‘Expiration Dates’ Author Rebecca Serle on Using Magic to ‘Expedite the Truth’ About Love and Fate in New Novel

variety.com:

Rachel Seo When the idea for her upcoming novel “Expiration Dates” began percolating in her head, author Rebecca Serle worried at first that the concept was “gimmicky.” “There was something missing,” she tells Variety over the phone, two weeks before the book’s March 19 launch.

The premise — based on the question, “What if a woman got slips of paper that told her how long she’d spend in a relationship?” — felt like it verged on triteness.

But the story evolved beyond that initial fear when Serle figured out the book’s midpoint, a major revelation that raises the stakes for its protagonist, Daphne, and introduces a sobering depth to an otherwise lighthearted concept. “All of my books through ‘Expiration Dates’ have some kind of midway twist,” she says. “I discovered what that was, and then I started writing.” Over the past several years, Serle has built a reputation as a writer of female characters whose personal transformations are precipitated by small but significant hints of magic embedded in the worlds they inhabit. “In Five Years” — which spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list — focuses on Dannie, who wakes up five years into the future and is suddenly confronted with the confusion of being able to understand the multivariable outcomes of one’s past decisions.

In “One Italian Summer,” protagonist Katy travels to Positano, Italy, where she meets a younger version of her recently deceased mother and is forced to recalibrate her sense of their past relationship.