Workplace Romantic Comedy

Do you have any kind of background in books?

When I’m not writing, I run a business called Rare Birds, which is a bookshop in Edinburgh and also an online book club and book subscription service that ships all over the world, so at this point it’s not much of an exaggeration to say books are my whole life!

So, what led you into writing a book of your own?

I’m Canadian and first moved to Edinburgh in 2010 to pursue a master’s in creative writing. I still get together with two of the friends I met on that course to write every week on a Friday. We had a standing rule that you would read out some of what you had written that day at the end of the session - a trick to help us stay focused - and I would often quickly scribble off little vignettes about a woman working in a dysfunctional office that I would read out just to make the girls laugh. I didn’t know it then, but this was the very beginnings of Annie taking shape.

The book is a workplace romantic comedy - what's the set up?

Annie Knows Everything is set in New York City at a fictional tech company called Taskio, which is a productivity software company. Before Rare Birds, I worked as a copywriter at a large agency and we had a lot of tech clients, so I was familiar with that world, and knew it was ripe for spoofing. Tech companies often have a lot of money and take themselves incredibly seriously, while also being totally ridiculous, and not treating their employees particularly well (while of course referring to them as family).

Why is the workplace such a good setting for this type of story?

Something I’ve always appreciated about workplace comedies is the idea that you’re lumped together with a whole group of coworkers that you might not choose to spend time with under any other circumstances, and yet the reality of work in the modern world is you spend a huge chunk of your waking hours with these people. In my own life, I know so many people who met their partners through their jobs, and I just loved the thought of writing a novel where you look up from your desk on an ordinary day and think: oh, there you are.

When you were writing it did you imagine it would be published?

When I first started working on this book I had no ambitions other than to finish it. It had been over ten years since I’d graduated and I was feeling restless about the fact that in all that time I’d never really tried. So at the start of 2023 I set a New Year’s Resolution to finish a novel draft that year, and really focused my energy. My goal was to finish it, and edit it, and that I would mark the project’s completion by submitting it to agents. I thought this would be a nice tangible end point, a way to say I had reached my goal and completed my resolution. I got so used to thinking about it this way that when an agent responded to my query asking to read the book, I was caught off guard! What I first assumed would be the end of the road for this project was actually the beginning of a much bigger adventure.

Any more books in the pipeline?

Yes! I’m working on the edits of my second book now, another romantic comedy, this one set in my hometown of Toronto.

It's UK National Year of Reading, what's a book that you think more people should hear about and why?

Two books that I love and love recommending in store are Fight Night by Miriam Toews and Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. And when it comes to romantic comedies, a new book from Mhairi McFarlane is always something I look forward to.

You can see Rachel at the festival on Tuesday 29 September.