Exclusive Interview

‘The Shippers’ Sets Sail! Katherine Center on JoJo & Cooper’s Future and More

“I really think that the job of a love story is to get us all out of our heads and down into our hearts,” Katherine Center told Swooon. “A good story should change the main character, but I think a really good story changes the reader, too.”

The author’s newest romance novel, The Shippers, does just that. The story follows JoJo, a math major-turned-art teacher who’s harboring some serious intimacy issues. Aboard her sister’s destination wedding cruise, JoJo is reunited with both her ex-best friend, Cooper, who abandoned her four years prior and has been AWOL ever since, and Finn, her childhood crush and first kiss. After her sister convinces her that she imprinted on Finn’s kiss — à la Twilight‘s iconic “You imprinted on my daughter!” moment — JoJo and Cooper set out on Project Conquest, a mission to catch Finn’s attention and, in turn, his heart. (Spoilers ahead!)

It doesn’t take a romance scholar to know that this is JoJo and Cooper’s love story, not JoJo and Finn’s. All three grew up in the same neighborhood, so while JoJo was crushing on Finn, Cooper was crushing on JoJo. Right from the jump, Center set up the perfect friends-to-lovers romance, complete with a don’t marry him moment at the beginning of the novel—not the end.

So, is imprinting a real thing, and if so, was it JoJo and Cooper who had imprinted on each other all along? Scroll to read The Bodyguard author Katherine Center’s full interview with Swooon.

Swooon: I’m so happy to be talking about The Shippers with you. It is truly my favorite book of this year so far.

Katherine Center: That feels great to hear. I’m very excited about it. I’m madly in love with it myself.

You always have an idea, and you think this idea has got a lot of potential, and then you kind of dive in, and you’re just crossing your fingers the whole time that it’s gonna light up from the inside and come to life and give everybody all the feelings. And this one just kind of magically did. I feel very grateful.

Swooon: I want to start at the top of the book. You’ve truly perfected the art of the author’s note. I want to know, have you ever considered writing a memoir or a musing on love?

Center: I think about that every single day. Like, literally every day, that’s my whole running internal monologue, me making this argument to the world about why love stories matter and why we need to be lifting up the best of humanity and making an argument for our potential as a species. So, yes, I would love to.

It’s on my to-do list for life, for sure. I would love to write a book about love that takes it seriously in a way that, as a culture, we occasionally fail to do. But it’s tricky. Life gets in the way. I write a novel a year, and my number one priority every year is to make sure that that novel is the best thing that it can possibly be.

Swooon: At the start of the novel, JoJo is about to marry Pierce. However, Cooper shows up and convinces her to fake faint to get out of the ceremony. What about seeing Cooper for the first time in years changes JoJo’s mind about the wedding?

Center: Cooper knows her really, really well, so when she sees him, he kind of reconnects her with her best self — that self who knows that this is not the right thing. She’s made this decision to marry this guy, come hell or high water, because intellectually she thinks it will be good for her. But as evidenced by how incredibly itchy the wedding dress she is wearing is at the beginning, clearly her body disagrees with her, and her heart does as well. JoJo is a person who tends to value what her brain thinks a little bit over what her heart says. I think that Cooper reconnects her with her heart.

Swooon: We have to talk about Pierce’s family, the Richmonds. They were absolutely fascinating. Were there any drafts where they made their way back into the narrative after the wedding?

Center: Not really. It’s funny, I mean, they needed to be there, and they needed to be a contrast of possibilities for her. At the beginning, JoJo isn’t super connected to her own dad, so her family life is not as great as it could be. And so, I think that the Richmonds are supposed to be an example of the worst possible case scenario of how you could wind up if you’re not careful in life. I gotta say, they are just the ickiest possible sort of nightmare country club kind of love you can get.

Swooon: After JoJo sees Cooper for the first time, we meet the rest of their childhood friends from their neighborhood. Growing up, did you have that kind of connection with your neighbors? 

Center: Yes, I did, actually. I grew up on a street that had a whole bunch of kids on it. All the moms just stood around in driveways, kind of ignoring us, and we roved the neighborhood like a big pack of wild animals. There was a ditch at the end of our street that had crawdads in it, and we would go hunt for crawdads. We would collect long spaghetti strands of frog eggs, and then we would bring them back and try to create frog farms, hatching them in old, discarded fish tanks. We were constantly putting together games. Our street had all one-story houses, and we were on roofs all the time.

I remember the balls we were playing with would often roll into these sewer holes, and we would always pick the smallest kid in the group and make them climb down into the sewer to get the ball. No mother in this day and age would ever let these things happen, but the great news is we all survived. Most of us have scattered to the winds now, and so I just run into them occasionally. My next-door neighbor from childhood actually shows up at a lot of my book events.

