Annie Lord has served as British Vogue’s dating columnist and previously wrote a darkly comic memoir about the demise of her five-year relationship. So it’s no surprise that she knows all the romcom tropes and subverts them with aplomb in her fiction debut The Project. The novel reads as a modern Pygmalion in reverse, with best friends Daisy and Maya pledging to emotionally, culturally, and stylistically make-over their laddy friend James. It’s all too easy to connect with these funny, flawed characters—likewise with Lord, even over email and across six time zones. Her responses to my questions—covering everything from her favorite Marguerite Duras quote to how to write a good bad sex scene—were candid and charming. No doubt she’d make a great romcom heroine.
Amanda Nyren: You’re a dating columnist who’s written a romantic comedy about how hard modern dating is. From your expert perspective, why is it so hard?
Annie Lord: Apps and the way that they abstract people has made it all too easy to act badly without repercussions, whether that’s flaking on dates last minute or disappearing without explanation. Even when we do meet someone out in the world, we still treat each other as completely disposable.
AN: What are your all time favorite romantic comedies?
AL: I love When Harry Met Sally: the script, how New York it is, the speech when he says, “I love that you get cold when it’s seventy-one degrees out…I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night.” I love Bridget Jones and lowkey think I look like Renée Zellweger, and it annoys me that no one ever points that out. I love Crazy, Stupid, Love—so funny! I love Notting Hill and the eccentric Welsh flatmate who says, “I’m about to tell you a story which will shrink your balls to the size of raisins,” plus the “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy” moment.
Also, I don’t know if it counts as a rom-com but my second favourite film is Jerry Maguire. It’s actually so unromantic: they’re not really right for each other, but he wants stability and support, and she wants love, and he’s in love with her kid, and they just sort of decide to make it work. “You had me at hello” is incredible. Anything with the big speech—I love the speech!
AN: You write a perfectly awkward drunk sex scene. What makes for good sex writing? What about good bad sex writing?
AL: The bad sex came to me quite easily because I had a backlog of horror stories and funny moments to draw from. Also stuff I’d heard from friends. With the good sex scenes, I found it completely mortifying because I was like, oh people will know what I think is hot. So I just pretended no one would ever read it, and it got easier. It also helped when I remembered that good sex doesn’t mean perfect; it means awkward repositioning, learning a rhythm, talking.
AN: There are moments when we see James through Daisy’s eyes, and he’s such an ass, but so charming and vivid, yet we have no idea what’s going on in his head. It struck me as a sort of female gaze. Were you thinking about that as you wrote?
AL: Yeah, I was really into the idea of the book channeling a female gaze, of really celebrating our desire and what it latches onto. It wasn’t something I had to try that hard with because I am bored and sexually frustrated and completely boy-mad, so I already had a long list in my head of hot things about men: anything from when they have big hands to when they get off their bike by putting one leg over the front and then resting it on their other foot pedal and then coasting along like that for a little bit before hopping off. If you know what I mean?
AN: It’s clear there’s a reverse Pygmalion/She’s All That thing happening with the project. And at the end you have Daisy giving the big romantic speech (granted Bridget Jones did too). Did you want to invert the common romcom tropes?
AL: Yes definitely! I love those tropes, they make you feel so comfy and secure and like, I know where this is going. And they’re tropes for a reason, because we love them and continue to get joy out of them. I want to see people make out in the snow Bridget Jones-style! I want the speech! But also tropes are often not very realistic. They feel shiny and fake. I liked picking them apart, taking the piss out of them, and doing my own versions of them, like when Daisy is making a speech to James, and he’s like, you can’t just say all that and expect us to just be all right again, this is not a movie. I wanted to make it so the reader could really place themselves in the character’s shoes.
AN: You write, “so much of masculinity seems to be about shrugging things off.” Were you tempted to examine the so-called crisis of masculinity at all?
AL: We had that “men are trash” sort of internet feminism for a while where we indulged in the cathartic feeling of being very fuck men! And, don’t get me wrong, sometimes I need to vent about them, but that approach doesn’t work. You could tell men were alienated by it; it wasn’t very productive. I liked the idea of the project being in reaction to that way of thinking, so that Maya and Daisy start to interrogate their feelings towards men and start to be a bit more sympathetic. Men hurt women but it also hurts women to hate men, to not have them in your life, especially if you are attracted to them. They’re half the population; we have to learn to live with them. There’s this quote I really like from Marguerite Duras where she says, “You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.”
AN: The book seems to say we’re all sort of in crisis, e.g. when Daisy thinks at the Schneemann show, “there’s so much life in these records… so little is offered to women now.” This is before she’s fallen for James and learned about herself. Maybe everyone needs to do a bit of inner work? Maybe being in crisis is just a part of life sometimes?
AL: I started therapy when I was quite deep into writing the book. I realised through that process that I had a lot more issues around intimacy than I thought. I looked back on a lot of situations with guys who had been into me and who I ended things with because I was freaked out about genuine connection. These revelations made me flesh out Daisy’s own journey more, so that she has her own process of unlearning to do, mostly around decentering men, letting go of control, and the way she disciplines her body. She becomes, like me, more comfortable with intimacy, learning to like herself so that she won’t be so scared of a man actually liking her. Also she’s more accepting of men when they’re softer and more in touch with their emotions—because women are conditioned by the patriarchy as well.
AN: I had a professor once who said that writing a book is like falling in love. Having written books, it’s stuck with me. Once you get into it, there is this intoxicating process of going in deep, discovering, being surprised and delighted. Is that how it is for you?
AL: Yes! I love the way characters become more and more real until they live in your head like alternate personalities, like you put on a TV show and you think, James would hate this. Or you go into a coffee shop and see some guy with a whippet and think, Fin would get one of those dogs.
AN: Do you remember the moment when you fell in love with this book?
AL: I was working on this other idea before, for a book with all these different people in a flatshare and how their stories would intersect. Someone once told me a person’s first book is always, “people in rooms saying things the author thinks is profound,” and that other idea was very much that. Then one weekend I slept with a friend from uni who was really laddy and a bit of an ass like you say. After when we were lying in bed together I thought, oh he’s all right underneath all that bravado. My friend joked, “the title of your next book should be ‘The Reinvention of [insert man’s name here],” and I thought that’s actually really interesting. I went on a solo holiday to Hydra in Greece and it was just coming out of me. I had so much to say. The other idea will very much never see the light of day.
AN: How did you find the time and creative energy to write a book while also writing for your job?
AL: In the later stages of the book I actually gave up the dating column but that was less to do with writing and more to do with feeling like I didn’t want to share so much about my private life anymore. Then I just focused on the book. It’s such a blessing about writing that you can only do it for a few hours before you’re too tired, and it’s rubbish, and you’re better off leaving it. You really have to be nourished, have to see people and talk to them, see the world, you can’t be burnt out to do it. It forces you to live a nice life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Annie Lord is a writer for Vogue and the author of the memoir Notes on Heartbreak. She also writes for the Sunday Times, Guardian, New Statesman, i-D, Independent and Dazed.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Amanda Nyren’s writing has been published in Sonora Review, The Pinch, and Phoebe. She studied Creative Writing at Northwestern University and lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her on Substack.