Haili Blassingame’s debut novel, They All Fall in Love at the End, follows Cat St. Clair, a twenty-four-year-old writer trying to balance an open relationship, artistic ambition, and the chaos of the 2024 election. What begins as a quest for freedom and self-determination spirals into a complicated love triangle involving her boyfriend’s best friend and his girlfriend, forcing Cat to confront the consequences of pursuing everything she wants. Set against a backdrop of political tension and creative uncertainty, the novel explores nonmonogamy, desire, identity, and the challenge of imagining new possibilities for love and liberation.
Blassingame is a producer for NPR’s 1A and has written for publications including The New Republic and The New York Times, where her Modern Love essay “My Choice Isn’t Marriage or Loneliness” went viral. She previously worked on NPR’s Code Switch and Weekend Edition and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing from American University.
We asked Blassingame to answer our recurring My Reading Life so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I DEVOURED A Series of Unfortunate Events. When the next in the series dropped, it was an urgent affair. I always felt the embodied peril of these books in a way I rarely feel now reading as an adult. I remember my grandma buying me the final book in the series and reading it on the train to New York. (This was when there was still a Borders in D.C’s Union Station (RIP), now it’s a Uniqlo or something). When I finished that last book, I didn’t know what to do with myself. The end of that harrowing odyssey marked, in some ways, the end of my adolescence.
What book helped you through puberty?
I think I must’ve blacked out during puberty because I have basically no recollection of reading during that time. But I was generally very into books like Bras and Broomsticks and Confessions of A Teen Nanny, books about teenage girls with cute clothes and hot crushes. The former is about a 14-year-old girl in Manhattan who discovers she’s a witch. She had a crush on this guy in her class named Raf who had black hair and green eyes or something and I was like, Sign me up. The latter is about a 16-year-old who babysits for a wealthy family, also in New York. They both had colorful, girlish covers, which was a requirement for me. I wouldn’t read anything with an awful cover. But these stories were always rooted in my desire to be a teenager gallivanting around the city. There was always an attendant freedom to these narratives that I wanted to claim for myself, of being unshackled but also completely safe.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
I was pretty chill at 16 but I was an absolute amateur about love and would be for years, and so I wished that I had read C.J Hauser’s essay collection, The Crane Wife. The titular essay is in part about the end of Hauser’s engagement, but really it’s about the insidious ways women are told that the less we need, the more love we’ll get for it. Hauser renders this lie with subtle devastation. Take these lines: “She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for.” That there’s no neat way to sum up this collection underscores Hauser’s rebellion against narrative, and ultimately, against how a woman should be. “The Crane Wife,” The Essay is about a woman unlearning the act of being small for love. The Collection is the stretch marks, the growing pains, that accompany being big. At 30, I feel like I’ve learned that hard lesson, but of course, it wouldn’t have hurt to learn it sooner.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
The Great Gatsby to teach tight plotting, efficient characterization and snappy dialogue, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff for how to write a beautiful and surprising sentence, In The Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado to teach inventive structure and second-person POV, Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura to teach tension, and The Idiot, by Elif Batuman to teach dry humor.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The Artful Edit by Susan Bell. I didn’t understand what revision was or how you were supposed to do it. Bell offers a close study of The Great Gatsby, which Fitzgerald maniacally edited to the bone. I have a soft spot for TGG. I sold my novel to Scribner at 29, which is about the same age that Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby with them. He’s my literary daddy.
What books are on your nightstand now?
My nightstand is too junky to fit any books on it but I have about thirty on my bed: The Idiot by Elif Batuman, Bunny and We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, The Book of Love by Kelly Link, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, some copies of POETRY magazine. These are just there for comfort, I have no intentions of reading any of them right now.