Writing is hard — and so is marriage! Combining the two would be a particular challenge not for the faint of heart, but that’s exactly what Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka regularly do.
The married co-authors (and former high-school sweethearts) have written 7 novels together. Their newest title is the adult romance “Do I Know You?” (Berkley). It’s the story of Eliza and Graham, a wedded couple in a marital rut who hope that a getaway to a romantic resort will reignite a matrimonial spark.
But when a hotel screw-up and a mistaken guest confuse Eliza and Graham as complete strangers, the unhappy couple see an opportunity. They spend the week as singles, pretending to meet for the first time and again experiencing the ups and downs of dating one another. It’s a chance to see if they remember why they once fell in love.
The novel was inspired — what isn’t these days!?! — by COVID-19, with Wibberley and Siegemund-Broka spending the first years of their own marriage trapped in Coronavirus quarantine.
Austin says, “We were 2 married people cooped up in a house together. The spark for the book was a couple who knew each other too well and had to learn to break out of that … something intimately inspired by spending the first years of our marriage stuck in isolation.”
Wibberley and Siegemund-Broka love working together, but the writing process is not without its struggles. While “Do I Know You” has alternating chapters told from the perspectives of Emily and Graham, the married co-authors write every word of their books in tandem.
“We don’t trade off who writes what. We write it together in the same room, speaking to each other,” Austin explains.
“Every sentence, which is why there’s always conflict!” Emily laughs.
It’s exactly as hard as it sounds, they say.
“We write books together, which is very difficult. It’s great, we love sharing everything, but the work is the #1 source of conflict in our marriage,” Emily says.
Austin shrugs. “It’s a very difficult endeavor, and it looks like fights plenty of the time.”