Exclusive Interview

‘You Again’ Author Kate Goldbeck Returns With ‘Daddy Issues’: Inside Her Single Dad Romance

Following up her uber-successful romance debut, You Again, a bisexual take on the classic romance film When Harry Met Sally, Goldbeck is back with her sophomore book, Daddy Issues, out November 18. The novel, one of Swooon’s best reads of November, centers on twentysomething Sam, who is struggling to get back on her feet after COVID. She’s forced to move back in with her parents and questions what her future is supposed to look like.

Enter Nick Martino, her new hot next-door neighbor and the ultimate responsible adult, as proven by how well he takes care of his daughter. Unable to avoid each other, Sam and Nick start an unexpected friendship that turns sensual quite quickly, forcing Sam to rethink her next move. Chasing the high of her career was the ultimate goal, but this path with Nick is shifting the goalpost in more ways than one.

Goldbeck spoke with Swooon about how she faced concerns around the sophomore slump, how her own IRL single dad romance influenced the novel, and writing about grappling with change.

This book is your sophomore novel after the success of your debut, You Again. Coming into this book, what had you learned from writing your first, and what did you hope to achieve in this one?

Kate Goldbeck: This was the first book I wrote knowing that it would be read by people, and that’s always different. Once you’ve experienced releasing a book out into the world, it’s hard to go back and draft something with a lot of voices and opinions in your head. But actually, I started writing a different second book before I started writing this one, and realized that I just wasn’t cracking it. And so this was actually almost the third book that I started writing, and it was on a whim. So I think I got a lot of the sophomore slump anxiety out of the way by writing this book that I didn’t actually finish and go through with, so I could write this one just because I wanted to, rather than feeling that pressure of “Oh my god, now I have to write a second book.”

What was the original inspiration that sparked this book?

Goldbeck: It was tough for me to come up with something, and one day, I was chatting with my boyfriend, and we were throwing out rom-com ideas, like, what’s something I could revisit and do a twist on it. And one of the movies that came up was Failure to Launch, which neither of us had seen, but we both knew the concept. We got into a conversation about how we had both had these periods of time where we had to move back in with our parents when we were adults, to come back and get our lives together by living with our parents. Just the idea of a main character who was in that position of living with a parent, who would the romantic interest be? And my immediate thought, just because in romance writing you always want to go for conflict, [I thought] what’s the opposite? Who could you match this person with that would create the most friction? And I thought it would probably be a single parent because that’s someone who has to be the parent and be very responsible and really be a grown up. My boyfriend actually is a single parent, so I was just starting to date a single dad, really. It was a bunch of these different factors, like coming together.

I’d considered the circumstances set up for protagonist Sam (i.e., grappling with student loan debt, the impact of COVID, the stalling of her career) to be very modern. Do you see it that way or as more universal?

Goldbeck: My boyfriend is a little bit older. He was experiencing this back in the early 2000s or something. But what actually occurred to me is that when we were having this conversation, I bet a lot of people found themselves in that situation specifically because of the pandemic. I knew quite a few people who ended up leaving New York City and moving to their hometowns because they just didn’t want to be alone in their apartment for months at a time. I think there’s also that idea of people feeling like they missed a chunk of their lives during that time. I think if you had just graduated in that time period where everyone was stuck at home, you would feel some sense of like, “Wait a minute. What happened to this whole period of time I was supposed to have?” I didn’t want to lean too hard on COVID specifically, but that’s definitely a huge factor for people in their 20s right now. They went through a lot at a really weird time, and now we’re all in this weird economic situation.

What drew you to the concept of a single dad as a love interest? Were there any aspects that you found were more difficult to pull off than you’d thought?

Goldbeck: I have to admit, not the trope for me, which is weird because I am living a single dad romance myself right now. I never thought I would write a single dad romance or a child character in a book, but having been this sort of stepmom figure for the last few years, I felt a lot more comfortable, understanding how kids are and how they talk, and that relationship.

