I start with the characters, but even then they're relatively unformed and I discover them as the pages flow. Do you outline the book very carefully before you start?ĮH: You know, it's funny because I don't. GR: There's a rich cast of characters in Here's to Us, and yet you manage to give us all of their backstories without slowing down the plot. So I love good people behaving badly and then ultimately coming to a place of peace. You need to have behavior that inspires drama. Otherwise novels aren't interesting if everybody is happy and faithful and well-behaved. You have to justify really bad behavior and come to a place of forgiveness, and that is a favorite theme of mine. And the same with Dabney in The Matchmaker, who is having an affair even though her husband is by all accounts an awesome guy. Yet my job as a novelist is to make him if not likable, then at least human and sympathetic in some respects. If you look at The Rumor or The Matchmaker, they have characters doing truly horrible things, such as Eddie in The Rumor, who's running a prostitution ring. GR: Had you been thinking about the theme of forgiveness, or did that come after you'd set up the characters and the plot?ĮH: I feel like all of my novels to some extent are about forgiveness. I didn't have all of this in the forefront of my mind initially, but as I was writing, Deacon Thorpe developed for me, and the novel took shape and the women developed and changed and their relationships changed, and we ended up with what I think is a pretty dramatic but ultimately heartwarming story about how feelings can change about the person you hate the most. And because I love the world of food and wine and restaurants, I decided my protagonist would be a celebrity chef, and so that led to the whole story line of the restaurant, and I wanted him to be a complicated, troubled person. And then I thought, what would be the reason for that? So I decided to have some kind of celebrity, and I wasn't sure what kind, who had been married to these three women and the three of them absolutely loathe each other. I wanted it to be three women who really and truly hated each other. Only in this case I didn't want it to be a female buddy novel.

Can you talk about your inspiration for the book?Įlin Hilderbrand: I wanted to write a novel that had three women characters because it's such an interesting dynamic, sort of harkening back to my novel Barefoot, which also had three women characters. Goodreads: Here's to Us focuses on Deacon Thorpe and the three women he married: Laurel, his high school sweetheart Belinda, the Hollywood diva who stole him and Scarlett, the former nanny.

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