's like, "Here's somebody who really knows and understands what's going on with me," but at the same time, it's difficult to have that lens affixed over all of your behavior and to be aware that this other person may be filtering everything that you do through this lens.

You are absolutely right. It was interesting to see the mental health aspect of it and how it played out. Because it was well managed, for the most part, and then when he had those real moments of "Oh, man, this is bad." And when he finally reveals his struggles, you see the people around him react, and there's a level of how he was dealing with it, managing, so to speak, and then actually, "Okay, this is something that's out there and it's out beyond me, and now people know."

I think one just troubling, recurring thing you see online is the forced disclosure of people's really personal information in order to provide context for behaviors that are being judged or interpreted in a certain way that only makes sense once you know this really sensitive, private stuff about people. You see it with queer public figures being forced out of the closet. You see it with people who have maybe health conditions whose actions or words have been taken to mean one thing. And maybe if we considered for one moment that maybe they were speaking from a place of good faith and knowledge instead of from a place of ignorance and accusation, maybe people would not come for each other in these ways. But, I mean, a big part of the book is how we only ever get these limited windows of each other, and people can do their best to interpret what they're seeing, but generally, we're all gonna fall a little short.

I love that you said that, because it leads right into just the real conversations that are happening in author and reader spaces. From authors reading reviews to readers discussing books online, and how quickly criticism can become a pile-on. As an author yourself, what was it like exploring that relationship from both sides?

It felt like a pretty comfortable space for me to explore. At the time that I started drafting, which was in early 2023, I had been published for about seven years, had been watching things percolate in publishing, of course, during that time. But I also think, I have been an author for 10 years now; I've been a reader since I can remember. I think sometimes people forget that authors are always readers first and readers for decades longer, generally, than they have been novelists. And part of being a reader and developing a taste and developing a voice is figuring out what you do and don't like, this process of internal criticism. Authors are not typically, quote, "allowed," unquote, to comment on criticism conversations in public book spaces because it's a little gauche. I do think it's a little bit inappropriate. I don't think that authors should be responding to reviewers. I don't think that creates a healthy critical climate, and I do feel strongly that a healthy, robust critical climate is important for a book space where we're discovering new, wonderful things.

That said, I think just because authors are not really participating in this space, it doesn't mean that we don't understand where criticism comes from and where harsh opinions on books come from. A lot of my writer friends are some of the toughest readers I know, and we're not saying that stuff. We don't want to hurt people's feelings. We don't want to inject ourselves into these conversations where we might not belong or might not feel comfortable. But I have been saying, about this book, that I agree with both characters. It is not a stretch for me to write Selina, because I love reading criticism. I think criticism is invaluable. And I have personally felt, as a reader, some of the things that she says and does. The author/critic void is, I think, probably smaller than people think it is.

Interesting. Now, did writing Parker change your own relationship with reviews at all, how you see them?

No, not really. No, I don't think so. I think we need a healthy critical climate. We need haters. We need people who are gonna speak the truth. Like, people should not be watering themselves down. I do think there is something to be said about whether criticism is in good faith and whether it actually adds something to the work and whether it engages with the work in a good faith, humane way. I don't really think that something that is a, quote, "piece of criticism," unquote, but really is just an attack on an author for whatever reason or just kind of making glib, throwaway lines to make a book seem ridiculous, I don't personally really think that that adds much to the literary conversation. But I think that something can be really harsh, something can be really brutal to read, and still feel additive and important, and it doesn't dismiss a work.

I totally get what you're saying, and I know for everyone that I've been recommending it to, I'm just like, "Come back and let's talk about some of these reader conversations that we have about the parasocial relationships that we have in the reading world." So, I'll say that.

I hope it is a conversation piece. I hope it does trigger some conversation. Really, no matter how people feel about the book, I hope that it leads to some fun chats.

I personally loved it. I just wish Selina existed out in the world so I can befriend her.

Now, listeners, I will get into some Bad Words spoilers with these next two questions, so if you haven't finished listening yet, this is your warning to come back to this part of the chat later.

So, one of the things that really just made it more palpable for me was the performance. Katharine Chin and Major Curda bring Selina and Parker to life in the audiobook. What did it feel like hearing their banter and chemistry performed, especially when so much of their relationship depends on exactly how something is said?

There's something kind of uncanny about it when you listen to the perfect performance of something that you imagined. These voices in my head were very specific. Katharine and Major really sound like them. Everything from the actual timbre of their voices to the way that they feel. I think the feeling that Katharine brings, the vulnerability that she brings to somebody hard-edged, is just the perfect balance. And then Major's earnestness and kind of sweetness to his vocal quality, and then also to the performance and his big feelings, it's all right there.

That's it. And I don't mean this as an insult, I can't pick up the book and read it in Patty's voice anymore because, like, no. It just doesn't do it. With the audiobook, audio listeners also get a very special bonus scene with Parker in the booth recording his own audiobook, which I absolutely loved. What a treat, Ríoghnach.

