Yulin Kuang is the name on your favorite author’s lips. We’re literally not joking about that. In fact, if you probably ask them what debut they’re obsessed with, there’s a good chance they’ll tell you all about the seasoned screenwriter and director’s upcoming debut novel. And, obviously, no one knows more about the best romance books like those who’ve written some our faves. When you have the likes of Emily Henry (who Yulin is working with on the Beach Read movie adaptation with, nbd), Tessa Bailey, Carley Fortune, Jill Shavis, Elissa Sussman, and so many others singing your praises, you’re definitely writing the next romance novel of our dreams.
Cosmopolitan has an exclusive new look at Yulin Kuang’s How to End a Love Story which brings her familiar world of screenwriting and mixes it in with all the romance drama that we love. When a famous author finally gets the chance to adapt her books into a series, things seem to be picture perfect. That is, until she finds out that someone she shares a traumatic moment with is also in the writer’s room with her.
And just like their history, there’s so much more where that came from. Here’s the official description from our friends at Avon before its big release on April 9, 2024:
“Emotional, relatable and binge-worthy.” –Tessa Bailey
“I’ll read anything she writes. An absolute star.” –Emily Henry
“I was hooked on the very first page. Don’t miss this one!” — Carley Fortune
Two writers with a complicated history end up working on the same TV show… Can they write themselves a new ending? A sexy and emotional enemies-to-lovers romance guaranteed to pull on your heartstrings and give you a book hangover from brilliant new voice Yulin Kuang
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Entertainment Weekly · Today.com · Paste · Daily Waffle ·The Nerd Daily and more!
Helen Zhang hasn’t seen Grant Shepard once in the thirteen years sincethe tragic accident that bound their lives together forever.
Now a bestselling author, Helen pours everything into her career. She’s even scored a coveted spot in the writers’ room of the TV adaptation of her popular young adult novels, and if she can hide her imposter syndrome and overcome her writer’s block, surely the rest of her life will fall into place too. LA is the fresh start she needs. After all, no one knows her there. Except…
Grant has done everything in his power to move on from the past, including building a life across the country. And while the panic attacks have never quite gone away, he’s well liked around town as a screenwriter. He knows he shouldn’t have taken the job on Helen’s show, but it will open doors to developing his own projects that he just can’t pass up.
Grant’s exactly as Helen remembers him—charming, funny, popular, and lovable in ways that she’s never been. And Helen’s exactly as Grant remembers too—brilliant, beautiful, closed off. But working together is messy, and electrifying, and Helen’s parents, who have never forgiven Grant, have no idea he’s in the picture at all.
When secrets come to light, they must reckon with the fact that theirs was never meant to be any kind of love story. And yet… the key to making peace with their past—and themselves—might just lie in holding on to each other in the present.
While we won’t have to wait too long to see what happens to Helen and Grant, you actually dive in a little early thanks to a special exclusive excerpt that you can check out below! Don’t forget to pre-order the book before you dive in!
An Excerpt From How to End a Love Story
By Yulin Kuang
Thirteen Years Later
When the phone rings on Tuesday morning, Helen already knows it’s going to be good news. Her literary agent Chelsea Pierce sends bad news in sympathetic couplets over email—they didn’t go for it; fuck ’em—but she picks up the phone for good news.
“I hope you hate your apartment because you’re going to Hollywood!”
Helen laughs and immediately feels a rush of cautious energy flood her. Don’t get too excited, the paperwork isn’t signed, everything could still fall apart.
She’s grown superstitious. When she published the first book in what would become the Ivy Papers series, she told herself, Don’t get ahead of yourself, people might hate it, or worse, maybe no one will even read it. When it became a bestseller and the New York Times put her on a list of voices to watch in the young adult space, she admonished herself, It doesn’t really matter, the work is still the same as it was before it made the list, and what if they don’t like the second book?
Her entire career so far could be linked from cautious mental disclaimer to disclaimer, right up to the announcement that some fancy Hollywood people are turning her books about moody prep-school moody prep-school teens keeping dark, academic secrets into a soapier, sexier TV show.
“What do you do about imposter syndrome?” she once asked a much more successful, senior author over a celebratory brunch.
“Well, at a certain point, it becomes unseemly,” he told her.
Six weeks later, as she opens the door to her new waterfront condo (all living expenses during prep and production paid for by the studio, plus per diem) across from the Santa Monica Pier—Helen thinks, perhaps, she’s reached a certain point.
The place comes furnished in expensive beiges and smells like a trendy hotel. Late-September sunshine filters through the floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto her private balcony, and it makes Helen wonder if she could become a totally different person here, the kind with morning routines and inner peace. There’s a shared common area on the top floor she can reserve for parties (Helen doesn’t know enough people in this city to throw a party, but she nods politely at the building manager anyway) and her kitchen window looks out onto the patio of her temporary neighbor, Academy Award–winner Frances McDormand.
“How very LA,” her East Coast friends say when she tells them.
“Who?” says her mom during their first bicoastal FaceTime.
“Frances McDormand, Mom,” Helen sighs as she unpacks the groceries. “She’s, like, an actress, you would know her. She’s in . . .”
Helen pauses, as her mind suddenly erases the entirety of Frances McDormand’s illustrious, award-winning career from existence. She was in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but Mom hasn’t seen that.
