All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Some books feel destined to be optioned. Take journalist and author Rose Dommu’s debut novel, Best Woman—about Julia, a bisexual trans woman who goes home to Florida from New York to ride out her brother’s wedding (and try to capture her intimidatingly cool high-school crush’s heart)—which manages to feel deeply cinematic without ever sacrificing laughs or hewing to the audience’s expectations. (After all, who says a leading lady can’t sow a little pre-nuptial tumult in the estimable company of hot people of all genders?)
This week, Vogue spoke to Dommu about our current rom-com flop culture, writing a heroine who rejects the notion of “happily ever after,” the interconnected beauty and pain of queer and trans life in Florida, and her persuasive theory that “weddings are gender.”
Vogue: How are you feeling ahead of pub day?
Rose Dommu: Crazy. Like, actually insane, but ready for it to be tomorrow.
Where, when, and how did the idea for Best Woman first come to you?
I ve been thinking about it on and off for almost a decade. I had the idea of setting a story about a trans woman at a wedding, because weddings are kind of the one holdover we have of this other world filled with huge, fabulous parties where everyone comes out and there’s tons of operatic drama. That, combined with the experience of being trans and having to re-meet your family all over again, just seemed like the perfect combination to me for some really messy interpersonal family drama. I also love classic ’90s rom-coms like My Best Friend’s Wedding, and I really wanted to pay tribute to those, but through a more contemporary lens and with a trans protagonist.
Did you always know you wanted said protagonist, Julia, to incite bisexual chaos?
Yes, of course, there was no other choice. [Laughs.] That’s the one thing about a lot of classic ’90s rom-coms: we have lots of heterosexual chaos, but when you’re bisexual, there are so many more opportunities for chaotic nightmare behavior.
So true.
Julia was always going to have that identity because I wanted as many triangle points to touch as possible, and also because I wanted to explore a character in a romantic comedy whose goal wasn’t monogamy or some kind of perfect, tied-up-in-a-bow happily ever after. Even though Julia is really obsessed with her love interest, she even says at one point that she’s not looking for them to be together in some committed, monogamous relationship. That doesn’t have to be the end goal of all romance. That’s why I think rom-coms have become kind of stale and fallen out of favor. I mean, we’re seeing a bit more of them being made in the streaming era, but we’re not getting a lot of big-budget rom-coms, and I feel like in the book space, there’s so much romance but not as much romantic comedy—where the comedy is really more at the forefront.
Can you tell me about Best Woman’s split setting between New York and Florida?
This book was always going to be set in Florida. I’m from Florida, and it’s such a weird place that I knew I had to write a book that was set there, just to try to capture what a total mindfuck it is to be there. I grew up in this place where I was very young but surrounded by very old people, and it made me kind of grow up really fast. It was the perfect opposition to Julia’s urban, progressive life, in which she’s grown into this much bigger version of herself than she’d ever been—and then she has to go back home and try to force herself back into this very tight box that she’s outgrown. She also finds out along the way, though, that there are some parts of home that she still appreciates or enjoys or is moved by.
That experience of coming home for the first time is so loaded for queer and trans people, and I really wanted to explore that. One of the films I thought a lot about when I was writing this book was Garden State, which usually kind of throws people off in terms of being rom-com inspo, but that’s another “going home for a family affair” kind of thing—also through a very specifically Jewish lens—and that experience of going home and having people expect a version of you that you’re not anymore is really… there’s so much friction there. But on the other side of it, as the person coming back, you kind of expect that no one else has changed either, and that’s kind of unfair in the same way.
Politically, it’s really hard to be queer in Florida; it’s really hard to be trans in Florida. But that doesn’t mean that queer and trans people aren’t there or don’t exist there, or that places eroding into fascism even faster should be written off or abandoned. It was really important for me to set this escapist rom-com fantasy there to prove that that experience can exist for trans people, no matter where they are.
Why do you think wedding culture is still, by and large, cishet and prescriptive?
Weddings are gender! They are. They are the most extreme, antiquated idea of the prescribed, heteronormative gender dynamics that we still have. I really liked the scene in Materialists of cave people doing the wedding negotiation, that kind of showed how ancient this tradition is and also how archaic it is. It is crazy that we all agree on this sort of delusional premise that we are going to take a chunk of time out of our lives and spend an insane amount of money and energy to celebrate what is essentially just a legal contract and a lifestyle choice. Weddings are a circus, but for that very reason that’s why they are so much fun to read about and to write about. The possibilities for shenanigans at a wedding are endless because, you know, it’s not just the wedding. It’s the whole week leading up to the wedding. It’s the months leading and years leading up to the wedding. It’s the time after the wedding. The whole idea of the Bridezilla and the “this is the most important day of my life” idea is wild, but people really believe in it so much, and we as a culture have just enforced its validity, so it’s just a really fun sandbox to play in.
You’ve written and created content online for a long time; what feels the most different about writing a novel?
Probably the time. You know, as a journalist or a social media user or a podcaster, there’s a real immediacy to what you create. No one could have prepared me for how long the process of writing a novel is. I started writing the book a little over three years ago, and it’s coming out tomorrow. That endurance and the patience that it requires of waiting for this thing to come out, when artistically, it’s actually so far behind you in so many ways, was really hard to adjust to, but it also is such an exciting new prospect to put so much time and thought and work and energy into something and to not be in it alone. Best Woman is not just me, it’s the work of so many people coming to fruition, and it gets to live on so much longer than any other creative work I’ve ever produced in my life. People hopefully will be reading it for decades, if not centuries to come. Maybe when the sun is exploding, someone will be reading a copy of Best Woman.