It was really fun to write.

Did you write that scene specifically for audio?

I did. Yes. The audio team came to me, and I believe it was the audio team's idea of maybe it could involve Parker's book somehow. Immediately, I was like, "Oh, this is so fun." It starts off as though it's a normal audiobook, and then slowly unravels. And then you start to hear all of the unedited bits and pieces behind the scenes, which I think is fun, because I think it also reflects what I was trying to do with the whole book, which is to sort of take people under the veneer of publishing and to peel that away a little bit and let people see underneath. The bonus scene was so fun to write, everything from the actual bits of these extraordinary times to actually getting to have Parker and Selina interact in sort of real space.

I loved it so much. I was eating it up. I was like, "Oh, my goodness, the magic of the audio.” I have had the pleasure of sitting in on some recordings, and it was so accurate to the stopping and starting that happens when someone's recording and the messing up and the ahem, ahem. I was just like, "Okay, Ríoghnach is a genius for this." And then the second thing is, the audio team who made this happen, also geniuses.

I will say it was not a huge imaginative thing for me because I have recorded a couple of audiobooks, so it was something that I was luckily a little bit conversant in and could throw in bits that I know well, such as drinking a lot of tea and trying to get all of the smacks out of your mouth before you lean into the mic.

I get to sit in here and I get to interview authors, but the book-recording part, I'm just like, "Oh, no." That's probably different than sitting here talking to an author and fangirling out for an hour. No matter how many times I see people, "Oh, this is a trick of the trade," I'm just like, "It's a different beast to hop in there and record."

In the booth.

Yeah, I'm good on this side. Now that Bad Words is out and has plenty of people saying good words about it, what's next for you?

So, my next book is going to be another YA book. It's out next summer. It's called Close Up on His Face. It'll be out from Union Square Hachette, and it is a corporate satire set in an alternate present where companies and universities can buy ad space on people's skin in the form of glowing tattoos. It's a bit of a wild one. Because what everyone wants from young adult is corporate satire, right? Anyway, and then after that is wrapped, which should be kind of imminently, we should probably be going into more of the production-y stuff pretty soon. But then I need to look at my next St. Martin's project, and I can't say much about it yet. It is definitely going to be in the same vein as Bad Words, which is an upmarket romance, hopefully with some more complications and hopefully conversation starters, and I gotta get this right. Ooh. Oh, God.

You got it. You've been doing this for a decade. Part of me wants to ask if your next YA will be under your pen name.

It will, yes.

Yes. Okay, fantastic.

My pen name is Riley Redgate.

Part of me was like, "Why didn't you write this under Riley..." But I understand wanting to separate the adult and the YA.

Yeah. I got into YA pretty young. I came up with that pen name with friends on a writer's forum when I was like 15 or 16, and I've been using it since then for my kid lit stuff. I just like it and think it's fun.

Listen, I love a "I'm gonna switch between the two, depending on my writing mood."

Exactly.

Love that.

Maybe depending on my mood for the day.

Now, I love asking the next question I'm going to ask, and I am especially excited to ask you this question because these two characters are so, so bookish. If Parker and Selina could each recommend an Audible listen to me, what would it be?

Oh, interesting. Interesting. I've been really getting behind one of Parker's recent favorites being Elaine Castillo's Moderation, which is just a terrific book. I mean, the writing is just so incredible. And then Selina, I feel like maybe a Rachel Cusk. I feel like there's something Cusk-y about Selina. Maybe the Outline Trilogy. I haven't listened to either of these on audio, so I'll have to change that. But I'm interested in both of those titles, those kind of representative titles. I do have reading lists for both of them, which I will, at some point, put on social media, but for now, those two.

Please do, because one of the things I love, when they were on the panel and she gives this obscure book, and he looks at her like, "What?"

Anna Kavan, yes. Asylum Piece. Great book.

There you go. So, we've got recommendations galore in Bad Words.

Yes. Anna Kavan is getting reprinted by Pushkin Press. They're putting out new editions of her work with these gorgeous covers. I do know a couple of friends who, when they read Bad Words, didn't know that she was a real person, because she is a little bit genuinely obscure. But yes, they are out there, and maybe they'll reprint Asylum Piece, too, soon.

Who knows? Maybe we'll get an audiobook for it someday if one doesn't already exist, right?

Yes, exactly. Katharine Chin can narrate it.

Wait, just saying, if it happens, you and I got that ball started.

Got it. Claiming credit.

Oh, my goodness, Rioghnach, it has been so much fun talking to you today about Bad Words. I'm so excited for everyone to listen, but specifically people who love books. I just know they're going to love this as much as I did.

Well, I definitely wrote it for them, so I really hope it finds its way into the hands of bookworms.

I truly believe it will. And listeners, you can hear Bad Words on Audible now. Happy listening.