“I think she played the Queen in something. Oh, and she’s the mom in Moonrise Kingdom!”
“I don’t know her,” Mom says. “Never mind. What are you making for dinner?”
Helen dutifully recites her dinner menu—just something easy, I still have to get more pots and pans, yes I’ll add something green, thanks, Mom—and is treated to another forty minutes of hand-wringing over the history of earthquakes in LA County.
“If the ground opens up, I’ll jump right in so it’ll be quick and painless,” Helen says as she finishes off her tomato and egg rice bowl. “Don’t worry so much. Love you, bye!”
She searches “moving into a new apartment in LA” on Spotify and puts on someone else’s well-curated playlist over the state-of-the-art Bluetooth speaker system.
Helen has never been cool enough to be “a music person.” She prefers leaving that up to strangers on the internet who’ve experienced the same specific soundtrack-worthy moments in life—“cozy October morning in the kitchen” or “driving toward my uncertain future”—and hoping they’ll tell her exactly what songs would bring those feelings out best, like a purple scarf for green eyes.
As Stevie Nicks croons about time making her bolder and children getting older, Helen hangs her clothes up in ascending length in the walk-in closet and thinks about the times when life files itself neatly into chapters.
Travel is a way of turning the page, Helen reminds herself, reciting her therapist’s counsel. Maybe you’ll finally be able to write something new.
Helen mentally strikes out that maybe with savage determination.
She hopes this chapter is a short, productive one.
***
When the phone rings on Wednesday, Grant already knows it’s going to be a shit conversation.
“Just take the meeting,” his TV agent Fern wheedles. “What’s the harm in taking a meeting?”
“I didn’t like the book,” he says, not untruthfully.
Prep-school teens and their sex lives aren’t exactly his area, and Grant was hoping to break this unemployment streak with something more exciting, like a feature (which he’s going to finish as soon as he has the time) or at least a development deal somewhere (it’s not his fault he missed pilot season because his mom hired some shady contractors who did such a bad job he had to spend the entire summer back in New Jersey undoing and redoing her floors).
“So you didn’t respond to the material—that’s nothing we haven’t gotten over before,” Fern says. “If anything, it means you’re a better candidate than some loser who’s obsessed with the books. You can see its flaws, you know how to fix it, blah, blah—”
“I went to high school with the author,” he says finally.
“That’s perfect—”
“No,” Grant says grimly. “It’s not. She didn’t like me.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous, everyone likes you,” Fern says, sounding a little maternally offended on his behalf. “Besides, she’s not going to be in the meeting; it’s just the showrunner and executive producers.”
“I . . .” He takes a steadying breath—exhale longer than you inhale—and shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about this right now. There has to be something else. What about Jason’s spin-off show? That was a good meeting, wasn’t it?”
“They don’t have the budget for a writer at your level,” Fern says evenly. “And you’re not taking a pay cut back down to co-producer when we’ve finally clawed our way up to co-EP.”
Grant’s IMDb profile succinctly condenses each rung of his career so far into a one-line credit—staff writer, story editor, executive story editor, co-producer, producer, co–executive producer. Other writers he came up with never managed to make it past that first credit, and there really aren’t many lines separating him from them. Grant knows he doesn’t deserve the success he’s had and it’s always felt that much more precarious for it.
Grant downs an Advil and massages his temples. “What about features?”
“As soon as you’ve got a draft of that spec for me, I’m happy to read it. In the meantime, you’re a TV writer. You make money for us both as a TV writer. And this is a straight-to-series, prestige”—he scoffs here, but Fern overrules him—“very buzzy TV show. The studio execs all loved your materials, the showrunner’s already read your sample. Are you really going to make me tell them they wasted their time?”
Grant sighs. He knows, somehow, this is a mistake, even as he says, “Fine, I’ll take the meeting.”
That night he spends some time googling Helen Zhang, YA author. Her author photo comes up first and she looks more or less the way he remembers her, except older and more expensive. Her eyes are intelligent and assessing, her posture as straight as it was that day in the church at her sister’s funeral. She’s not smiling—Helen has never smiled in his memory, so that makes sense—and he can still see the stiff, serious editor-in-chief of the school paper in her, after all this time.
Their paths rarely crossed before the night that changed his life forever—Helen hung out with the nerdy, Ivy League–obsessed crowd and was not-so-secretly judgy about him and his friends on the football team and cheer squad, rolling her eyes at pep rallies and homecoming and everything that had given his life meaning when he was seventeen years old.
And afterward . . . afterward, Helen hadn’t looked at him at all. She looked through him whenever they were in the same room.
Grant considers what Fern would say if he told her he couldn’t take this job for “mental health reasons.” He laughs to himself—Fern would probably remind him of his mortgage (he shouldn’t have bought the bungalow in Silver Lake, but he’d thought The Guys would have at least one more season before its untimely cancellation) and dangle attractive numbers in front of him (minus ten percent) and tell him therapy costs money.
When he gets the call a few days later that they want to offer him the job, he’s past the point of putting up a fight. Therapy does cost money, and if Helen Zhang has a problem with him being on the writing staff of her TV show, well.
She can take that up with his entertainment lawyer.
Excerpted from the book HOW TO END A LOVE STORY by Yulin Kuang. Copyright © 2024 by Yulin Kuang. From William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
How to End a Love Story, by Yulin Kuang, will be released on April 9, 2024. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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