Swooon: When they were kids, JoJo got a blindfolded kiss from Finn. Now, her sister is convinced that JoJo imprinted on that first kiss, since it happened on a pretty traumatic day for her. How much research did you do on the psychology behind imprinting?

Center: I did a fair bit because I felt like this is important, like, this needs to actually be a real thing. I felt like enough of the story hinges on this idea of imprinting that it needs to actually be possible. I really love reading about random, esoteric psychological phenomena, so I read all about it.

Swooon: JoJo decides she needs to be with Finn since she thinks she imprinted on him. Is there anything from your research that suggests a better way to break that connection?

Center: Well, I’m not a psychologist by any means, but I would vote for journaling in that situation. I think telling the story of your own life and writing it down can be very freeing from things that plague you. I’m always totally fascinated by all those studies about how writing the story of your own life seems to fix things that seem unfixable.

Swooon: Do you think that would have worked for JoJo? 

Center: JoJo is a person who has a hard time connecting to her heart, and so I don’t know how well that would have worked for JoJo. She might have just needed some high-level shenanigans to get her into a better place. If it had worked for JoJo, I would not have written it as a novel. She’d be doing fine off living her best life.

I really think that the job of a love story is to get us all out of our heads and down into our hearts. That works a lot better when we are stepping into the shoes of a fictional character and going through whatever it is they’re going through in the story, not just with them, but as them. When they fall in love, you fall in love.

There is something very embodied about a really well-told story where the writer is really doing their job. If the writer is really crushing it, you have this experience that’s almost virtual reality for human life, where you get to do all the things and feel all the things that the main character is doing and feeling. And so a good story should change the main character, but I think a really good story changes the reader, too. I think it’s good for all of us that we got to go through these shenanigans with Cooper.

Swooon: Ultimately, we learn that it was Cooper who kissed JoJo, not Finn. Do you think Cooper imprinted on JoJo, too?

Center: I do feel like he did, because he met her right after something really bad happened to him. He showed up in this neighborhood, and he met JoJo, and she looked after him in a way that I think he was really, really needing. Of course, once they’ve had that profound moment where they connected in this way, they built this whole life together. She just became his person.

I have this theory that a good love story needs to break your heart because we all walk around in life so armored up all the time, that if we want to let the joy of a great happily ever after in, it has to be able to get past the armor. I think in some way, that’s what happened to Cooper. He was a little bit broken when they first met, and he was open enough that JoJo could take root in his heart in this profound way that he never was able to let go of.

Swooon: We know that Cooper didn’t want to tell JoJo about his feelings after she got engaged, but why do you think he wasn’t able to confess his feelings before that?

Center: I think Cooper was not a super aggressive person in his youth, and he was always so afraid of pushing anybody around. He had watched how his dad told his mom what to do, and he didn’t want to be that guy. He never really wanted to tell JoJo what to do, and she seemed very fixated on these other people, right? When they were kids growing up, she had this mad crush on Finn, and he wasn’t going to tell her not to have that crush, right? On the boat, she’s once again circling back with that crush on Finn, and Cooper’s having to confront that again.

Swooon: What changed when he saw that wedding invitation?

Center: She tells him that she’s engaged, and then he leaves for London, right? But it wasn’t until he found out from his mother, four years later, that they never actually got married. He had been thinking they were married all this time, and I think it’s the fact that he spent all those years regretting that he hadn’t tried harder, that he hadn’t argued with her, that he hadn’t launched his own Project Conquest back in the day. I think regret can teach you a lot.

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When he realizes that she’s not actually married as he thought she was, he gets a second chance. It’s this moment of courage for him when he decides that he’s gonna spontaneously fly across the ocean and show up at her wedding. I love that that’s the beginning of Cooper learning the emotional courage that he needs to live his best life. He pulled out of his childhood that you should never tell anybody else what to do, but sometimes you can make your argument for yourself and see how it goes.

Swooon: In the end, we see Cooper and JoJo get together. What’s next for them?

Center: I’ve never read a happily ever after as “And they kissed, and then nothing bad ever happened to either of them again.” I conceptualize a happily ever after as them deciding to become each other’s people. They decide to look after each other, take care of each other, love each other the best they can, and that any hard stuff that comes, they’re going to face those things together.

I think that’s been my experience in my own life. I wouldn’t say that my life has been devoid of worries, troubles, griefs, struggles, and hardships, but I got very lucky because I married this wonderful man, whom I started dating right out of college. He has this incredible knack for making everything better instead of worse. To me, that’s what a happily ever after is: We’re gonna look after each other the best we can, and we make the most of our lives. That’s definitely what JoJo and Cooper are going to do.

The Shippers by Katherine Center is available now everywhere books are sold.