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readersdear
ONE OF MY FAVORITE THEMES TO EXPLORE, both in reading and writ ing, is the road not taken or the notion of regret for all the things that we (and my char acters) could have done differently. I also love diving into flawed characters who aren’t, as Oprah may say, living their best lives. Additionally, I’m hopelessly addicted to music: unpacking the lyrics, working out harmonies, discovering new songs with my children. Combine these three fascinations, and you have The Rewind , my take on a big, swoony (I hope!) romantic comedy that will have you rooting for Frankie and Ezra right up until the last page.
Set on the cusp of the new millennium, The Rewind transports us back to the 1980s and 1990s, when babydoll dresses and acid-washed Levi’s were all the rage. When big hair could only get bigger, when Prince and Bon Jovi ruled the jukeboxes, when the internet didn’t yet exist and we weren’t constantly checking Twitter or Instagram to fill our down time. If you wanted to talk to someone, you picked up the landline—as Frankie does over her summers away from Ezra—or you found them wherever they happened to be, as Ezra does in Frankie’s dorm room after those same summers apart. You turned up the FM radio in your car because no one had iTunes (or iPhones),and you trekked to the college library stacks for research because the internet was just some faraway thing that only extremely smart people understood. Maybe you dialed up on your AOL account, but even that took forever anyway because you had to use your phone line.
Frankie and Ezra broke apart, catastrophically, during this era, and we find them together again on New Year’s Eve, 1999, when Y2K loomed, and yet, also, anything felt possible.
I hope very much that I have given you characters to root for and that you are cheer ing and groaning and fretting over those obstacles that have gotten in their way, which, actually, get in a lot of our ways. Complicated childhoods, unfair expectations, too much love and not enough love, busy careers, misunderstood intentions, and ultimately, a really, really awesome soundtrack to it all. Thank you for hitting REWIND. Now go press PLAY.
allison
I set the book on a make-believe college campus because so many of us have pangs for those breezy, optimistic but still complicated days of early adulthood. When so much of who Ezra and Frankie were was already solidified but so much of their path was still un charted. They bruised each other badly when they were twenty-one, and a decade later, there are no promises that they won’t do it all over again. When they wake up with no memory of what transpired the night before, in Ezra’s old dorm room, with rings on their fingers, it feels like anything could happen: both destruction and renewed love are on the table, and ultimately, this frantic journey over the course of twenty-four hours is as much about who they are as individuals as who they were (and could be) as a couple. A good rom-com needs characters you can root for but also understandable obstacles that get in their way.
The Rewind is, I hope, a bighearted classic romantic comedy with a lit tle bit of a fun spin on the traditional tropes that we are used to in the genre. Frankie Harriman and Ezra Jones haven’t spoken in a decade since their breakup the day of their college graduation, and ten years later, they find themselves in bed together, possibly married, with no memory of what happened. The plot is dizzyingly fun (and was difficult to write!), but it’s also a character-driven book, and I always took my lead from the two protagonists at the heart of the story.
Rosenberg 2021
Scotch © Kat
In The Rewind , two exes realize they might have gotten it wrong the first time around. Do you believe in second-chance love stories in real life?
Tell us about The Rewind !
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Oh, this is a tricky question! The short answer is yes. The longer answer: I say it’s tricky because I am definitely a person who spends a lot of time in her head, ruminating on the past. It’s just part of my nature and what makes me tick, and actually, it’s probably part of what lead me to be a writer—I love the opportunity to explore regret and how your past can inform your future. That said, the hard truth is that second-chance love stories in real life often don’t really work, since there are often fundamental reasons why you split in the first place. But I also do believe that if people have grown and shifted and made amends for the ways they hurt the other person, then sure, absolutely. I’m friends with many of my exes, and I’ve seen their evolution over the years, just as they’ve probably seen mine. If you work your way back to each other in different places in your lives and you can learn from your previous mistakes, I personally think that second-chance love can have a shot. Do they always last? That might be fodder for my next book.
a conversation with allisonscotchwinn
There is something so joyous, so hopeful about writing romantic comedy or pure romance. I think, after the last few years we’ve all had, I really just wanted to explore joy and op timism and happiness and hope again. I can’t tell you how much fun I had—in that heartrendering sort of way—tripping down Frankie’s and Ezra’s memories, watching them work hard to find their own happily ever after. Discovering their joy was akin to discovering my own. It sounds sort of silly and certainly very writerly, but I fell in love with them both and was rooting for them until the very last page.
