Ordinary Love: An Interview with Marie Rutkoski
There’s a reason that stories about first love are so compelling. Whether sweeping and passionate, halting and unsure, or marked by secret longing, that first rush of emotion can be intoxicating and all-consuming. First love – and the heartbreak that often follows – has a way of lodging itself deep inside of us, stirring strong memories for years to come.
In Marie Rutkoski’s compelling new novel Ordinary Love (Knopf, June 2025), teenage protagonist Emily’s deep feelings for her best-friend-turned-first-love Gen are complicated by living in rural Ohio, in a place and time where queer relationships aren’t commonplace or accepted. As they navigate early adulthood, their relationship unravels, and they lose touch. Decades later, as Emily begins to extricate herself from an emotionally abusive marriage, Gen resurfaces in her life. When the two women realize that the intensity of their love for each other hasn’t faded, Emily is faced with a choice: who does she want to be, and what is she willing to risk for love?
Ordinary Love is a story of self-discovery, second chances, and the bravery that it takes to find a path back to a self that was lost long ago. In vivid, evocative prose, Rutkoski explores the idea that coming of age is a continual process and that the best love stories – the kind that endure, that grip us when we’re young and refuse to let go – are anything but ordinary. – Jen Bryant
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JEN BRYANT: You’ve previously written several YA books; Ordinary Love is geared towards adult readers. What similarities have you found in writing for the two audiences? What’s different?
MARIE RUTKOSKI: Writing YA uniquely prepared me to write this book. There’s a long section that takes place during Emily’s adolescence – we see her briefly when she’s ten, and then there’s a longer section where she’s a senior in high school and falls in love with Gen. Writing for younger readers made those sections flow easily, and they were really natural for me to write. I was in my element.
One of the things that differentiates young adult literature from adult literature is that we see characters really going through things for the first time. It’s the first time they’re really learning how to see themselves apart from their families, and what it’s like to fall in love for the first time, and these firsts are what make young adult literature so powerful. Something that I realized when I was writing Ordinary Love is that we talk about coming of age as if it’s something that happens once, in the moment that we transition from being a child to being a young adult – exiting childhood, entering young adulthood – but we are always coming of age, and adulthood is also marked by moments where we leave our past self behind and enter into a new sense of identity. We see that happening with Emily as she’s becoming a mother, leaving her marriage, and re-entering into a relationship with Gen, and also as she’s understanding more about her sexuality and her identity.
JB: How long did it take to develop the story and characters in Ordinary Love?
MR: The development process happened over a period of six months, where I was beginning to see the shape of the story and beginning to write my way into it. I began with a kind of vague idea, and it was only after six months of considering how it could go that I really began writing.
JB: Speaking of the characters, I was so fascinated by the contrasts between Emily’s relationships with Jack and with Gen. The relationship between Jack and Emily shows the insidious dynamics of control and the ways in which the unacceptable can slowly become commonplace. By contrast, while Emily and Gen sometimes disagreed, they always supported and cared deeply for one another. These individual relationship arcs are contrasts, but each one deeply influenced Emily’s character – her behaviors, decisions, and beliefs about herself.
MR: I do think of those relationships as contrasts. The relationships are starkly different, but they both helped Emily become who she was. I loved how you described the insidious nature of emotional abuse. One thing that was important to me in how I portrayed her relationship with Jack was to show just how easy and understandable it could be to fall for that, especially when it’s not so obvious. He’s not physically abusive, and he’s telling her all the time how much he loves her, and she really yearns for that kind of love because she’s been so lonely for most of her life and because her relationship with Gen as a young person ended up in such heartbreak.
And the costs are so high, right? In order for Emily to really admit that what Jack’s doing is unacceptable, that the way he’s treating her is not okay, would be very scary, because it would mean that she’d have to break apart her entire life and be entirely alone and become his enemy – and he’s already proven that you do not want to be his enemy. And so I think that very much does shape her, and it makes it seem to the reader that she’s all the more brave for leaving that relationship.
And I don’t think that Jack knows what he’s doing. I think he really thinks that he loves her, and that he’s making the best decisions, and that she can never value him the way he deserves to be valued.
JB: Emily felt unsupported in her writing during her marriage, with her husband often going to cruel lengths to suppress her talents because he felt threatened. What in your opinion is the relationship between mental/emotional freedom and creativity?
MR: It’s absolutely essential for creativity. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is problematic in some ways – she completely ignores the existence of women writers of color, for example, which is a big issue. I won’t go into all of her problems, but I will say something that feminists have long recognized is true, which is that she outlines the importance of being financially free and how that is essential for creativity. This is why she believes women writers have not really existed to the extent that they should have before her time – that there are not many writers she can point to as being truly great – because of hundreds of years of women not having the financial freedom to express themselves, or having, physically, a room of one’s own, where they don’t have to worry about housing or food or taking care of children, et cetera. But I think that implicit in her analysis of the importance of financial freedom is also the importance of emotional freedom and intellectual freedom. They go hand in hand. If you’re constantly subservient to men’s needs, as women had been for hundreds of years, you do not have emotional or intellectual freedom, and it is very difficult to be creative.
JB: The novel also touches on themes of social class, contrasting Emily and Gen’s working-class upbringings with Jack’s wealthier lifestyle. What made you decide to include class and money as major themes in this story?
