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Casey McQuiston has made a name for themself crafting unforgettable queer love stories: the prince-meets-president’s-kid romance of their 2019 novel Red, White Royal Blue was followed by a time-traveling lesbian subway affair in 2021’s One Last Stop, and then a foray into young-adult literature with 2022’s I Kissed Shara Wheeler. Now, the author is back with a big, beautiful, extremely bisexual European romp in the form of The Pairing, out this week from St. Martin’s Griffin.
In The Pairing, constitutionally anxious nepo baby and somm-in-training Theo is reunited with their heartbreaker pastry-chef ex Kit on a transatlantic flight to a food and wine tour of Europe. Before long, the two are locked in a contest to see who can rack up more international hookups, pausing at every turn to eat and drink to their heart’s content (and then some). This week, Vogue spoke to McQuiston about their fourth book, their faith in rom-coms, and their love of Anthony Bourdain.
Vogue: How does it feel to see your fourth book coming out into the world?
Casey McQuiston: You would think that by book four, the feelings would be less intense, but I still woke up with a bubble gut this morning. [Laughs.] It’s just like, oh, shit, all of the last few years have been leading up to this day. I’m just trying to enjoy it and savor it and not be nervous about it. I’m really proud of this book, and I feel like I accomplished what I set out to accomplish when I was writing it. I think that’s kind of the dream when you’re putting out a book: to know that you did what you came to do. I feel really good about that.
How did you decide to set The Pairing within the endlessly generative world of food and drink?
I mean, selfishly, I love food and drink! It’s always been something that’s interested me, and it’s something that I find really creatively inspiring and that energizes me and makes me excited about the people in the world around me and just being alive. I think when I sat down to write the book, in early 2022, I started thinking about what it should be, and we were all kind of coming out of the dark ages of deep COVID into a different world. After so much time spent not being able to go out and touch and taste and smell and experience things, I think I really needed to reconnect with that part of my humanity. So much of the process of writing this book was about healing my relationship with pleasure and indulgence; so much of life, and American life in particular, teaches you to focus on work, and make the best use of your time, and be economical, and make yourself smaller, and take up less space, and deny yourself pleasure in favor of focusing on something else, and I think this book is 1,000% the antithesis of that. I hope something that people can really take away from it is that this book is an indulgence, and it is not too late to indulge this summer and heal your own relationship with pleasure and indulgence. I want people to feast.
What is it that draws you in about the romantic-comedy format, do you think?
I’ve always been a lover of love stories. As long as I can remember, any time I would watch or read something, what would attract me and engage me would be the relationships. I think I was really fascinated by that sort of inexplicable magic that creates chemistry and connection and the building blocks of romance between two people. But then I’m also not somebody who takes life super-seriously, or takes myself super-seriously, so to me, comedy is always part of everything. I grew up in a household of a lot of silly jokes, and my dad was one of the funniest people I’d ever met. I see everything in the world through this lens of, like, Well, where’s the joke?
I think it took me a while to land on exactly what kind of book I was going to want to write one day, but once it clicked, I was like, Oh, duh. These are the two biggest parts of who I am, and what I like about the world. The first movie I remember seeing in theaters was You’ve Got Mail, and I feel like the rest was history.
Anthony Bourdain feels, in some ways, like the patron saint of this novel. What do you think was (and remains) so appealing about the food legend’s approach to life?
Oh, my God. First of all, I feel like there’s a certain irreverence about him that I really connect to, but it’s a specific kind of irreverence where he is very reverent of food and the people who make the food in the places where he goes, but he is not reverent of the decorum of it all. I really relate to that, as someone from the South; I relate to wanting to have the fullest experience but also not be pretentious about it or get preoccupied by the appearance of it or whether or not it’s sexy. Sometimes the sexiest thing in the world is to not care about what’s sexy, and I think I would say Anthony Bourdain was extremely sexy. I think that’s part of why he’s a patron saint of this book; he had this very unpolished, genuine physicality to him where he was like, I’m here to sit here and smoke a pack of cigarettes and drink a bottle of wine and fucking eat. I respect that so much. He knew exactly what he was about, and I think that is the spirit of this book. He had that admiration for not just the most prestigious food that you can find, but genuinely the best food, whether that’s a five-Michelin-star restaurant or someone’s grandma in the back of the house rolling the same tortellini that she’s been making for 45 years.
If you had to pick your dream food-drink pairing, what would it be?
Okay, I’ll pick my dream Southern pairing. I’m going to say something that’s going to sound so cliché to anyone from Louisiana, but there’s something about an Abita Strawberry Lager. Like, an ice-cold Abita Strawberry beer, and a crawfish boil with really spicy crawfish that are really hot, fresh out of the pot, and all the tails are perfectly curled, and they have that bright, bright red. All of that, with my mom’s homemade dipping sauce that she brought from down the bayou, is my ideal summer afternoon.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
