Bestselling author Annabel Monaghan returns to the podcast to discuss her latest novel, IT’S A LOVE STORY, an adorable, poignant rom-com about a former teen star-turned-Hollywood producer navigating second chances, big lies, and a complicated love with a charming (and quiet) man. Annabel reveals how the story evolved over twelve drafts, why she’s drawn to messy characters, and what she’s learned from nearly 30 years of marriage about real love (“Love actually happens over breakfast…during our morning dog walk… in line at the DMV and in hospital rooms…”). The two also bond over big families, awkward Substack lives, and The Notebook.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome Annabel. Thank you for coming back on Totally Booked with Zibby to talk about Its Love Story, your fourth novel. Congrats. 

Annabel: Thank you. Thank you so much. This is the highlight of my year coming on your podcast.

Zibby: Oh, please. Oh my gosh. 

Annabel: Thank you for having me back. 

Zibby: I was looking, you have two more live events I think today for this book, right? Don't you have a Substack Live, which I've never done by the way. 

Annabel: I do tomorrow. 

Zibby: Oh, tomorrow. 

Annabel: And the stress that I feel having to press that button. Maybe it's the wrong button.

I don't know. It's all very mysterious when it works out. 

Zibby: Yeah. I actually did try to do a Substack live, not knowing that it immediately sends an email, so I was just like walking down the street at a retreat and then I realized that like everyone had gotten the email and I was like, this is not good.

But anyway. Yeah. So I hope you have better luck than me. Okay. It's A Love Story. What is, it's a love story about please. 

Annabel: So it is the story of Jane Jackson, who is a former teen star who was when she was on TV as a teen, she was the punchline of every joke. She was the one who was on the receiving side of a milkshake to the face, or she sat in the nachos.

Ha. And now she's all grown up and she's trying to make it as a producer in Hollywood, and she's about to get her. First project green lit, like it's all gonna happen and it starts falling apart. And in a panic, she tells a really huge lie to buy herself a little bit of time. And now she has to rely on the one guy.

She really cannot stand in the world to help her make this happen. And his name is Dan Finnegan and he is so cute. Zippy, like there's no cute, like Dan Finnegan. 

Zibby: Andy is an identical twin, which is amazing. He is? Yes. Wow. With three other brothers. Oh my gosh. Spoiler. 

Annabel: So many to choose from. Yes. 

Zibby: Yeah. Yeah.

The scene in the house where she first walks in and meets the whole clan of like nieces and nephews, like all the kids and all the cute boys, and she's just what kind of land have I entered here? What is, especially as an only child herself. 

Annabel: Wow. Have you ever had that experience where you walk into a really big family and it's like there's something happening here and I don't know what it is.

This has happened to me before. 

Zibby: It happened to me too. I dated a guy who had three brothers and a dog, and it was like, I had my one brother and my parents were divorced and it was so quiet in my house and I walked in and I was like, oh my gosh, this is insane. Yeah. Yeah. It was like that. So thank you for I like it.

I like it bringing us back. 

Annabel: I just think there's a little bit of honesty in a giant family like that. I don't have a giant family, but we're every, but everything's out in the open. And I always, I wanted to write about that kind of big family where everybody just busts on each other, but nothing's too serious.

Because sometimes the really serious thing is the quiet thing that isn't un, that's unsaid in a family. And that's where things get dangerous. 

Zibby: Very true. Very true. Yeah. So you have multiple sort of plot lines going here. You, or settings even, I should say. So there's the aspiring I'm hiding under my desk.

I, I really want my movie to get picked up and I'll do anything. And I'm like, gonna talk myself into it. And then there's the most sort of vulnerable feelings in a relationship. And then there's. Okay. Sorry, hold on. Let me back up so I don't give anything away. So there's the mo, the complicated mother daughter relationships and the intimacy of that.

So you have all these different. Puddles where people can find themselves and something that relates most to them. Was there one piece of this you were drawn most to when you started? 

