‘The Favorites’ Author Layne Fargo on Which Olympians Inspired Her Characters, Whether She’d Write a Sequel and Being Optioned for TV

variety.com:

Emily Longeretta In the world of ice dancing, nothing is off limits. That’s the tone and story that Layne Fargo set to tell with “The Favorites,” her latest novel that has become the talk of social media since its January release.

Per the book’s description, “To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession. An epic love story set in the sparkling, savage sphere of elite figure skating, starring a woman determined to carve her own path on and off the ice.” “The Favorites” is told through multiple storylines — both from Katarina Shaw’s point of view as she falls in love with Heath Rocha as a kid and begins her Olympic journey; and that journey told by others via an unauthorized documentary celebrating the tenth anniversary of Shaw and Rocha’s final skate. “This was a book I wrote for myself about things I was obsessed with,” says Fargo, a longtime viewer of figure skating competitions on TV and a big “Wuthering Heights” fan.

When she began, she was working on two different books — a gothic romance and a thriller about ice dancers. “Neither one was working and I just kept bouncing back and forth.

Finally, I had the idea to mash them together and make it a ‘Wuthering Heights’ retelling… I’d been struggling for years, and then it was just like this magical process.” From there, she began doing much more research, from reading skaters’ memoirs to going through the archives of U.S.