Exclusive Interview
How Hannah Bonam-Young’s Love Story With Her Husband Inspired ‘People Watching’
What To Know
- Hannah Bonam-Young’s novel People Watching is inspired by her own love life and real memories in Baysville.
- People Watching became Hannah Bonam-Young’s first New York Times bestseller.
- The book explores themes of self-discovery and caretaking, drawing from Bonam-Young’s personal experiences with her grandmother’s memory care journey.
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for People Watching by Hannah Bonam-Young.]
Anyone who’s read Next of Kin and Out on a Limb knows that Hannah Bonam-Young has been a force to reckon with since Day 1. However, People Watching, which hit bookshelves on September 9, brought her career to a completely different level. Now, the BookTok sensation, best known for penning love stories about “diverse, disabled, marginalized, and LGBTQIA+ folks,” is a New York Times bestselling author. To celebrate her major accomplishment, Bonam-Young sat down with Swooon to chat all things People Watching, including her personal connection to the novel’s picturesque setting, her secret to writing the perfect spice scene, and more.
On the day of its release, Bonam-Young revealed that People Watching, which follows polar opposites Prudence Welch and Milo Kablukov, is her favorite book that she has written. Explaining how Prue and Milo are “really messy and vulnerable and raw and far from perfect,” she told Swooon, “I think it was refreshing to spend time with characters who feel like they’re in the midst of their journey, instead of having this kind of like perfect, well-oiled machine of life. They’re both figuring themselves out, journeying, and very lost and confused, but still capable of love.” She explained, “Hanging out with them felt like a reminder of not needing to be perfect because they aren’t, but they aren’t any less worthy of love or acceptance or friendship because of that.”
However, the characters aren’t the only aspect of her newest book that sets their story apart. Prudence’s hometown, Baysville, which serves as the setting for the novel, is a real location that Bonam-Young frequently visits with her husband’s family. She revealed that the first time she visited Baysville with her now-husband, she went up as a friend of his younger sibling at 14. “I begged his sibling to invite me because I had such a crush on him,” she explained. “I just wanted to spend a week with them, which, cringe and embarrassing, is the theme of my life, I think. But, I went up and I spent the whole week kind of following him around and wearing T-shirts of all his favorite bands.” However, the next year, she came with him as his girlfriend — proving there’s hope for all of us yearners out there.
“We were driving into town, and there’s a sign that says, ‘Welcome to Baysville.’ He did this silly little throwaway bit, saying, ‘Smile for the camera,’ like you do when you’re on a roller coaster ride. So we did that, and then we did it the next year, and the next year, and the next year.” She recalled, “We were driving up on this more recent visit, and I was thinking about all of these times that if there really was a camera there, like what it would look like to see a portrait of us throughout these years? We’re teenagers in the back of his mom’s van, and the next year, we’re in his first car, and it’s like a beat-up Toyota. The next year, we’re in my first car, and the next year after that, we’re in the car we bought together. And the year after that, there’s a car seat in the back.”
Looking at People Watching, she shared, “I really just wanted to live in that feeling and pay homage to somewhere that’s been so special to us, and held the first bit of our relationship, but now we get to continue to enjoy year after year. It’s a place that holds a lot of memory and a lot of really special moments.”
Hannah Bonam-Young / Instagram
After explaining how her own (absolutely beautiful, if you ask us) love story, Bonam-Young turned to her romantic leads, Prue and Milo, and shared how she knew they were made for each other. “I think what I love most about them is that they are complete opposites,” she said. “I think so often I’ve seen this with my friends, where they’re looking to fall and when they’re looking to build a relationship with someone, and they’re like, ‘But we’re just so different, so it’s not going to work.’ And I think that the funny thing is, time after time, my friends say that, and then that ends up being the love of their life.”
“I think really at your core, what you need to do is find someone who morally aligns with you, whose future aligns with you, and who’s just kind,” she continued. “Prue and Milo are kind people. They have very different ways of showing it. They have very different ways of showing up in the world and who they are, but they’re very kind people, and they see the world very similarly. They see beauty in people, and they express that through their different art styles: Prue’s poetry and Milo’s portraits. I think their unabashed appreciation for people and just their deep appreciation for humanity is really what makes them compatible.”