Annabel: When I started, I just wanted to write about, I wanted to write about somebody who grew up and went through puberty on tv.

When I was that age, it was like, for me, it was a time of trying things on. I had a big perm and permed bangs and I, you're trying on how you look and how your personality is, and you're trying to figure out who you are. And so I wanted to write about a person who had grown up reading from a script, wearing a costume, being told where to stand, being told that she was a joke who grew up.

And what I was surprised about is she literally grows up to be a person who is so unselfaware like she has no idea who she is. She's a mess. And I really loved writing about somebody who was a mess. So that was where I started. And then all of the rest of it, like all of what she had been through as a kid came to me as I was writing.

But it, for me, it was more about her. I. Like trying to be figure out as an adult what all the stuff she should have figured out when she was 15. 

Zibby: Interesting. Okay. And so what are your actual thoughts on the notebook? Because there is a debate in the book. 

Annabel: Okay, so I'm a normal person with I am emotionally regulated.

I loved the notebook. And I think that's the right opinion. Okay. I will die on that hill. Jane and Dan disagree about the notebook for a variety of reasons, and it was so fun to write because there really are a lot of ways to hate on that movie. If you've watched it a thousand times, it does fall apart in your hands.

Zibby: I have not watched it as much as you, obviously I know I Now I need to go back. I'm like, how many times has Anabel watch this movie? 

Annabel: Oh no. A million times. But like, why didn't Ali ever just go to the mailbox and see if he had written, if I was madly in love and my boyfriend didn't write to me for a year, I'd maybe go check the mailbox.

Yeah. Or even the post office. Hello. Yeah. Yeah. I would start dating the postman. To make sure I got those letters. Anyways, so there are a lot of, and it was just like such a funny fight. It's so stupid, right? But it was a very funny fight to write about. 

Zibby: Did you have to do some digging into the world behind the scenes and Hollywood and all of that?

Where did all that come from? 

Annabel: A little bit, I like I, I had a couple of friends that I asked just the most ridiculous questions to just for like words and like what your career trajectory would be, and they gave me so much information. I remembered why I don't write nonfiction, because I really don't like a lot of information and I just took seven words of what they said.

So it's all, it's not really a deep dive into Hollywood, 

Zibby: but it's enough though. You get like a, no, it's 

Annabel: enough. I learned more than I wanted to learn and then I was like, no one reading my books needs to know all this. This is just how it, this is just how it's gonna be. 

Zibby: So I read the book and then once I finished, I read the questions at the end and I was like, oh, look at that.

There are questions at the end of this book. And Anvil's already answered all these questions, so I'm gonna make sure not to ask her any of these questions. But then as I was reading, there was a quote that you had in here that I loved so much I took a picture of, and I think I'm gonna post if you don't mind.

But anyway, this is what you said. Actually, let me back up and read the beginning. You said there are definitely elements of my own marriage in Renie and Cormax. I have been married for a thousand years, and what I've learned is that real love is not like it is in that Tiffany ad where she's in her best dress and he's in a tux hiding a blue box.

Behind his back. That has literally never happened to me in my life. Love actually happens over breakfast. It happens during our morning dog walk where we talk through our plans for the day and laugh about something we saw on TV a decade ago. It happens in line with the DMV and in hospital rooms and over texts from Costco.

I found that long-lasting love is about just showing up for the other person, giving them the benefit of the doubt, and treating them like they're as important as your house keys. 

Annabel: Sibi. You know what's funny? I was thinking right before I signed into this podcast that last year you made me cry and I think that could almost make me cry again.

I. I forgot that I wrote that. Yeah, I do. That is how I feel. I do, I've been married almost 30 years and my husband is not like the guy with the grand gestures. And I think that we all like growing up watching rom-coms and love stories. We want the parade, where the guy comes in on the float and it's the big, I love you in front of everybody, and that's it's just not how it is.

