Definitely Better Now: An interview with Ava Robinson (MFA ’22) on her debut novel

Interview by LIT Books Editor Jonathan Kesh

Ava Robinson’s Definitely Better Now is a romantic comedy, or at least it is in part. How else you might classify it is trickier, which is part of its appeal.

The book begins with Emma, the narrator, uneasily but earnestly celebrating a full year of sobriety after a difficult break from alcoholism, which runs in her family and was never quite shaken by her father. Per the rules of her New York Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, she’s held off dating to focus on keeping her own head above water, and per her own personal discomfort, she’s kept her life secret from her coworkers at her office job. And once we’re fully immersed in this mundane, realistic setting, Emma experiences something which feels to her like a dip into the fantastic. She has a meet-cute. His name is Ben. He works in her company’s I.T. department, and he’s tall, sardonic, and just awkward enough to come off as humble.

The rom-com tropes which are present are deliberately and lovingly placed. It’s much less of an “anti-rom-com” than an inversion clearly written by a steady hand which loves the genre. As it separates from plenty of traditional romance — I’m attempting to avoid generalization, although it can be a genre with strict narrative rules — the story’s engine shifts from its plot to a more character-driven meditation on Emma’s sobriety and how it’s transformed her. And unlike more fantastical romance, there are moments of genuine, painfully mundane tragedy and Emma’s lowest points are complicated and relatable. This isn’t just a story of whether two people get together and have a happily-ever-after. It’s a story about a character who’s unsure if she’s ready to chase something better in the first place.

Ava Robinson’s debut novel came out in December 2025 from MIRA Books. Shortly after its release, Robinson spoke with LIT about how a story of messy characters came together so cleanly.

LIT: When you first started working on Definitely Better Now, what was your vision for what the book would be?

Ava Robinson: My vision for the first draft was a very fun romantic comedy. That’s really what I wanted. I don’t know if you’re a big romantic comedy reader, but you can imagine a cartoon with the boy and the girl, and they’re smiling and there are hearts. And I was like, “this is going to be a fun paperback summer read.” That was my vision for it. And then I sort of kept making it sadder by accident (laughs).

LIT: Do you feel like it changed a lot from that original vision while you were working on it?

AR: Yes. And — spoilers abound, right? — but one day I was working on it, when I was talking to my friend whom I consider my writing partner, and we were writing together on Zoom. And then halfway through, I paused. I unmuted myself and I said, “I’m gonna kill the dad, actually.” And she was like, “You can’t do that. It’s no longer romantic.” I decided, no, that’s just what the characters are telling me I have to do. I have to kill him. Once I made that decision, it was no longer in that specific genre, and it got darker and deeper.

So my first draft, there was more sex and it was funnier. And then halfway though I kill the dad. Then, once I started writing the second draft, I had to plant some seeds here and tone it down in the first half. And that’s actually what I was working on in [Luis Jaramillo’s] class. So I had half a very classic rom-com and then half a kind of sadder book. And in Luis’ class, I married the those two halves together.

LIT: There are a lot of different threads in this book, between the narrator’s sobriety, and her struggles with her family. But the main thread is this romance between the main character, Emma, and her coworker, Ben. Do you still think of this book as a romance first and foremost, or do you see it equally being any other genres?

AR: I think it is incredibly hard to define. I thought it was a romance — that’s how we read it in Luis’ class, you all thought it was a romance — and then I started querying it and everybody I queried it to out in the marketplace said this isn’t a romance at all. That’s just not a romance. And the rules for what a romance is are different than I understood, I think, when I was writing it. The romance genre is huge, and the readers of romance expect very certain things. And they expect them at page fifty, page one hundred, page one-fifty. They want you to hit all these beats. I’m a romance reader myself, and I love the familiarity of that formula. I think it’s wonderful when you’re in it, and it feels just like a warm blanket. But my book didn’t quite hit those beats.

