Now a Read With Jenna Book Club pick!
When people find out we wrote a book together, we tend to get a wide-eyed ‘ooh’ or sometimes even a ‘huh?’ So often the conversation comes back to this: How can two people write one book? In the case of Happy Wife, our debut novel, we didn’t necessarily set out to write a book at all. Not at first.
We started as friends who met at our kids’ back-to-school night, and we caught up when we could. At the glamorous haunts you’d expect to find two moms in the wild: post drop-off walks, playdates and kids’ birthday parties. After a year or so of friendship, Kendall was thinking it might be time for a career switch around the same time the Writers’ Guild went on strike, leaving Meredith’s TV work stalled. One afternoon on a walk, Kendall suggested a story idea and Happy Wife began.
And because of our collaborative work experiences—Kendall in the corporate setting and Meredith on TV shows—we were predisposed to creating things in a team environment. We set some guidelines, namely ‘best idea wins’ and ‘the process must be fun,’ and started trading chapters the way some people pass notes back and forth.
We agreed we wanted to tell a story that was fun. One that saw women with empathy—even the women we’ve been taught to hate. We loved the idea of putting a romcom heroine into a mystery. What would you do if you met your dream guy, said yes to the fairy tale, and it landed you at the center of a missing person case? And because friendship is the backbone of our story, a strong female friendship emerged between the pages, too.
Maybe it was because of the pivotal moments we were both living through that ultimately we wrote a story about identity—how it can be shaped, stolen, and reclaimed. We found ourselves exploring questions many women ask themselves: How did I get here? Do I like what I’ve become? And what am I going to do next?
While we were determined to finish the story, where it would go from there was anyone’s guess. But we knew we were both at stalled moments in our professional lives, and the momentum felt important. We wrote late at night. We wrote when we were supposed to be doing something else. We left jokes for each other in the Google docs we shared.
The process of writing, editing, and even publishing can feel isolating at times, and we feel fortunate to have been able to experience it together. Writing Happy Wife gave us both something to look forward to in a time of uncertainty. We hope readers have as much fun reading as we did writing it.
If you’re interested in reading Happy Wife, signed copies are available from Eagle Eye Book Shop.
Author Bios:
Meredith Lavender has spent more than two decades working as a television writer and an executive producer. Most recently, she served as showrunner and executive producer on Max’s The Flight Attendant, and she is currently in development on multiple projects with A&E, Paramount+, and more.
Kendall Shores’s career spans nearly seventeen years and runs the gamut from grant writing for a nonprofit museum in Orlando to communications consulting and strategy for large organizations. She is the author of This is Not That Blog, a humour blog that was featured on Daily Beast, the Bloggess (Jenny Lawson), Smithsonian.com, and more.