After. Time and I have found increasingly, like probably more and more like in the last 10 years of my marriage, I just feel like it's those quiet things where like he notices I'm out of the sparkling water that I like and goes and buys it and I'm like, I open the fridge and there's the sparkling water because he was thinking about me during the day and I'm like.

I love this man so much, and since my husband's retired, it's like we do have these routines that are so quiet, but the dog walk is like a morning meeting. 

Zibby: That's so nice. It is really nice. Thank you. Thank you for writing that because I think those moments are so often taken for granted, right? We don't even pay attention to them, and yet of course, that's where all of the magic lies really.

No, 

Annabel: that's where it's that quiet stuff. And I think that was the whole point of this book once I had written it six times, is this quieter kind of love. Like Dan is a quiet man. 

And ps I love a quiet man. And he it's all very steady and constant. And through his parents' marriage how that steady, constant, non flashy thing is just like, has a lot of weight to it.

Zibby: And you talk about how emotional he is too. There's one point when he says he's been crying for a week straight. Yeah. And that's so sweet. Most men don't say that. 

Annabel: Yeah. 

Zibby: But 

Annabel: they do 

Zibby: cry. I. They do cry, but they don't say it. They don't say it. 

Annabel: Yeah. It's a really nice way to say, I trust you and I care about you, is to tell somebody that you cried.

So 

Zibby: you 

Annabel: wrote this 

Zibby: book 

Annabel: six 

Zibby: times? Oh God, no. 

Annabel: I wrote this book. This book. I probably wrote this book 12 times. I've written this book well times. Yeah. I just, the first three drafts were so far away from where it ended up. I was like, I knew I was trying to tell a story, I just couldn't find it. And it's terrifying if you write a book the way I write a book, which is just.

To sit down and write a book, it's terrifying to not really know where you're going. The pop star that they were after. The first three drafts was a woman. Oh. And had nothing. They had never met her before. And then I was like, this is not working. So I started again. Yeah. I wrote a lot of drafts of this book.

Zibby: So when you say, did you actually throw the whole thing away and start a new document? 

No, 

Annabel: I never do that because I don't think I could survive that, but I often delete a third of a book. I actually just did that with the book I'm writing right now. I just deleted a third of it. I was like wrong way.

This, it's, it sounds horrible, but I've done this a bunch of times now, and it's the only way. It's like there's something in me that I'm trying to say, and it's the only way I can excavate it is by actually writing. Huh. If I knew another way I would do it. Trust me, my editor would be so happy. But it's just not, that's just not how it goes.

Zibby: At least it's only a third, right? Yeah. Things could be worse. It could be worse Half. Yes, 

Annabel: exactly. Wait, what is the new book? I'm working on a book right now about, I think we talked about this a little bit in Arizona. She is a woman, a single mom, she's 39, she's a kindergarten teacher.

She works part-time in her dad's fish store and she needs to pose as this, as the girlfriend of this guy who's the heir to a huge real estate fortune. He's like a Vanderbilt. The whole thing takes place in a fake town next to Newport. Oh, that'll be nice. Yeah. I love make, I love a fake town.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Annabel: And I feel like I'm the designer here's where the butcher is, here's where the diner is. 

Zibby: So how are you keeping up this pace? Especially if you're writing and deleting and writing and deleting, like you're, you have so many books coming out so fast. How are you doing that? 

Annabel: It's one a year and I have.

Recently talked to writers who write three books a year and two and three books a year, and they're like, oh, you're only writing a book a year. I think it's a lot to write a book a year, and I work, I work seven days a week. I'm always working it. I think it would be perfect if the year was 14 months long, like if, I think that's how long it takes in like a more reasonable pace.

But frankly I really love doing it. I love writing a book. I don't really mind deleting a third and digging in. Again, I, it's almost like a crossword puzzle to me. Like I, I enjoy figuring it out. So I don't know how else I'd be spending my time if I wasn't doing this 

Zibby: That's fair.