So when I was talking to agents, I had another offer from somebody who’s much more of a traditional romance agent, and she said she could take this and make it more of a romance, and shift things to make them funnier and less serious. That was her pitch to me. Then I went with somebody who said, “I like it as it is, how it’s kind of bridging two genres, and we can work with that.”

LIT: Correct me if I’m misquoting, but during a recent event for your book at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, somebody asked you about how often sober characters are portrayed in fiction. And you responded that one of the most notable sober characters seems to be Jack Torrance from The Shining. Being that this is a very different take on that, how are you trying to portray the experience of being sober in Definitely Better Now?

AR: I said that, and actually my critical thesis also was The Shining. I think it’s a good representation because sober characters are kind of infamous — obviously, Jack Torrance has an infamous relapse. That’s the whole plot of The Shining, he has a relapse, he goes insane, he tries to kill his family. And the whole book is the tension of “will he relapse?” You feel him going more and more insane in his interior dialogue. Such a great book, one of my favorite books of all time.

But I really wanted to shy away from using the potential relapse as tension. I wanted a sober character whose sobriety is just… a thing about them. And sobriety is kind of what this book is about, but it’s not where the plot is coming from. So there are interior feelings coming from that, but the plot beats, the conflict, they’re coming from elsewhere, and that was really important to me. Just because I am sober, I know a ton of sober people. And for the most part, we have tons of conflicts in our lives that aren’t about, “is everyone going to relapse tomorrow?” It’s interesting to explore this as more of a mental health thing than something that would create a plot device, which I wanted to avoid.

LIT: In the story, Emma seems to view alcoholics as a sort of “other” in society. At one point, she even makes a passing comment that her sponsor is one of the most normal alcoholics she knows. Were you trying to tap into a sort of otherness with these characters, or is that just meant to be part of Emma’s worldview?

AR: Yeah, I was definitely trying to tap into the otherness. It’s actually a saying in AA, that “normal people” are not us. If you were to go to a meeting and say, “Oh, I have a new boyfriend, and he’s a normal person,” everybody would know what that meant. It means, you know, “not an alcoholic.” So it’s that terminology, and it’s also her worldview because she’s so immersed in that world.

But part of this book, and part of longer term sobriety, is about thinking, “Now this is your life. You are normal. You’re a normal person. How are you going to to deal with this being your normal?” So it’s moving from feeling totally othered to thinking, “Everybody has their things. This is my thing. I can have a normal life.”

LIT: Alcoholics Anonymous is, of course, a big part of Emma’s story. How were you trying to portray AA in the story?

AR: This is actually controversial with a lot of us — Courtney Preiss, who was at my book event, she has AA in her book but it’s not called AA. It’s called something else. I think a lot of people do that, and they make the rules slightly different. She fictionalized AA. And I went to this very interesting panel at AWP a few years ago that was basically about the morality of that. Should we put AA into stories in this true way, or is that breaking anonymity, which is this whole drama in the AA world? It’s a fictional book, so everything’s fiction, so it’s not like I’ve broken anybody else’s anonymity, which is really what you don’t want to do.

But I’m interested in subcultures. I wanted it to feel like somebody’s watching a documentary about a totally different world that they didn’t know existed, and I wanted it to feel very real. I didn’t want to fictionalize too much because then it wouldn’t feel very real. For people who are sober, they could read this and say “Wow, that’s so realistic.” But for people who aren’t sober, I want them to say, “Wow. I feel like I got a secret insight. It’s like I watched a documentary and now I secretly know what it’s like.”

So I wanted to stick very close to the truth there, because I think one of the most fun things about New York in general — and this is a very New York novel — is that it has a thousand subcultures. For some people, this New York AA is very specific. I think every city’s AA is a little bit different. But if this book’s New York AA was very accurate, then as a regular, I knew that the reader would feel that even if they’ve never been there.

LIT: In the book, you bring up this idea that there are different kinds of ways to run AA. Actually, it feels like there’s a bit of tension between Emma and her sponsor regarding this, even though they’re speaking politely to each other the whole book. Is that tension something you were going for?

