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Like any artist, writer, director, and all-around multi-hyphenate Yulin Kuang can trace her creative roots back to middle school. As a fledgling young writer, she penned an epistolary novel about a girl’s experience of Pearl Harbor—but later abandoned the project when her friend called it boring. (Kuang had included five years’ worth of backstory.)
That penchant for dramatizing reality—for taking one set of events or characters and inventing new contexts for them—would eventually lead Kuang to fan fiction (both as a writer and a reader), and, later, adapting books. Yet while she was developing the script for People We Meet on Vacation, Brett Haley’s forthcoming film based on the 2021 novel by Emily Henry, Kuang wrote How to End a Love Story. The book, released this month, is a contemporary romance centered on Helen and Grant, two writers bound by a tragic history who find themselves working on the same TV show in LA. It has all the delicious trappings of a good love story—the bristling tension, the yearning—but it’s also a nuanced exploration of grief, trauma, and career anxieties.
Vogue spoke to Kuang about diving into the romance genre, her love of New Jersey, and her “beautiful friendship” with Henry.
Vogue: You’re primarily known as a screenwriter and director. What made you want to write a book?
Yulin Kuang: At the time, I was very actively in the weeds on People We Meet on Vacation. I had also been tapped to do Beach Read at that point in time, and I was also working on a 27 Dresses reboot for television that didn’t end up going anywhere, and I was pitching on a reboot of The Cutting Edge that also didn’t end up going anywhere. There were a lot of adaptations in my life, and I kind of had this moment where I was like, I am living my dream. I got into this industry because I was such a lover of books that I would watch news of their adaptations and be like, Oh, my God. I hope they don’t like fuck everything up! So I was really, really happy. But then I also had this moment where I was like, is this why I became an artist? I was with a friend who had just directed his first indie feature, and I was like, “I am so happy for you,” through gritted teeth. I, too, wished I had something that was original. And so I was going to write a feature for myself to direct.
I’ve written so many things that the world will never see because they die in development. They die on the vine. And I really wanted to do something where, once I finished writing it, that would be the thing. I kind of wanted to see what I would do if I didn t have to convince many people to give me permission to do it.
Did writing a novel feel like more of an independent process than filmmaking or working in TV?
Oh, for sure. My editor was very much like my producer on a project where, you know, I turn in a draft, and then she kind of is the advocate for the audience. But on the whole, with movies, it takes so many steps to get a movie made. You’re dealing with so many different things, and different people have different motivations. There’s some corporate mandate that comes down from on high, and then that trickles down into, like, some studio executive’s personal tastes. So there’s so many more forces at work behind a movie, whereas with the book, it did kind of feel like this pure thing of, This is the story that I wanted to tell. And at the time, I was like, I’m gonna do this in secret in case it’s embarrassing, and maybe nobody ever needs to know. So I think on that level It was deeply personal.
When did you find time to write this book?
I was drafting this book while I was doing People We Meet on Vacation. At 5 a.m. I would wake up, I would work on the novel, and then at about 10 a.m. I would switch over to People We Meet on Vacation, and I’d work on that until like 4 or 5 p.m., and then I’d switch back to the novel from like 5 p.m. to midnight, and I just did that every single day. At the end of the month I had a manuscript, and it was like a magical process that I have not been able to replicate at all.
Tell me more about the inspiration for How to End a Love Story. The first line, “All things considered, her little sister’s funeral is a pretty boring affair” is so compelling.
I always knew it was gonna be about a screenwriter and a novelist who had known each other in high school, and the archetypes of who they were in high school. I didn’t want to do any research because I was busy at the time, so it was just going to be about adaptation.
But looking back, I was spending so much time reading Emily [Henry]’s books and thinking about what resonated with me in them, and I was like, What shared wounds do Emily and I have? The things that I resonate with in her work are the ways grief and friendship, and all of these things that are not necessarily the warm, happy parts. So I kind of wanted to look at what kind of shared wound I could give this novelist and the screenwriter, where they’re both coming at the same hurt from different angles.
New Jersey is a huge character in the book. Tell me more about that—you grew up there, right?
Partially, I did, yes. I was born in China, when I was three we moved to Wichita, Kansas, and when I was eight we moved to New Jersey, and then we kind of hopped around different suburbs of New Jersey, I think because my parents were trying to send me to the best public school for each grade. So I moved a lot. I feel like people should romanticize New Jersey a little bit more.
What about New Jersey felt right as a setting for this novel?
I knew I wanted it to be like an East Coast, West Coast kind of culture clash. I mostly identify as being originally from the East Coast, and I think that when I first came out to LA, there was a kind of a culture shock for me. I remember going to an interview in a full J.Crew suit that I had spent money on, because it was an important interview for me, but it was so not the vibe! And so I wanted to use that geography to separate them a little bit more.
What do you think the two characters see in each other?
