Edward Underhill: Spite Keeps Me Going

Edward Underhill grew up in the suburbs of Wisconsin, where he could not walk to anything, so he had to make up his own adventures. He studied music in college, spent several years living in very small apartments in New York, and currently resides in California with his partner and a talkative black cat. He is the author of two YA novels, Always the Almost and This Day Changes Everything. Follow him on Instagram.

In this interview, Edward discusses how wanting to go back in time inspired his new LGBTQ+ magical realism novel (and debut adult novel), The In-Between Bookstore, his advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Edward Underhill
Literary agent: Patricia Nelson, Marsal Lyon Literary Agency
Book title: The In-Between Bookstore
Publisher: HarperCollins / Avon
Release date: January 14, 2025
Genre/category: LGBTQ+; magical realism; fiction
Previous titles: Always the Almost, This Day Changes Everything (both YA)
Elevator pitch: A whimsical and healing novel about a trans man in New York who—almost 30, laid off, broke—moves back to his small Illinois hometown, walks into the bookstore he worked at in high school. . . and slips through time to come face-to-face with his pre-transition, teenage self.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

What prompted you to write this book?

I’ve always been interested in “What if I knew then what I know now” kinds of questions. I think they’re especially poignant for queer people. I’ve often found myself wishing that I could go back and tell myself that I was trans earlier, and wondering how my life would look different now if I had. It’s a very weird gray area to exist in—wishing that you could have made something easier for yourself, while simultaneously recognizing that the way your own story played out absolutely shaped who you are. With The In-Between Bookstore, I really wanted to explore that confusing gray area, that kind of coming-of-age narrative, but through a queer, millennial/Gen-Z lens, with a speculative twist. A bookstore felt like the perfect space for my main character’s transformation—bookstores have always felt a little magical, a little like they existed out of time and space, to me.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I started discussing the concept of the book with my agent in late 2022, and then once I’d written the first few chapters and a full synopsis, we sent that as a proposal to my publisher in early 2023. Then I had to write the rest of the book, which I actually did in about a month and a half! It was insanely fast, and I’m honestly not sure I recommend drafting at that pace; but one good thing was that I had no time to overthink anything. There simply wasn’t time. I had to fully immerse myself in this story for six weeks, with no time to overthink anything—and that was actually wonderful. (It’s so easy for me to get wrapped up in my own head and worry about the publishing side of everything instead of the writing side.)

The core of the story stayed the same. I always had the bookstore, I always had this hook of a time-slip that allows my main character to talk to his younger self, but other elements of the story definitely shifted around that. I actually completely rewrote the climactic scene of the story the night before I sent it to my editor—and I think that was absolutely the right call! I wanted it to feel more urgent than the first way I wrote it, and apparently it just took me until right before my deadline to figure out how to make that happen.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

It’s going to sound cheesy, but honestly the biggest and most wonderful surprise has been just how many people have been excited about this book. Like my main character, I grew up in a relatively isolated town in the Midwest, at a time when trans identity wasn’t in the mainstream—I never even knew it was a thing until I got to college. I remember Googling when I first came out, desperately looking for other trans people (especially trans guys), and I found one blog. That was it. And that was in 2009! The whole time I was writing this book, even after my publisher bought it, I kept feeling this strange disconnect—here I was writing the kind of story I’d always wanted to see myself in, and I was deeply, deeply loving it, and at the same time, a little voice in my head kept telling me nobody would want to read it. That there couldn’t possibly be room for trans characters to be in the mainstream, to be messy and imperfect and real in a way that’s so specifically trans but also (I think) so incredibly universal. To see my agent, my editor, and then whole teams of people at my imprint, and then librarians and booksellers get excited about this book … it’s been surprising in the best way. I really absorbed this notion when I first came out that the only way to live life the way I wanted to and stay safe was to be invisible. It’s strange and rewarding and scary and wonderful to watch this book (and by extension, myself) become visible—to have people see this book and tell me they’re excited to read it.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I wildly underestimated how hard and complicated time travel logistics are! When I started writing this book, I told myself it would be easy because it wasn’t hardcore science fiction. I wasn’t thinking that much about the actual science of time travel; I could be hand-wavy about all of that. But as soon as Darby, my main character, walked into the bookstore and time-traveled back 13 years, I realized I had a problem: Everyone these days has smartphones, and obviously Darby’s first instinct, upon seeing someone who looks exactly like he did as a teenager would be to pull out his phone and snap a pic! So, then I had to figure out a way to get rid of his smartphone. Similarly, with everyone’s tendency to just Google things, I knew Darby would actually start Googling time travel and portals as soon as he could—so what did I do with that? There were a lot of times I had to think about how much information I wanted to make available, both to Darby and to the reader. How much information I could make available without having the story lose its slight sense of magic.

I also had to go down so many specific holes related to the mid-aughts, and the era Darby was traveling back to. I’d be in the middle of writing a scene and then realize I didn’t actually know when the first iPhone came out, or how long it was before most people were using them. That sort of thing. Keeping track of all of that—plus constantly jumping between the present outside the bookstore and the past inside it—was more challenging than I thought it would be going in.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

With so many excellent craft books out there, and with the existence of the internet, I always hesitate to give real tangible advice about writing. I’m mostly self-taught. I learned by trying stuff and reading stuff. But the best piece of advice I ever heard (from Patrick Ness, when I heard him speak at an event), and the thing that has kept me going, is: Write out of spite. For all that that little voice in my mind kept telling me there wouldn’t be room for a book like this on the shelves, I wrote it anyway. We all experience rejection, whether we’re marginalized writers or not. I think I’m obnoxiously stubborn, and when someone tells me “No, you can’t do that,” I mope about it for a day and then I get mad and decide to do it anyway. Giving myself permission to harness that energy and turn it into something productive is the only reason I finished books, and kept sending those books to agents, and so on and so forth. Writing and publishing is not a sprint—it’s a marathon, uphill, in the dark, in flip-flops. Spite keeps me going, so I embrace it.