Blog Tour: Guest Stop with Lauren Kate, Author of Fallen

Welcome to today's stop on the Lauren Kate blog tour! Lauren is the debut author of the novel, Fallen, a tale of forbidden love and fallen angels. In Fallen, a seventeen year old girl named Luce falls in love with a Daniel, the highly intelligent and mysterious boy she meets upon being sent to reform school.

What’s the deal with bad boy appeal?
by Lauren Kate

One of the best questions I’ve gotten from a reader so far is whether I believe the kind of love I write about in Fallen exists in the real world. I like this question not only because it allows me to gush about my own experience finding love (my husband I just got married this summer, and writing Fallen and planning our wedding happened simultaneously, so love was—and still is!—definitely in the air). No, the main reason this question stayed with me was because it was asked at a book signing—right after I gave a reading of a particularly unromantic scene between Luce and Daniel. A scene in which they argued, she stammered, he took off to brood! Okay, it was sexy brooding, I’ll give you that, but still. What this reader was responding to wasn’t the open, honest, everyday kind of love that I have with my husband. It was the forbidden stuff.

So what is it about forbidden love, bad boys (or girls!), and crushing on the unattainable that gets us so wrapped up? I think the answer has a lot less to do with the object of our affections, and a lot more to do with us. Because we could never all agree on universal bad boyism. You know what they say: there’s no accounting for taste. I happen to have a thing for motorcycles. That may be toally unappealing to you. I once heard a friend vow to “never again date a guy who wears gloves,” because she liked them “rugged.” Gloves-as-a-turnoff would never even cross my mind, but to this day (at least to my knowledge) my friend has stuck to her word.

What I mean by all this is that the road to forbidden love—or any kind of love—looks different to us all, so we each find it using a different map. What feels dangerous, challenging, or thrilling to one person is either too much or not enough for the next.

Thinking about that reader’s question about finding love in real life, I finally realized that she wasn’t responding to the way Daniel blew Luce off in the scene—but to the way Luce felt about it. Slightly stung, but overwhelmingly exhilarated. Challenged. Hungry for more. He unlocked something inside her, made her feel the way no one had before. How he did it is impossible to explain (and it’s better not to try). Anyone who’s been in love knows exactly what I mean.

The other day, I got another great question from a reader: Can two people really be in love if they aren't even friends? Doesn’t true love stem from friendship?

I understand why she was asking this, and I appreciated the chance to get to answer it. So many love stories seem to skip the friendship stage, don't they? There's tension and drama and arguing and all sorts of things that make for good page-turning storytelling--while all the while, readers are crying out for some of those more down-to-earth elements that make us feel like we are really invested in a relationship.

I think that friendship is one of the most important aspects of love, but I wouldn't stay that true love always stems from friendship. Of course, it can, but I don't think camaraderie is the only possible origin of love. When I met my husband, I was instantly drawn to him, instantly attracted to him—and instantly intimidated by him. Yes, he was a bad boy. And we weren’t really friends until after we started dating. At the beginning, before I considered him a friend, I didn’t love him the same way I do now (see above), but I was still “in love” with him. When our friendship came easily after that, I knew that this was it.

I have friends who groan about my hopelessly romantic advice on relationships. I’m probably the least likely person ever to say, “he’s just not that into you.” To me, forbidden love is exactly the kind of thing worth striving for. Not because it always works out, but because it’s worth the effort. Falling for someone off-limits or hard to get is a kind of emotional endurance training. Whether you get the guy or not, in the end, you’re left with this polished, stronger, sharper you.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I wish you good luck in finding your perfect bad boy. Extra points if he’s driving a motorcycle and not wearing gloves…

Thanks for stopping by Lauren. Be sure to visit Bitten by Books for Lauren's next tour stop!

Lauren Kate recently finished her M.A. in Creative Writing at UC Davis, where she also teaches. She lives and writes in an old farm house in Winters, California. Her first novel, The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove goes on sale one month before Fallen.

Visit Lauren's Official Website and Blog