While their compatibility paves the way for a stunning love story, it also opens the door for some deeply steamy, beautifully crafted spice scenes. As Prue strives to expand her horizons, she creates a list of intimate moments she wants to have with Milo. When it comes to crafting the perfect spice scene (as many have credited her with doing), Bonam-Young explained, “I think for me, I never want to write sex for sex’s sake. I never want to write intimacy scenes for the sake of it, feeling like, ‘Okay, well, there should just be more in this book for fun.’ I want it to serve a purpose.” For People Watching, she told Swooon, “I was kind of trying to figure out how to, not only frame and center consent and Prue’s relationship with sex and learning her herself in that way for the first time, and Milo helping her in that journey, but also how to create intimacy between two people who approach sex very differently.”
Of course, spice is a major component of Bonam-Young’s novels, but she balances those joyful moments with some of the more serious, emotional aspects of life. While People Watching mirrors aspects of her own romance, the novel also includes Prue’s journey caretaking for her mother, Julia, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease shortly after her daughter’s nineteenth birthday, a narrative similar to Bonam-Young’s experience caring for her grandmother.
“I think that the thing that I hope people take away from Julia’s journey, and specifically watching it through Prue’s eyes, is that caretaking is not an easy task. Caretaking for a loved one with memory care issues, especially, is a struggle, but it’s also profoundly beautiful,” she candidly revealed to Swooon. “I was very lucky to get to go on tour and talk about this quite a lot. And what kept coming up was, yes, it’s extremely difficult. It’s so, so hard, and it’s exhausting and it’s demoralizing, but it’s also really profoundly beautiful. I got to experience sides of my grandmother in her early stages and late stages of diagnosis that most people don’t get to experience, like Julia waking up in that first chapter from Prue’s perspective, thinking it’s her wedding day, something that happened with my grandma very often.”
“I got to help my grandmother get ready for her wedding more times than I can count,” Bonam-Young recalled. “That’s something sacred that I will forever treasure. I got to experience girlhood with my grandmother, like she thought she was in her 20s and getting ready to marry the love of her life, and feeling giggly and silly and sharing things with me that she just wouldn’t normally share and was in a place mentally where she was just so happy and unaware of her body and its in its limitations and its age and her mind.” She explained, “I think what I would love people to take away from People Watching is that, like any illness, memory care is really just about honoring the whole person and allowing them to have the waves that come with it, and the frustrations, and the anger, and being a safe place for that person.”
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When it comes to “traditional” publishing, that is getting picked up by a publishing house like Penguin Random House instead of self-publishing, Bonam-Young revealed that she quickly learned that hitting the New York Times bestsellers list is “the thing you can do in your career… It’s the ceiling.” After introducing her readers to Baysville, writing a novel that she called “deeply nostalgic,” Bonam-Young got the phone call every author dreams of receiving.
“Basically, what happens is you wake up on the Wednesday after your book’s release, and you see if your book’s on the USA Today list, and if it is, whereabouts it is. And that can be an indicator of whether you should expect the New York Times call, as they ominously call it. I think I was #15 on the USA Today list, and the New York Times list is Top 15, so in my brain, I was like, it could or could not happen. So it was kind of this horrible but wonderful feeling all day of being like, ‘Okay, no matter what happens, 15 on USA Today is so incredible and such an honor. I’ll just wait and see.'”
When Bonam-Young received the call, she was out to dinner before an event, surrounded by her Canadian publisher team, friends, and family. Since everyone knew she was expecting the call at that time, when her phone rang, “everyone at the table went really still and wide-eyed.” She explained, “I couldn’t answer my phone. I couldn’t manage to swipe. I was shaking and couldn’t focus. So my friend reached over and did it for me, and put the speaker on, and my editor just cut right to the chase. She was like, ‘You’re #5.’ I don’t remember anything in that moment, other than just this rush of kind of adrenaline and surprise and shock and confusion and excitement, and it was just such a special moment. I mean, when I started writing, it was just me, and a bunch of Post-it notes, and this, like, little quiet dream that I’d had since childhood.”
Now that Bonam-Young has reached that “ceiling,” it’s clear that the sky’s the limit for her love stories, and we, for one, cannot wait to devour what she writes next.
People Watching by Hannah Bonam-Young is available now.
