Romance is Redefined in Rebecca Serle’s “Expiration Dates”

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This month on Authors Between the Covers: Expiration Dates

March 2024: "Expiration Dates" is the story of a woman in her 30s who receives a slip of paper with his name and a number on it every time she meets a man. And the number on the paper reflects the exact amount of time they will spend together. What happens next? Listen and learn!

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March 2024: A Note from Hope Katz Gibbs, founder, Inkandescent® PR & Publishing Co. — “Being single is like playing the lottery — always the chance that with one piece of paper, you could win it all,” says New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Serle about the theme of her newest novel, Expiration Dates, available this month. Promoted as a romance that will define a generation, this is Rebecca’s 8^th book — and after reading it, and crying during my 9-hour plane trip from Frankfurt to JFT, I can tell you that is certainly true.

Here’s the story: Daphne Bell believes the universe has a plan for her. Every time she meets a new man, she receives a slip of paper with his name and a number on it—the exact amount of time they will be together. The papers told her she’d spend three days with Martin in Paris; five weeks with Noah in San Francisco; and three months with Hugo, her ex-boyfriend turned best friend. Daphne has been receiving the numbered papers for over twenty years, always wondering when there might be one without an expiration. Finally, the night of a blind date at her favorite Los Angeles restaurant, there’s only a name: Jake. But as Jake and Daphne’s story unfolds, Daphne finds herself doubting the paper’s prediction and wrestling with what it means to be both committed and truthful. Because Daphne knows things Jake doesn’t, information that—if he found out—would break his heart.

What critics are saying: Told with her signature warmth and insight into matters of the heart, Rebecca Serle has finally set her sights on romantic love. The result is a gripping, emotional, passionate, and (yes) heartbreaking novel about what it means to be single, what it means to find love, and ultimately how we define each of them for ourselves. Expiration Dates is the one fans have been waiting for.

Below, find our Q&A: An article based on our interview will be published in the March 2024 issue of Costco’s magazine The Connection. This isn’t my first time writing about Rebecca and her books for Costco. I had the privilege of interviewing the author — who also developed the hit TV adaptation Famous in Love, based on her YA series of the same name — in 2018 when she published The Dinner List — an enchanting story about who you’d invite to that one magical dinner when anyone, from any time, could attend. This book strikes a similar cord, linking magic to reality. Buy the new book here!

Authors Between the Covers: Check out our video interview on Inkandescent.tv, and our podcast on InkandescentRadio.com. Scroll down to read more!

Hope Katz Gibbs, Inkandescent® PR & Publishing C0: Rebecca, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us about your new book out this month (March 2024), your new marriage, and your path to being a New York Times bestselling novelist. As I mentioned, we met in 2018 when you published The Dinner List. Tell us first about that book.

Rebecca Serle: I’m so happy to be here and to see you again, Hope. Yes, The Dinner List was my first novel for adults. It’s sort of like the answer to that famous question. If you could have dinner with any five people, living or dead, who would they be? So this woman shows up to her 30th birthday dinner, and it’s that dinner and Audrey Hepburn’s at the table and her father, who passed away when she was very young, and her best friend, who she’s struggling with in their relationship, and then her ex-boyfriend. And the chapters go back and forth between sort of, like, times of this unfolding dinner and her love story with this man. So that was a really fun one. But publishing that book feels like another lifetime ago, It was the start of so much of my career, and so much has happened since 2018.

Inkandescent: You have written eight books about finding love — and in October 2023, you got married! Mazel tov.

Rebecca: I did! I just got married. I love marriage. I think it’s the best. I’m, like, a really big fan. We wanted a very small wedding, and we knew we didn’t want to have a big thing, so we wanted to elope, but we wanted our families to be there. And so we went to France and got married with just our parents. And it was lovely and wonderful. And then we went on and honeymooned around France. We married in Provence and then went to Saint Tropez and Paris for a few weeks. It was wonderful, and I feel very lucky. It’s a different chapter for me, and it’s a different chapter for my work. I imagine all of it will be reflected in what comes next.

Inkandescent: Amazing, and again, congratulations! So let’s talk about this new book, Expiration Dates.

