Author Jane Marlow reflects on how love and relationships have changed in the modern world
BY JANE MARLOW
This isn’t my first rodeo in terms of novel-writing. I had written a book published by DIVA Books back in 2002 before segueing into writing for TV, but it was time to bust out of the out of the two-page, 60-second scene format and get back in the saddle.
My mission was to liberate the lesbian characters I’d been writing for on TV from their purgatory of unrequited love. All the clever people say, “Write what you know”. I’d fallen properly, hopelessly, desperately, heartbreakingly in love for the first time when I was 15. I wanted to revisit the power of those all-consuming emotions and write something young people could relate to, but would also appeal to anyone who had known that feeling. I’m in my late 50s now, but we’ve all been young, right? How hard could it be?
A setting – Bournemouth, where I grew up. The sea, the sand that got under my skin for the first 18 years of my life that’sso atmospheric and charged with emotion. Tick. A situation – as a young teenager, I went on a school exchange trip to France. It was amazing. Eye-opening and hugely bonding for the English and French students. It was chocka with drama, conflict and high stakes relationships. Tick.
I set up my lead character. Cleo. An amalgam of people. Some of me, but a lot of people I’d wished I was, I’d known or wanted to be. Cleo’s friendship group. Yep – rich pool of characters and imagination to draw on there.
A title even landed. I Miss You Already. In French – Tu Me Manques Déjà. Translation: “You to me are missing already”. How authentic is that?! I was on a roll.
But that was ten years ago.
I had to put my novel back in the drawer as other projects took over. But every time I started work on it again, the world had changed a little more. Then a huge life change happened for me. The relationship I’d been in since the millennium bug was a thing ended and I was thrown into the real world of dating 2023-style.
I realised immediately that simply channelling my own experience of falling in love as a teen wouldn’t work. Mobile phones and dating apps had changed everything for digital natives. Not only in terms of story structure, but emotionally too.
Crushes and relationships used to grow in savagely slow, creeping increments back in the 80s. Now, there was a tsunami of information – or misinformation – and messages. The ping, ping, ping of the phone alert, the tyranny of the blue tick, the like, the heart, the right emoji, the curated Instagram lives. The sheer speed and volume of contact built more pressure to respond or react until you’re snowballing at breakneck speed, with your thoughts and emotions similarly spiralling.
I had to ask what remains core about the qualities of love and desire that transcends technology and societal change.
Loyalty, commitment, boundaries, sexualities and vocabulary had all evolved. But I concluded that the primal feeling in your stomach when you see someone you fancy; the squeeze of the heart when they look you in the eye; the ache as the hours stretch out before you see them again, flesh on flesh, is unchanged. So, while I updated the mechanics of the story, it’s the intensity of those real-life contacts that I tried to bring to I MISS YOU ALREADY as I think those are what make us human.
I Miss You Already is written by Jane Marlow and is available to buy on Amazon.
You can find out more here: janemarlow.com/
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