Grant compels Helen because he is what she is not capable of. He is able to move easily in the world. I always look at people that are just wildly charismatic golden retrievers. I mean, Emily Henry would be a great example, right? I look at how easy it is to fall in love with Emily Henry, and I’m like, Oh, my God, what is that? So I feel like the compelling part of Grant is how much he has that. But then also, at his core, he’s kind of a sad boy, and I always feel like whenever people have a second layer to them, and they reveal that vulnerability to you, that’s always very deeply compelling. And I think he’s just very good at his job, and competence is always sexy, right? For Grant, Helen is somebody who knows what she wants, and is very good at getting it. And so it’s very flattering when somebody like that wants you.
Nowhere does personality show up more than in the writers’ room, a huge setting in the novel.
My first writers’ room experience was my own show, and so it was kind of a comp to Helen having her first writers’ room. It was a very rewarding experience, but I also don’t feel like I had a lot of control over my instrument at that point in time. I kind of knew the story I wanted to tell, but I didn’t have as much understanding of the details, or how to keep all those balls rolling at the same time. So when I look back on that show—which premiered to the second-lowest ratings on the CW ever, and was promptly pulled from broadcast, and is now only available on the CBC Gem app in Canada—I tried a lot of things. I had a lot of enthusiasm. I was like, What if we tried this and this? The experience itself was really fun.
Do you think that being the author of a romance book still carries a certain stigma? And how does that effect you?
Yeah, there’s a difference, right? There is a very interesting tension between what’s popular and what’s prestige. And I feel like romances with happy endings are not perceived as prestige, in a way that really irritates me, quite honestly. Within the romance space, it’s such a wildly popular genre that you can’t really argue with the fact that people fucking love it. But then, as soon as you take a step outside of romancelandia, you’re kind of smacked in the face by how other people are perceiving this thing that you love.
I think that there is a thing where, when we talk about rom-coms, it kind of gets flattened into romance and comedy, and so people think it’s, like, kissing and jokes. But when I think about my favorite rom-coms, I’m thinking about Sleepless in Seattle, which begins with this kid calling in to a radio station because he’s so certain that his dad is suffering because he can’t get over his dead mom. There are all these ranges of emotions that you find in the best romances. I think that that’s what makes them art.
And so how does it effect me? In Hollywood it affects me because if people are like, “Oh, you’re working on a rom-com,” there is this kind of instant deduction. Almost like they’ve docked a point before I’ve even had a chance to make my pitch for it.
Romance novels of all kinds garner really intense and unique fan bases. What do you imagine your readership will look like?
I came up in the 2010s Tumblr primordial ooze, where “transmedia” was the zeitgeist-y word, and so I love fandoms that are generative. I love fan art; I love fan fiction. I think the Yulin Kuang person is probably what I would call a creator-track fandom, like, maybe you’re somebody who likes reading, but you also probably have a book in you that you’re eventually gonna write, or you wanna make a movie someday, or you’re an artist of some kind. Those are the bat signals I’m sending out into the world. Are you drawn to the behind-the-scenes? Are you drawn to some sort of meta layer, and is there some fire within you that wants to create? That’s who I want.
I want to talk a bit about your upcoming directorial work, and your relationship with Emily.
I never had a chance to organically discover Emily Henry. The People We Meet on Vacation manuscript landed in my inbox before it was published, and I think that was in 2021. The things I was reading at the time for pleasure were all historical, but when I got Emily’s book it had all of that DNA that I love from romance novels. It also had more locations than a James Bond movie, so that was also kind of a fun, compelling puzzle. I was like, okay, this is a beautiful book. It has so many emotionally resonant things, and also I can see how it would be difficult to adapt. But that made me more intrigued—I like a challenge.
I’m sure you guys have gotten close now.
We have now. In the beginning I feel like it was a marriage of convenience. We were kind of thrust together by our industries. And—oh, my God, sorry, I m getting a call from my sister. She’s fine. She’s got a crush on somebody right now. But our first meeting was over Zoom, and it was kind of like a first date. I obviously cared a lot that she would want to work with me. I was trying to present myself as my coolest, funnest self.
I think I can be kind of an intense person. If my job is to be professionally obsessed with you, I know how to do that because I come from fandom. I was like, I’m gonna book a flight to the town that Emily was inspired by, and I’m gonna reread the book there. I didn’t realize that that was also Emily’s college town, and when I asked for a tour, these really lovely girls at Hope College were like, “This is where Emily’s class used to be. These are her dorms. This is her former professor…” and I was just like, I feel like I’m seeing too much. I wasn’t supposed to go this deep! But somehow, from infinite weirdness a beautiful friendship has sprung.
Okay, and I have to ask you this: Both you and Emily have stoked rumors about the cast of People We Meet on Vacation, including one about Paul Mescal and Ayo Edebiri…
You know, I’m so excited that everybody is so excited. What I can tell you is that I owe a revision on both of these drafts. And we are not having those conversations yet.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