There was something in the air during the final days of 1999. I remember it clearly. Every thing felt monumental, like we were on the cusp of change, like we were privileged to be alive when one century switched over to the next. Of course, there was also all of the Y2K hype, which, looking back, feels ridiculous and a little hilarious (a sentiment that Frankie shares), but no one really knew what January 1, 2000, was going to bring. So the eve of the millennium just felt like exactly the right time to bring these characters together for pivotal life decisions.
The novel is set on the eve of the new millennium. Tell us about your decision to set the novel then.
Also, I think there is a major wave of nostalgia right now for the ’90s because it feels like one of the last uncomplicated (or less complicated) times of our lifetime. Social media wasn’t yet around, our country wasn’t nearly as angry or incensed, and life felt…simpler. I didn’t want my characters to have access to smartphones, which wouldn’t have worked for the story, so practicality-wise, as well as emotionally, 1999, when we still carried Nokias and flip phones, felt like the right call, so to speak.
The story is told from both Ezra’s and Frankie’s perspectives. Was one perspective more challenging to write than the other? If so, why?
Ah, great question. I had to work really hard on both of them, to be honest. Initially, Frankie was too caustic, which is something I often do in early drafts—overcorrect to make my female leads really difficult to like—and Ezra really didn’t have much of an identity; he was there to serve Frankie. With each draft, I peeled back layer after layer until I finally landed on exactly who they were. Frankie probably came easier to me because I tend to be a little
The Rewind is your return to rom-com after many books away. What has been your favorite part about writing this genre again?
Oh, fun! OK, in college, Ezra and Frankie had a game where, whenever one of them said “run,” the other had to drop what they were doing and go into a full sprint to try to beat the other one. This game is woven through out the book and has a few pivotal moments, and every time they did it, it made me smile. It’s something so pure, and also something that felt exactly like college, and I love pic turing them chasing each other all over campus until they tilted over from laughter. I think there is a major wave of nostalgia right now for the ’90s because it feels like one of the uncomplicatedlast(orlesscomplicated)timesofourlifetime.
Without giving anything away, what was one of your favorite scenes to write?
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The story is set over the course of one New Year’s Eve. Did any of your own New Year’s Eve memories make it into the novel?
I’m not a superbig New Year’s Eve celebrator, mostly because I’m superprotective of my sleep, and I rarely find anything worth staying out late for! More than New Year’s Eve, I’d say that my nostalgia for my misspent youth over my college years is woven into the book. Not really any specific examples because I don’t tend to incorporate my real life into my fiction, but just that rosy sense that your whole life was in front of you, and that, in the moment, your friends and your loves and your world on campus is safe and insular and protective. That’s how I look back on my time at college, and I think I drew from that place while crafting everything about Frankie and Ezra.
hardheaded and stubborn (ahem), but I have such a soft spot for Ezra, who is a man I’d love to meet in real life and, certainly, a guy worth fighting for.
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AHHHH! Impossible question! I feel like music is always the soundtrack to my life, so I have a million songs that fit all of my moods and circumstances. But here are a few: “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia got me through some breakups and so did “How’s It Going to Be” by Third Eye Blind, “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks always made me feel like a bad-ass, “Needs” by Collective Soul always made me feel like I was falling in love, and “A Murder of One” by Counting Crows always made me think (and still does) that anything is possible if I’m open to change. Honestly, I could do this all day.
You know, it is such a tough time in the world right now that what I genuinely hope for this book is that it offers a reprieve from their day-to-day and that they can get lost in Frankie and Ezra’s story and then maybe get lost in their own. I am a really nostalgic person, and there’s nothing I love more, even if it’s sometimes like pressing a bruise, than listening to music or reading a book that transports me back in time to a pivotal or meaningful mo ment from my past. So I hope that The Rewind can do the same for them—the heady days of early love, the riotous moments from college or their youth, the time when their futures were ahead of them, wide open.
In the novel, Frankie is on the rise as a music manager for one of the hottest bands of the late ’90s. So tell us, what’s your all-time favorite ’90s tune?
What do you hope readers will take away from reading The Rewind ?
