The old adage "write what you know" has rung true for Rebecca Serle.
Because the author very much drew upon her own experience navigating the dating world for her latest novel Expiration Dates. More specifically, as she told E! News in an exclusive interview, the book came from "being single for, like, 17 years and dating a lot."
But plotting her character Daphne's pursuit of love also coincided with Rebecca experiencing her own great love story.
"For a long time, I wanted to tell a story about the search for love, but I wasn't really sure what it is that I wanted to say," she explained. "I remember in 2020 writing my editor and saying ‘I want to write about the search for love. I think if I write it honest, he'll be there at the end of it.' And I ended up meeting my husband three months after I finished the first draft of this book."
"I feel like I just really had to put it down," Rebecca continued. "There was so much I wanted to say about what it means to be single in your 20s—I think probably more specifically in your 30s. And I'm really glad I got to because now I'm in a different story."
In the novel, Daphne's dating life is shaped by these mysterious slips of paper telling her the name of her next paramour and how much time they have together—their expiration date, as it were—be it a year, months or even a whirlwind weekend. Until one day she is gifted with just a name, no expiration date in sight.
"I think every relationship however brief informs what comes next to a certain degree," Rebecca noted. "I think, as anyone knows who's tried to move on from a relationship, sometimes a weekend can be more impactful than two years."
For those not convinced, she says to "look no further" than Taylor Swift's newly released album Tortured Poets Department, which allegedly references her six-year-romance with ex Joe Alwyn and subsequent fling with Matty Healy.
And as much as Rebecca's dating journey informed her latest book, her new chapter in life will also shape her next work. "I think that if Expiration Dates is about the search for love," she teased, "then what comes next, is probably an exploration of what it means to be committed."
But that's not to say she's specifically mining her life for possible story ideas, rather her work is "always in dialogue" with what she's experiencing. Or conversely, they're a reflection of what she's afraid of.
This is especially the case with her 2022 BookTok sensation One Italian Summer—which borrows inspiration from a trip to Italy where she and mother Ranjana Serle visited her mom's Italian ex-boyfriend—following her character Katy's travels through Positano as she mourns her late mother.
Rebecca shared that taking this fond experience with her mom while weaving in a heartfelt grief narrative was facing "the staggering, breathless reality that I will one day have to be here without my mother."
"For me, writing is a way to exercise or explore those fears and write into them," she continued, adding, "One Italian Summer is a little bit of a love letter to my future self."
Rebecca's books, which also include The Dinner List and In Five Years, have tended to, in addition to a flair of magic, explore grief through varying lenses. And that's because she is a firm believer that love stories and grief stories are closely linked. That's also why her books don't necessarily wrap up with a neat bow.
"I like to leave my characters in a way that feels hopeful," she admitted, "but that we don't necessarily know exactly how it's going to end because that's life."
For her, the heart of the story is the journey—not where her characters end up. It's a sentiment Rebecca also relates to her own life, revealing how when she and her husband of eight months first started dating they realized they'd actually been introduced seven years earlier.
"Sometimes, he will lament that we didn't have those seven years," she noted," And I always think it's so beautiful that what is meant to be becomes. We wouldn't have worked out seven years ago like it wouldn't have been that. And I can't imagine being married to anybody else.
"I just feel grateful of all of the mistakes and all of the missteps and all of the failed relationships and closed doors that led me here," she added. "I think they were all necessary."
Rebecca's novel Expiration Dates is out now.