   Rebecca: The story takes place in Los Angeles, and we have a little bit of the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel colors on the cover, even though there are no scenes in there. But, yes, this is it. Expiration Dates is the story of a woman in her 30s who receives a slip of paper with his name and a number on it every time she meets a man. And the number on the paper reflects the exact amount of time they will spend together. The book opens with her receiving a piece of paper that has the man’s name on it, and the time is blank. It is also my book about looking for love, and it’s my book about romantic love. Specifically, I’ve written a lot about different kinds of love. I think the dinner list was about romantic love, but it was also about familial love and sort of, like, icon love and the love between best friends. That’s complicated. And in five years, it was obviously, like a story between two best friends. And one Italian summer was a mother-daughter love story. And so this one is really about romance.

Inkandescent: I love your romantic, powerful plots and the fact that your books float in the space where magic meets reality.

Rebecca: I see magical realism as a way to cut to the quick of a story faster and in a bigger way. So I’ll take my last novel, for instance, a book One Italian Summer. It’s about a young woman who has just lost her mother. Her mom had always talked about this magical trip she took to Positano when she was a young woman, and the two of them had planned to go back to Positano together. Katie’s mother, unfortunately, passes away before they can go. And so Katie decides to embark on this adventure alone. And then, in a magical twist, she ends up meeting her mom when her mom is young, and they spend the summer together as two young women. I could have told a story about a young woman who has just lost her mother, who goes to this place that meant so much to her and meets people who knew her mother and uncovers a journal of her mom and her old stomping grounds and an old love of hers and all of these things. But the bigger, more interesting story is, let’s just meet Mom. Let’s just be with Mom. While magical realism is a bit of a cheat, it helps me get to the heart of the stories I want to tell.

Inkandescent: You do it so well! Tell us what led you to write this story.

Rebecca: I write stories to figure out where I am in my own life. Part of the romance narrative is that there is, in some way, an ending and answer to the question: How will this turn out? Are these two people going to end up together? Are you going to meet your person? Who is he? Do you end up getting all the things that you’re looking for? Is love what you think it is? And I didn’t know because I was single. For a long time, I wanted to tell this story, but I just had absolutely no idea how it ended. I wrote to my editor back in 2021, saying, ‘Okay, I want to write about the search for love. And I’m starting to think that if I write this book, he’ll be there at the end of it.’ Like, my person will be there at the end of me writing this book because so much of my journey as a girl and novelist has been about looking for my person and searching — and not knowing how it is going to turn out.

Inkandescent: You finished this title in the late fall of 2021, and in the Spring of 2022, you ended up meeting the man who’s now your husband. That’s remarkable!

Rebecca: There was something about just laying it all out there. And this book has a lot. It’s not my experience, but it certainly shares a lot of my experiences of different relationships and dates. There’s a lot of just, like, comedy and truth in there. I hope it will speak to women about the experience of searching as a continuation in the way I think all of my books have a little bit. At the end of all my novels, I always write a note with an acknowledgment to my readers. In this one, the note is the novel. Everything I want to say (I’m going to get emotional now) to women about what that search is and the idea of keeping going is in this book. It means a lot to me to talk about that now.

Inkandescent: That’s beautiful, and I’m sure it will be appreciated by women everywhere. What are your quick takeaways — the three things you want women to know about the search?

Rebecca: Interesting question. I think that it’s really important to know that it’s not you. For a long time, I thought, well, maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe my standards are too high, or maybe I had all of these ideas about, maybe this is what it feels like. Maybe I’m missing it. So I would say:

1. You’re not wrong. Trust yourself.
2. Number two: I would say it does feel different from how you think it’s going to be. I think you need to meet yourself. You need to do the work. I was not ready for a long time because I was chasing exciting relationships, I think, or to use a writer’s term, very plot-heavy. Like, a lot happened. There was a lot of drama, and they were feeding my work. And so it worked for me. It was what I needed at that stage. So I think you have to do the work to recognize your person and to recognize that the kind of love that I have, the kind of love I would love for my friends and my readers, feels very sturdy. This relationship feels like home.
3. And third, just be open to it being better than you ever really imagined because that’s how I feel about my very young and new marriage. And I’m sure at some point, I will be sitting here, and we will be talking about the complexities of marriage, and that will be a book that’s coming. But for now, I feel incredibly lucky. I didn’t know this level of happiness was out there for me in my relationship. Be open to it being even better than you imagined.

