Casey McQuiston is a child of the internet, and it shows.
It shows in the way she speaks about cancel culture, Twitter reply guys, and the eternal bingeability of Parks and Recreation in the span of one conversation. It also shows in the hyper-specificity of her debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, a romantic comedy with a distinctly 2019 sensibility, thanks to the near relentlessness of its pop-culture references. Case in point: a party scene set to Lil Jon’s “Get Low,” featuring “that guy from Stranger Things” and a nameless actress “from the new Spider-Man movies.” But this is what it means to be 28-year-old McQuiston, who worked in magazine publishing before writing her book. “My brand is writing super of-the-moment books,” she says. “I’m not writing to be timeless.”
That’s probably why Red, White & Royal Blue became the year’s surprise best seller and the so-called book of the summer. Set in a reality where the United States elected a female Democrat to the presidency in 2016, the novel follows the secret romance between first son Alex Claremont-Diaz and British royalty Prince Henry. It’s pure rom-com, down to its enemies-to-lovers premise and the bubblegum pink of its cover. Yet it’s also a highly specific story—a queer romance as interested in flirty Snapchats as it is in addressing its characters’ struggles with anxiety and depression. It’s honest in a way that resonates in an era where more and more millennials are openly discussing their mental health issues.
But more than anything, it’s just a lot of fun. After ruining a royal wedding by pushing each other into the wedding cake, Alex and Henry are forced to spend time together for the sake of maintaining positive U.S.–British relations. Theirs is a begrudging courtship by way of 20-something flirting, where one’s true feelings are a valuable currency to be spent judiciously. “Horrible Revolting Heir,” Alex writes in an email to Henry. “It’s recently come to my attention you’re not quite as boring as I thought.”
McQuiston considers herself a student of the rom-com, and counts You’ve Got Mail among her favorites. But when it came time to write her own, she says she had to write what she wanted to read. “I felt like what I was missing was something packaged like all of the rom-coms that I loved growing up. And that was this shiny, colorful, 10 Things I Hate About You–type of experience, where it was frothy and trope-y, and it felt like a million things you’d read before but it felt new at the same time.”
She crafted Red, White & Royal Blue to reflect the world as she knew it. Alex’s bisexuality, for instance, was a subject she had never seen in such a pop commercial format, in a trade paperback that someone from her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, could feasibly pick up in a Barnes & Noble. But McQuiston, who is bisexual, is quick to disavow any claims that she’s breaking new ground, crediting authors such as N.K. Jemisin with blazing the trail for her. “I’m not reinventing the wheel here,” she says. “I’m not the bi messiah, you know? I never want to Sam Smith myself.”
She may not be reinventing anything, but she’s done her part in bringing the genre into the internet age. Stretches of Alex and Henry’s interactions are exclusively in email or text message, mirroring the way people her age communicate largely through social media and online. Even her dialogue is designed to sound like the world she knows. “I write with this particular group chat rhythm where everybody has their little role in the group chat, and it flows really fast and that’s how it is,” she explains. “It’s an instinctual rhythm that so many millennials internalize, which makes for really good book banter.”
As for Red, White & Royal Blue’s success, McQuiston thinks the book is a lightning strike of right place, right time, right story. Its frank representation—a biracial first family, an openly trans Secret Service agent—and mix of romantic charm and political optimism offer a salve to today’s fraught climate. “What we’re seeing right now in rom-com is that it’s not a fairy tale anymore to only center on people who look the same as everyone in positions of power making the world burn,” she says. “That kind of stuff is just not escapist for me.”
The occasional Twitter heckler aside, the book has reached far beyond her self-described target audience of “queer millennials who are kind of depressed” to find footing among young adults, Boomer dads, and everyone else in between—something she still has difficulty wrapping her head around.
“I know that my writing is extremely earnest, and that is my thing,” she says. And though that kind of heart-on-the-page writing might appeal to a generation raised on oversharing in blog posts and AIM away messages, she offers a quintessentially millennial metaphor for Red, White & Royal Blue’s power: “It connects you to your Patronus moment, to all the happy memories you think of.”
Yes, there’s a movie in the works at Amazon Studios. No, she doesn’t have casting intel (though she’d love Connie Britton to play Alex’s mom, President Ellen Claremont). There’s no word on a sequel, though McQuiston insists she won’t go the J.K. Rowling route of using Twitter for footnotes (unless it’s astrology-related). In the meantime, she intends on pushing the boundaries of rom-com even more. Just take her next project already in the revisions stage: a romance in the vein of 2001’s Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman–starring Kate & Leopold, featuring a displaced-in-time lesbian and…a magical subway. She agrees it’s weird; she insists it works.
Which is to say Red, White & Royal Blue has clarified what she—and her favorite genre—can do for a world seeking escapism. “I’m not a lawmaker, I’m not a politician. I’m not even an organizer. That’s not my gift in life. But what I can do is basically the equivalent of being the waterboy for those people. And the water is frothy, escapist, romantic comedy.”
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