Rebecca Serle shares what’s behind her magical realism and new book
LOS ANGELES: In Rebecca Serle’s new book “Expiration Dates: A Novel,” the protagonist, Daphne, knows when her relationships will end. A slip of paper always shows up with a name and a number for how long they will date. We meet Daphne on her way to a blind date with Jake — whose paper doesn’t have a number. This must mean he’s the one. Or is he? Is it helpful or a hinderance to have the answers? “I was thinking about fate and free will and which one wins,” Serle said recently over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “How much is within our control and how much is going to happen regardless of the decisions we make and the choices that we make?” Serle’s recent novels have blended fantasy and realism. In her last book, “One Italian Summer,” a woman meets a younger version of her mother while on vacation.
In “Expiration Dates,” Serle, who married in 2023, was inspired by her own dating history. ”I was single for a really long time,” she said. “I remember relationships would end and I would feel like, “This again? Didn’t I already learn this lesson?” Looking back, I see who I had to become before I met my husband, but it’s hard to see in the moment. That’s where the wish fulfillment of ‘Expiration Dates’ comes in. There is something so compelling about the idea how you might see a relationship if you weren’t entering into every one, as I did, thinking ‘This could be the one.’” Over the past several years, Serle has built a reputation as a writer of female characters whose personal transformations are precipitated by small but significant hints of magic embedded in the worlds they inhabit. Her 2014 young adult novel “Famous in Love” was turned into a Freeform show starring Bella Thorne, while 2010’s “When You Were Mine” eventually became Hulu movie “Rosaline,” starring Kaitlyn Dever. The rest of her projects, Serle says, are in “active development.” New Line acquired the rights to “In Five Years” in 2022, while Paramount owns film rights to “One Italian Summer.”
Serle spoke to The Associated Press about philosophy, what she tells her husband about her books, and why running and writing are a lot alike
What inspired you to start adding fantasy elements to your books?
In college I would write magical realism short stories. I read a lot of Aimee Bender and Haruki Murakami and enjoyed the way they would open up a universe and not explain it. Something about that just sparkled. I published four young adult novels before writing my first novel for adults which was “The Dinner List” in 2018. With that, I went back to how I began by writing magical realism. high school. I remember reading Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and being blown away.
Your readers enjoy the magic elements in your book. Do you ever feel pressure to continue to include those?
I’m working on a book right now that might be the last book that has some kind of magic in it. I want to keep reinventing myself as a writer and growing. But I’m also aware that I have an audience that for whatever reason, lovingly and wonderfully and surprisingly really likes what I do. We’ll see. Once the thing is no longer interesting to me, the books are not going to be interesting to read. That’s just the truth.
What has it been like introducing your husband to your writing?
I said to my husband early on, and I remind him all the time, “Happy marriages doesn’t make interesting books.” He’s going to inevitably recognise himself in everything that comes next, because the fabric of our lives are now woven together. We live together. We share a life together He’s going to recognize details of himself in a husband character. Of course he is. I’m writing it. But just because that person you know, has an affair doesn’t mean that that’s how I feel about him. That’s a hard thing sometimes for non-writers to understand.
You’ve recently started running regularly and say running is like writing. How so?
By the way, by running I mean like, 3 miles. I’m not marathoning, OK? But I never ran a mile in my life. I really had never run five minutes in my life. I recently started running because it was something I really wanted to learn how to do. My knees would hurt when I ran for five minutes, but they don’t hurt now that I run for half an hour.
Your ability to keep moving and your lung capacity adapts, but I think what really adapts is your brain. Your brain says, ‘I know I can do this; I know I can complete this.’ I think that is exactly what it means to write a book. Every time I sit down to do it, it gets a litle bit easier, because I’ve done it before, and I know I can do it again You keep on and eventually something gets built.
NEW YORK: Diarra Kilpatrick recalls writing for NBC’S Debra Messing procedural “The Mysteries of Laura” when she got feedback from the network over wanting to have Messing’s character, a homicide detective with the NYPD, out on a date. “The network was like, ‘Do people hate her? There are still criminals at large.” And I remember thinking, ’What? She has to have something for her,” Kilpatrick said recently over Zoom. A date is now at the centre of a new comedic mystery series Kilpatrick created, executive produces and stars in for BET+ called “Diarra from Detroit.” Kilpatrick (“Perry Mason”) plays a school teacher — also named Diarra — who is going through a divorce and has returned to her childhood home. She meets a man on the dating app Tinder and the two spend the night together. When Diarra doesn’t hear from him again, her friends say she’s been ghosted, but her conclusion is that something must be wrong and launches an investigation. This amateur sleuthing leads Diarra into dangerous situations.
Ghosting, says Kilpatrick, “is something that happens to all my girlfriends. They talk about it with such ease. They’re like, ‘I was talking to this guy, and then he ghosted. And so then I was talking to that guy, and then I ghosted.’ It’s such a prolific act. I feel like no one’s really talking about what it’s saying about us as a society, that we just aren’t communicating with each other anymore.” Kenya Barris, creator of hit shows such as “black-ish” and “grown-ish,” is also an executive producer on the series. Barris is a partner at BET Studios and “Diarra from Detroit” is its first scripted series.
Kilpatrick recalls first meeting Barris at the NAACP Awards in 2017 where he told her he had read one of her scripts. “That was such a big moment for me because I was like, ‘How on earth would you ever have time to read my script?’” recalled Kilpatrick. “It was years before it turned into anything but was just kind of that Black Hollywood ‘How do you do’ turning into something that’s amazing.”
Like her TV character, Kilpatrick is from Detroit and her last name is familiar. Kilpatrick’s father is Bernard Kilpatrick and her half-brother is disgraced former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick who was convicted in 2013 on corruption charges. He served more than seven years of a 28 year sentence and was granted clemency by President Trump in 2021. The elder Fitzpatrick, who worked on political campaigns including his son’s mayoral bid and former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s 2002 campaign, was also convicted in 2013 of tax fraud and spent 10 months in prison.
Kilpatrick says she’s aware that questions will come up about her family now that she’s in the spotlight. ”I’m prepared for it,” she said.
“I do realise that in order to amplify my voice, I have to amplify my face, too. And that’s just going to come with the territory.” Kilpatrick atributes spending time with her dad growing up that helped her to learn about the different neighbourhoods of Detroit and to appreciate its people.
“I say I’m from all of Detroit because on the weekends, it was very common for my dad to be running a campaign or something, and me to be in the campaign office with him or going canvassing, passing out literature in a neighborhood, asking people to vote for this person or that person. So I saw a lot of the city, and I had a really warm point of view on it.” Diarra Kilpatrick is an American actress, writer and producer. She produced, wrote and starred in the ABC web-series, “American Koko” (2017), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actress in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series nomination. From 2020 to 2023, Kilpatrick starred in the HBO period drama series, “Perry Mason.”