Inkandescent: Tell us about your path to becoming a novelist.

Rebecca: I was always a writer. It’s interesting to me when people say, oh, I woke up at 35 or 50 or whatever and had my story. I’m fascinated by those writers because, for me, it’s just who I am. It was always who I was in elementary school and middle school, just putting little stories together and entering grading competitions. I also like to say I have no other discernible talent. So it’s very lucky that this worked out because I don’t know how I would be employable if it weren’t for my career. So I’m very grateful. So I went to college for creative writing and English. I was a double major at USC. Then I moved to New York City, went to the New School, and got my master’s in creative writing. In graduate school, I worked at Penguin, the publishing house, as a paid intern and at a literary agency.

I would say grad school was great, and I think it’s wonderful. It gives you time to focus on your work. But what made a difference for me was working in publishing because I got to see how this thing gets made and what the players are. I knew I wanted to write, but I had no idea what an agent or, sorry, an agent or an editor were. I didn’t know any of those terms. And I figured, okay, well, and this was back in 2010, so I figured, okay, well, maybe I’ll work for a magazine. I felt like a writer. It would be incredible to write novels, but who even does that? They weren’t real people. Working in publishing gave me a sense of how this works and how I could do it. At the time that I sold my first novel, the Young Adult genre was taking off, in a way. It was right in the middle of Twilight, and I had this idea for a book that became When You Were Mine and the movie Rosalyn.

Inkandescent: This book asks the question, what if Romeo and Juliet’s love story was wrong?

Rebecca: Exactly. It’s the story of Rosalind, Romeo’s ex. And it was really fun to write. I was 23 when I wrote it, so I was very close to the teen experience. I was lucky enough that I knew my agent at the time because I was working at this agency, so I was able to give it to her. And she read it and loved it. And I’ve been writing full-time ever since, which was. We sold my first book in 2010.

Inkandescent: That’s a Cinderella story for every writer that wishes they could become a novelist. You are 38 now, have written eight books, and have had tons of experiences. What do you think you are best known for?

Rebecca: I think I’m best known for books that make people feel, which I love because I think that I touched on this earlier, but I think in a lot of ways, I write to figure out how I feel about life, my own life, life in general. And so I see it as being a little bit of a shared dialog. I’m putting things out there and being like, does this resonate? And then the reader is saying, like, yes, it does. I also feel this way, and seeing that reflected is important. So I think that I’m probably known for making people feel, maybe making people cry.

Inkandescent: Is there a movie on the horizon for any of your books?

Rebecca: Hopefully. I mean, one Italian Summer and Five Years are both in development. So hopefully we’ve. It’s been challenging here in Hollywood because of the Raider strike, and then there was the Actors Guild strike. So hopefully, as we come out of those strikes, we can better understand forward motion and progress on those projects.

Inkandescent: Tell us, what’s next for you?

Rebecca: Life is funny like that, right? You get something, and then the tide moves, and there’s a different challenge in your life. And so I feel like I’m taking time to be in this new marriage and to be happy and here. And there’s also stuff going on in my life that’s challenging right now, and I’m sure that it’s a conversation for another time, but I’m sure that book is coming, too. I try to be as present as possible in my life and pay attention because I think when you’re present in your life, and you pay attention, you figure out what the stories are that you want to tell. I’m writing more slowly now because my process is also changing. It’s different than when I was single because I could sort of fall into a hole and come out the other side three months later and have a book. And it’s different now because I don’t live alone anymore. And so much of my life has changed. I’m definitely in the process of figuring out what my new process is.

Inkandescent: Before we finish, let’s return to Expiration Dates, which is out this month (March 2024). What do you want people to take away from this book?

Rebecca: I would love readers to feel validated in their own experience. I want them to know that growth is possible for you and the people in your life. I would love for women looking for their person or women who have found their person, or women who are looking at their person saying, is this the right person to feel validated in their experience and feel less alone?

Inkandescent: Thank you, dear Rebecca, for your time. And thank you to all of our readers, listeners, and viewers for sharing this interview with us. We will bring you another episode of Authors Between the Covers, where you’ll meet amazing writers like Rebecca Serle. We’ll talk to you all soon.

Click here to learn more about this Truly Amazing Woman: rebeccaserle.com.