I feel like sometimes with single dad romances, the thing that people are attracted to about the single dad is, “Oh, he’s so responsible. He’s caring for this child, and I can see this different side of a man.” But then, that also comes with an actual child who has their own entire life and personality, and you have to want to be part of that whole family. It’s not just the dad part of it. I feel like it’s a really interesting trope in a lot of ways because I can totally see why so many people find it attractive, but it’s like, if so, then I think you have everything that comes with it

There’s such a stark difference in where Sam and Nick are in their lives due to their age gap. How did you want to showcase the importance of their different life experiences while still leaving room for connection?

Goldbeck: I feel like the age gap is one of those things that romance readers love it or hate it, so it’s always kind of a double-edged sword. It’s like, do I really want to go there? But Nick, he’s a single dad, he’s also a little bit older, and he has already gone through the period that Sam is going through because he’s had a whole lot of life experience before he had his daughter. They’re definitely in different places in their lives, which creates more friction around if this actually a good fit. Nick offers certain things that Sam is probably not going to find in somebody her own age. Nick has to stay in town. He has to hold down this not very glamorous job. And I think for Sam, who is somebody trying to figure out how to find some solid ground, anywhere in her life, Nick feels like somebody who’s very solid. Because of the way her life is, that’d be something she would be seeking — that stability and competence.

A lot of that, honestly, did come from my boyfriend. The character is not him, but what I did find attractive about him was that he is a general manager (not of a Chile’s). He’s a little bit older than me, but there are certain things about him that I’m like, I don’t have my life together at all. But I see him, and I’m like, you’ve been doing this for a while, and he just seems to have it together in a way that I sometimes don’t. So I wanted to bring in a little bit of that.

It’s very serendipitous to have written a single dad romance while living out the trope in real life. Were there any aspects of your own experience that you wanted to pepper into the story?

Goldbeck: It’s not like my story. This is not the way our relationship happened. But a lot of the little touches are from my experience and from little things that have happened in our relationship. One of the main things that really changed my perspective on a lot is that I did a lot of research on step-parents [because] I wanted to see different sides of the step-parent dynamic. I’ve had a wonderful relationship with my boyfriend’s daughter the whole time, so I consider myself very lucky that I never had a lot of challenges around that. I read a book called Step Monster, which sounds terrible, but it’s actually a sociology-type book about women’s experiences being stepmothers, how toxic that dynamic can be again, and it’s not the kids’ fault. I feel like the kids are the ultimate people who have no choice in the matter, and you throw a new adult into the mix, and a lot of things can happen. It hasn’t made me not want to be in our relationship or anything, but I feel like it’s kind of good to take off the rose-colored glasses and see what can be. That really opened my eyes a lot.

A major theme of the book is Sam grappling with the fact that her life plan may not work out the way she wants it to. Is that a struggle you relate to at all?

Goldbeck: That was definitely something that I was grappling with, even though I’m at a different career stage than Sam. After the pandemic, I basically lost my dream job, and everything was thrown to the wind. I’ve gone through several jobs and been laid off from several jobs since then, and at the time I was writing this, I was feeling really demoralized about how a job can give you a sense of self and just making that your identity and your purpose. And [for my book] I was like, you know what? Sam’s not going to have it all figured out, but by the end, she’s going to be on a path to figure something out. And that’s actually what got me to have the happy ending of the romance. Part of the story was that there are going to be things she’s probably not going to achieve, some of the dreams that she had for her career. But if you have people in your life who you have a real bond with, and they’re going to be there to support you even if you do not have your dream job, those are the things worth hanging on to as opposed to pushing those people by the wayside in order to chase a job that has no guarantee of anything at this point.

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What book would you recommend to pair with your own?

Goldbeck: I read Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon when I was first dating my boyfriend. She is one of my favorite authors, and that book is a single dad romance, but there is something about the way she wrote it. I felt very seen, I guess. At that time, I hadn’t even met my boyfriend’s daughter yet. I feel like I was grappling with: Should I be doing that? Like, this is a big deal. As somebody who is beginning a relationship with a single parent, you have to make a decision about whether or not you’re okay with potentially gaining a child at some point in the future. And that’s definitely where I was when I read Weather Girl, and I just felt something comforting about that book. I actually told Rachel when I met her that this book helped me feel more comfortable with my own single dad romance, and that was well before I ever thought about writing a single dad romance. So that one is really important to me.