There can't be that many people who are writing two and three books a year. Are there? 

Annabel: In Romance, there are. 

Zibby: Okay. There. 

Annabel: And they're just like spontaneous, like Allie Hazelwood just announced a book. Like I'd never heard of it and it's coming out in a week. Like when did you, because you just released a book.

So what? What's happening, people are prolific and with my starting over again all the time process, I am not gonna ever be more prolific than I am. 

Zibby: Interesting. There's this whole Instagram jealousy thing going on in the book as well, where one of the other stars, what's her name? Allison Brie, what?

I'm totally forgetting her name. The one who becomes really famous. What is her name? I can't remember. I can't, you can't remember either. Okay, great. I think it's like Allison or Bree or whatever. I don't, anyway, 

Annabel: it doesn't, as soon as we're done, her name's gonna come to me, but I okay. 

Zibby: The point is not even about her.

The point is that she's on Instagram and is sharing her like perfect life all the time with the bazillion followers and of course, making everyone else feel badly about their own lives when they watch her life. Talk a little bit about that. 

Annabel: Oh my gosh. I don't think I need to explain that to anybody, but what, when I really started thinking about that is when I read Jeanette McCurdy's, I'm glad my mom died.

Really started thinking about Teen Stars and I started thinking about her on Sam and Kat and Victorious. My kids used to watch these shows all the time, and I used to think like. Or I was started thinking about what do all those people who were on those shows think about the fact that Ariana Grande is a billionaire now?

Like she used to be the girl who stood in the background and was like, ah. I dunno if you ever saw this show. I, yes. Yes. She's a billionaire, like out, she's killing it. And I don't know what happened to the rest of those kids. And so I think about we, we're all, and I've been like this in my life too, where I'm like, am I keeping up with the girls I went to high school with?

Because, one of 'em, head of breast surgery at Cedar-Sinai I'm like, I am not keeping up. And it's like how we measure ourselves in our lives about whatever. I'm against what everybody else is doing. I think people did that already, but with Instagram, showing like the highlight reel and everybody's best hair day every single day, I think it's easy to just lose track of where we are in the world and how much we've done.

Zibby: Okay. So who makes you feel worse when you look at their Instagram accounts? Who makes you feel bad about yourself? Like that. You're not keeping up. Is there anybody? 

Annabel: Yeah, you know what? I don't think I feel like this anymore. It was more when I was like, 15 years ago and I was home with kids. Okay.

And like mostly covered and vomit all the time. And then one girl from my high school class is like the chief technology officer at Facebook or something, and I'm like. What am I doing? Like I know what I'm doing, but like how did I not, yeah, I don't think, I don't think I feel like that as much now, which is the beauty of being in your fifties.

Nice. 

Zibby: Any other beauties? 

Annabel: Everything. Everything. No, I'm not kidding. Ziv, every, I don't know, people to talk are like so terrified about getting older. When you turn 50 call me on that day, you're gonna be like, not that far away. I'll call you in a year. Okay. No, Ziv. It's like something shifts, it's oh, you know what I'm gonna do?

I'm just gonna do what I wanna do. Like I, and all of a sudden it's like everything opens up. It's I, so far so good. I do love this decade. I. It's my favorite. Yet it needs like 

Zibby: better branding though. Fifties. 

Annabel: It needs better branding. And why? Why is all the branding about how we've gotta fix ourselves?

So we seem like we're in our thirties. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Annabel: I wasn't as happy in my thirties as I am now. So how about I brand myself, like I'm in my fifties. 

Zibby: Yeah. I would take my skin back though. 

Annabel: Yeah. Yeah. The skin, there are a couple things. There are a couple things. The collagen, yeah. 

Zibby: I would take back the collagen best in peace to the collagen 

Annabel: and the estrogen also.

Those were good things. 

