Marianne Cronin: On Characters You Let Go of Coming Back to You

Marianne Cronin was born in 1990 and grew up in Warwickshire. After gaining her PhD in applied linguistics, she worked in academia until becoming a writer. Her first novel, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, published by Harper Perennial in 2021, was shortlisted for a Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, and received the American Library Association Alex Award. She lives in the Midlands with her family and her cat. Follow her on X (Twitter) and Instagram.

In this interview, Marianne discusses the song lyrics that inspired her new novel, Eddie Winston is Looking for Love, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Marianne Cronin
Literary agent: Alexandra Machinist at CAA (U.S.), Susan Armstrong at C&W (U.K.)
Book title: Eddie Winston is Looking for Love
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release date: December 31, 2024
Genre/category: Fiction, Book Group Fiction, Romance
Previous titles: The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot
Elevator pitch: Eddie Winston is 90 years old and has never been kissed. He spends his days volunteering at a charity shop where he meets 24-year-old Bella who has just lost the love of her life and they form an unlikely friendship. When Bella learns Eddie has never been kissed, she sets out to help Eddie Winston finally find love.

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What prompted you to write this book?

This book was inspired by a song lyric! When I was writing my first novel, I had a playlist with songs that I would listen to on repeat when I was writing certain scenes. It’s sort of like the soundtrack to the film in my mind. One of the final chapters in the book was underscored by a song called “The Ramblin’ Rover” by Silly Wizard.

Not long after Lenni and Margot was published, I had written a few failed attempts at a second novel and was in a bit of a panic, so I put on my Lenni and Margot playlist to get into a creative headspace. Even though I’d listened to “The Rambin’ Rover” easily 200 times by then, that day there was one lyric that stood out to me:

“Oh, there’re sober men and plenty,
And drunkards barely twenty,
There are men of over ninety
That have never yet kissed a girl.”

The idea of exploring a character in their 90s who is still hoping for their first kiss felt too intriguing to ignore. Immediately, I could picture who the 90-year-old man was. He was gentle, cheeky, a good soul who had just missed his opportunity at love, and never found anyone else he wanted to kiss. Within a few days of writing, it felt like Eddie’s voice was so clear to me. Then I was away. It was a huge relief!

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

Eddie Winston is my second novel, so the process was a lot quicker than with my first novel. The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot which took seven years from initial idea to publication!

Once I’d had the inspiration for Eddie, things happened quite quickly. I started writing in November 2021 and by March 2022, I had 50,000 words to share with my agent and my U.K. editor (I was writing under a two-book contract in the U.K.). I went on maternity leave in 2022 and then got back into the swing of writing in 2023—then edits took me to January 2024. We published in the U.K. in August 2024 and we’ll be publishing on New Years Eve in the U.S. (an extra reason to have some champagne that night!) So, in total around three years for the process from beginning to publication, which feels very fast to me!

The central idea, the core of who Eddie is and his mission to find his first kiss before he dies never changed but a lot of smaller things did. His unlikely friend and sidekick, Bella, was originally not meant to have any narration chapters, but after a suggestion from my lovely U.K. editor that she wanted to see inside Bella’s head, I added some Bella chapters. It felt right to see Eddie from Bella’s perspective and to get more of her interior world.

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

I feel like I’m constantly learning! I think one of the key things that I’ve learned is that publishing a novel is a process of letting go. When you start writing, it is just you and the characters—they are completely yours and nobody else knows about this little world you’ve made. And then comes time to share your writing, to work on it with many other voices and perspectives, and it’s a wonderful thing to work with people who love your writing, but it also means that you will never be as close to the characters as you were which is an emotional thing. It’s a process of loosening your control, this tight grip you’ve had on your characters and your perception of the book and what it is. And the book is always the better for it. Then as the book goes out into the world and is in the hands of the readers, you have to let go completely. You can’t change what’s on the page you can only hope that they like what they find there. I’m a bit of a nutcase perfectionist so I tend not to look at my writing once it’s printed because I’ll see something that I want to tweak or change!

The magical thing is when the characters you let go of come back to you. I recently met a vicar who has read extracts of Lenni and Father Arthur’s dialogues about faith at his church and that was amazing.

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

Finding Eddie’s voice happened with just one sentence which was a huge surprise. The sentence eventually got cut, but in that one sentence I understood the whimsical way in which Eddie Winston views the world. I returned to it whenever I found myself unsure of how Eddie might see something or phrase something.

It surprised me how much fun I had writing this book and that I was able to feel like the characters lived in the same world as Lenni and Margot while being a completely new story. After spending seven years in Lenni’s head, I wasn’t sure I could ever love a protagonist like I loved her, but once I really dove into Eddie’s thoughts and his world, I felt so much for him and for Bella, too. There’s an Easter egg character who appears in Lenni and Margot and appears in Eddie Winston—that was just me having fun while writing but I’m glad it didn’t get cut! I may have made it too subtle, though, as nobody has spotted her yet…

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope readers get a little joy out of this book. It’s a love letter to second chances, so trying again, to the weird and wonderful friendships, and all the oddball people who somehow find each other. It’s also a love letter to the strange microcosm that is the charity shop and all the things you can find there. I hope it’s a book that leaves people happier than it found them. There’s also a guinea pig with incredible hair.

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

I would say to really lean in to what makes your writing yours. The peculiar things, the unusual choices, the silly stuff that you think won’t be allowed. Whatever it is that makes your writing yours is likely the thing that your readers will love. Lean into the weird.

I also often recommend Kim Liao’s article for Literary Hub about aiming for 100 rejections a year—reframing rejections as something to collect rather than to be embarrassed or upset by was so useful to my fragile ego in the two years that I was looking for an agent!