Meet Edward Underhill | Author of Queer Fiction

We had the good fortune of connecting with Edward Underhill and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Edward, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I like to say it’s because I grew up in a suburb of Wisconsin, and I couldn’t walk to anything, so I had to make up my own adventures. But honestly, I just love stories. I love escaping my own life and living in made-up worlds. It’s what drew me to writing and to composing, and I’ve worked professionally in both fields. As a composer, I got into writing music for TV shows, which basically let me escape into someone else’s story and add an important emotional element to it. I started pursuing that career first. Even though I’d been writing for at least as long, and dreamed vaguely of getting something published, I just somehow never thought of it as a viable career for a long time. Partly, I think, because I didn’t see a whole lot of space on the shelves for queer stories—especially trans ones.

Around 2018, I started getting very burned out as a composer. I needed something else, a different creative outlet to keep me going, so I started writing more seriously again and decided to try in earnest to get published. I queried and got my agent in 2020, and we sold my debut novel in early 2021. That book, Always the Almost, came out in early 2023, and since then, I’ve published three more books—This Day Changes Everything, The In-Between Bookstore, and In Case You Read This—and just announced a fourth, The House of Now and Then. It’s wild to realize that will be my fifth book. I feel very lucky to be where I am.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I really love to write high concept fiction—stories with big hooks, big feelings, and (I hope) wide appeal—and then put queer and trans characters into those stories. For a long time, I think publishing as an industry has viewed queer stories as niche, as limited to exploring themes of trauma, of coming-out and identity. Those stories are important, but for myself as a reader, that’s not what I want to read all the time. I also want the fun books. The big, plotty books full of romance or magic or time travel or what have you. The books that are about all the other pieces of life that have nothing to do with being trans or queer. I’ve always written what I want to read; that’s the only way I can keep it fun enough for myself to get through the long slog of drafting, revising, and copy-editing a book. When you sell a book to a big traditional publishers, like HarperCollins or Macmillan, you’re usually selling that book about two years before it will appear on shelves, because that’s how long it takes for that book to go through edits, to get a cover concepted and designed, for the sales teams to get bookstores and libraries excited for it, to send it out for reviews, etc. etc. So you better feel good and excited for that story, because you’ll be living with it a long time! And what excites me is writing books where trans and queer experiences are not niche. They simply are, and the exciting elements of the story happen around them.

It hasn’t always been easy to hang onto that. Publishing (and society as a whole) puts a lot of pressure on marginalized voices to perform our stories a certain way if we want them to be consumed. I’ve gone from feeling like the only way I’d ever be published was if I wrote straight, cis characters to feeling (at times) like the only way I’d ever be published is if I only wrote my trauma, or erased my characters’ complexities until they became fuzzy caricatures.

What I keep coming back to is something I heard another author say, years ago: Write out of spite. It’s probably the best advice I’ve ever received. It’s what I always come back to. Maybe it’s partly my personality—when someone tells me no, I tend to mope for a couple days and then get back to work with the attitude of “I’ll show YOU.” But personally, I think that’s what you need. Or at least, that’s what I need. I need a little spite to keep me going. So I keep getting back up after someone says no, and finding a new way to keep going, to write a new story, to say “next time, I’ll show YOU.”

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
One of the things I love about LA is just how many amazing independent bookstores there are here. Just doing an overview of indie bookstores would be such a great way to explore the city, because you’d wind up in practically every neighborhood! There’s Vroman’s in Pasadena, Annabelle’s in Studio City, Skylight in Los Feliz, Once Upon A Time in Montrose, The Last Bookstore downtown, Book Soup in West Hollywood, Diesel in Santa Monica, and The Ripped Bodice in Culver City. And those are just a few of my favorites! There are truly bookstores for every kind of reader, tucked into every different neighborhood, surrounded by every kind of restaurant. I’m pretty sure if you had a whole week, you probably still wouldn’t be able to visit them all.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I wouldn’t be where I am in my writing career without two key people: Nicole Maggi, who took me on as a mentee for the book that would become my debut novel, helped me hone it into the best story it could be, and then patiently guided me through the confusion of querying agents; and Patricia Nelson, my agent, who then took over guiding that book into the hands of an editor who loved it, and has been there for everything from brainstorming book ideas to talking long-term career strategy.

Website: https://www.edward-underhill.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edwardunderhill/