Zibby: Okay, so the movie Star, or sorry, the singer who plays a big role in the book. And finding the singer and all of that, was a jerk back in the day and continues to just be a jerk. I kept hoping that he would be a really nice guy. Yeah. What are, what should we take away from that?

Annabel: We, sometimes people don't change and sometimes you think that everything, that everybody's gonna grow up and grow out of all their nonsense. But, being a jerk isn't about being a certain age. Some jerks are ageless. And anyways, if he had turned out to be a nice guy and accommodating, then I think things would've been too easy for her.

I. I always, when I'm writing a story, I want everybody to get what they want immediately. Like I want the whole book to be over in three chapters. 'cause I can't stand people suffering. But I really felt like for her to bring up all of her garbage that she'd been carrying around, she needed to really go there.

So he had to be a jerk.

Zibby: Kinda a shame though. 

Annabel: Yeah. It's a shame. 

Zibby: In the book, or maybe it was in the questions after you talked about writing a novel. Based on True Story, which is the fictitious pilot script or not pilot screenplay in the book. Are you thinking about that? Did you drop that idea? 

Annabel: I thought it was a fun idea for a minute, probably the minute that I was writing the response to that question.

So the screenplay that they're trying to get greenlit, it's a movie called True Story. And it's about that kind of love. It's about a quieter kind of love where you fight and you come back and you fight and you come back and it's not just like all one big honeymoon the whole time and the original name for it's a love story.

It was gonna be true story, but it sounded like true crime. So they, 

Zibby: I was thinking it was gonna be true story and then I was thinking, oh, people thought it would've, thought it was a memoir or something. 

Annabel: Yeah. The other thing is for all, any writers who are listening, I do think that publishers understand titles.

When they change my titles, it's always for the better. Like I'm giving up titles. I always make a title. It never gets, it never sticks. Anyways, I was thinking like that is a story there. The story that the MO of the movie they're trying to make, I was thinking it might be a fun. Book one day to write, like to actually write what I imagine that story was, but I don't have any plans to do that.

Zibby: That could be your first screenplay maybe. 

Annabel: Maybe, God, I don't know if I wanna learn a new trade. 

Zibby: Okay. You don't have to. 

Annabel: Okay. Still working on this one. 

Zibby: And I love, by the way, that this is set on Montana Avenue, right where my bookstore is in Santa Monica, which is so exciting where you'll be for an event for the books, which I'm very excited 

Annabel: June 1st.

June 1st. 

Zibby: June 1st, yes. 

Annabel: Oh my gosh. Like all of my family. I am, so I, that's the Los Angeles stop on my tour is always so much fun. It's like a really quick family reunion and all my little great nieces and nephews come. It's so fun. 

Zibby: I love it. And you were like, there are five bathing suit stores within walking distance.

And I was like, where are these bathing suit stores in walking distance on Montana? We need some more bathing suit stores. 

Annabel: I was thinking about the one on, on Topanga Canyon.

Can't think of what it's called. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Annabel: Anyways, yeah, I don't shop for bathing suits as much as I used to when I lived in Los Angeles.

Zibby: I only buy bathing suits online. I could never face a dressing room for a bathing suit. 

Annabel: Yeah, it's brutal. 

Zibby: Yeah. Favorite love story of all time. Do you have one? 

Annabel: Oh, the Notebook was the first one that came into my mind. I think that my favorite love story of all time is actually love story. The one where she dies on page.

Zibby: Yeah. Yeah. 

Annabel: I just, there's something so raw about that story. And I actually read that book a couple years ago for the hundredth time. But yeah, I would say love story. 

Zibby: So good. Maybe that was really good too. So good. Okay. Anabel, thank you so much for yet another great book in your trademark.

Awesome, witty, amazing voice, and congratulations. 

Annabel: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. And also, yay. 

Zibby: Yay. 

Annabel: Okay. Bye Al. 

Zibby: Bye bye.