MR: I’m always interested in class. I think that my education has led me to a very different place in life. It took me from the suburbs of Chicago to living and having a wonderful life in Brooklyn. I did my PhD at Harvard, and I remember arriving there and just being like, Whoa. This place is an intellectual utopia, but also, it’s so wealthy. Money is dripping from every blade of manicured grass on the lawn. I probably shouldn’t say this, but there were sometimes receptions in this one room in my department’s building, and I’d heard that the carpet cost millions of dollars. I knew somebody – another graduate student – who deliberately poured wine onto it, just out of rage, I think, at how much money Harvard had. But it’s also a complicated feeling, because it’s something that we also benefited from. Almost every graduate student at Harvard is there on some kind of full ride. I was able to attend Harvard because I didn’t have to pay tuition, and I received a stipend, and that was true for everybody in my department as a graduate student.
And now I’ve gotten very far away from your question, which was why I wrote about class. I suppose I wrote about it because it’s important to me, and I’m interested in writing about money because it’s important to everybody. Who’s going to deny that money is essential – how to get it, how to best use it? It’s something that defines our existence.
JB: I think it’s a lot easier to see the doors that money opens, and the ways in which it smooths certain things over, when you don’t grow up in that environment, and so you don’t have that automatic expectation.
MR: Emily thinks about that, too, early on in the book – I’m with this guy who has so much money, and I feel a little bit like maybe I shouldn’t be enjoying that he’s spending it on me, but then again, why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t you want a life that’s relieved of care, where you don’t have to worry about having to pay, where somebody makes that part of life easy and you’re allowed to enter into a kind of beautiful existence?
JB: Absolutely. And on the topic of beauty, it seems like Emily’s beauty opened some doors, too. She was very smart and accomplished and creative, but her beauty was the initial thing that caught Jack’s eye. I think that’s another thing we don’t really talk about a lot – the way that certain things can help you to almost transcend class, or allow for easier class mobility, and I think that beauty can be one of them.
MR: That’s absolutely right. And although Jack feels that he’s caught a prize, and he likes that Emily has a degree from Harvard, she doesn’t use that degree; instead, she becomes a wife and a mother. And there’s nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom – my mother was one, and many women make that choice for good reasons. But in the case of Jack and Emily, it really is a stifling of her identity, and she becomes only a beautiful object to him.
It’s interesting – I hadn’t really thought about this until you brought it up, but I don’t think that Gen ever really comments on Emily’s beauty. Emily is beautiful, but it’s not what Gen is focused on.
JB: Ordinary Love is full of unexpected moments. As the author, did anything surprise you during the process of creating this book?
MR: You only get maybe one chapter where you see Emily and Gen at ten years old, when they first meet in fifth grade. They’re not in the same class, but Emily sees Gen in the lunchroom, and it’s clear that Gen doesn’t even really have enough money to buy lunch. She’s using the small amount of change she has to buy skim milk, because it’s cheaper than whole milk, and she even opens up the package and is licking the inside because she’s so hungry. Emily sees this, and without explaining herself or really saying anything, she begins passing Gen peanut butter sandwiches she makes at home. And so you see how the beginning of their relationship is marked by care and by recognition – that Emily sees that Gen is not okay and wants to do something to help her. And similarly, Gen wants to find some way to repay Emily. She’s drawn to Emily and listening to her talk and hears that Emily likes flowers. And so Emily finds in her pocket one day this packet of marigold seeds. It’s a cheap thing – if you’re not buying milk because somebody’s bringing you peanut butter sandwiches every day, you could save enough to buy an 80-cent packet of seeds.
I wasn’t planning for the marigold seeds to become so significant, but it ended up being a way to mark their relationship over the course of the book. The way in which Emily holds onto that packet of seeds, or even just thinks about it – whenever it shows up, it becomes a kind of shorthand for the reader to understand where Emily and Gen are in terms of their relationship with each other. And I just wasn’t expecting that simple gesture of Gen giving Emily marigold seeds to become so important.
JB: Looking back now, I can see how they were a touchstone throughout the book. And of course, a seed is symbolic – you don’t know how it will turn out, and you have to put in that care and investment to help it grow. In a way, I think that was something Jack wasn’t willing to do with Emily – he didn’t want her to bloom; he wanted her to stay this small thing that needed him – whereas Gen was invested in seeing Emily flourish, and vice versa.
MR: Seeds and flowers can be kind of a cliché, but I also think clichés can be clichés for a reason. I remember giving a draft of the novel to a writer friend, and they were like, “This seed thing is a little symbolically on the nose.” And I thought about it, and I decided, “Well, yeah. So what?” Not that I discounted his opinion, but there are reasons that we talk about seeds that way. It’s kind of universal: children go to kindergarten and put grass seeds in a Styrofoam cup and see what happens.
Cover photo by Flavie Martin on Unsplash
About the Author
Jen Bryant is an editor at MUTHA Magazine and a creative nonfiction reader for Mud Season Review. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Ms., BUST, Hip Mama, Matter News, and elsewhere. She has participated in readings and storytelling events at the Columbus Arts Fest, Wild Goose Creative, and Two Dollar Radio. Originally from the South, she currently lives in the Midwest.
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