AR: That is something that I was going for. There’s this kind of genre that I have read and enjoyed called “Quit Lit,” which I was pushing against just because I didn’t want this book to be that. Someone will get sober, write a memoir about it, and say, “and then I met my sponsor in AA, and everything was great and perfect.” It’s like the happily-ever-after of a romance novel. You know the ending of a Quit Lit.

So the whole point of starting my book when she’s a year sober and not when she’s going through that is to complicate and ask, “Okay, but what is that happily-ever-after of a Quit Lit book?” Part of that is, “What if you don’t love your sponsor?” Sponsors come and go in people’s lives. Your group that you’re a part of comes and goes, and you could even quit AA and still be sober. All of these are different versions of what sobriety could look like, and long term sobriety, that I wanted to explore. I didn’t want it to be a perfectly rosy relationship.

LIT: Before we move on, I wanted to make sure I asked at least one question about the Fun Team. Throughout the story, Emma’s pushed by her boss at her corporate job into joining the “Fun Team,” which plans the company’s holiday party and which is absolutely miserable and has this faux cheerfulness which Emma can’t stand. What is the Fun Team, and corporate life and culture more generally, to Emma?

AR: I’ve never lived corporate life, I’m such a nonprofit person. But I think they actually have a lot of similarities. Office life in general is deeply bizarre, and I would imagine — and I did imagine — that corporate life leans into that bizarro world even more so. Because nobody really wants to be there — we’re all there for the money, right? And yet you become kind of a family in spite of that. You spend more time with these people than you do your own family. So when they want to do these silly things like a holiday party, it feels incredibly false, but it would also kind of feel false to not celebrate something with your coworkers.

For Emma, who’s deeply compartmentalized between work and non-work, that is exactly where I wanted her to be. In the office, if you’re just working on things like spreadsheets and designing things for Instagram, you can easily not be yourself. You could go through your whole life not being yourself at work. But when you have to be a little bit social with your coworkers, that’s where I think those boundaries can get fuzzy. So I wanted to put her in the Fun Team so she can can no longer avoid being social with these people.

LIT: Emma’s narration in this book is very closely interior, to the point where despite being written in past tense, it often feels like it’s a live, steady, by-the-moment stream of Emma’s thoughts. While you were writing, how were you thinking about the prose style and the way Emma talks to the reader?

AR: I think I always do this when I write: I started it in third person, fully. It was third person for, I think, fifty pages. I was getting a sense of the story before I got a sense of the character, which is often how I write. And then I decided this is a really character-driven story — it should probably be in first person. There are obviously great character-driven stories that are in third person, but you want to be really close in their mind. And the voice of the narrator was meshing so well with her voice, that the further I got into the book, the more I felt, let’s just all make it her voice then. So then I went back and I changed it all.

And I did struggle with whether I should do past or present tense for a while. Maybe I made the wrong choice, but I feel like English writers so often write in past tense. But in editing, I had to keep making sure it was past tense. It often slipped into present tense.

LIT: Moving away from the craft talk — from the timing of it all, it sounds like you were preparing for this book’s release around the same time that you had a baby?

AR: Mm-hm.

LIT: What has that been like?

AR: That’s been really crazy. I am kind of an open book: while I was in my thesis semester, I was talking to my advisor. I mentioned that I really wanted a baby, but I was nervous about the timing of the book. And he responded that, well, you don’t know that your book’s going to get published. Just, like, have the baby. That’s solid advice.

But honestly, it did happen that way. And once my book got sold, I knew that it would come out around when [the baby] would come out. My book sold in July 23, and then I knew it was coming out basically January 25. That’s a year and a half, and I thought, I can have a baby in that time. But the timeline was very overwhelming [laughs]. They’re so meshed in my mind, the baby and the book now. Like, I wonder how I could ever separate them. It was her six month birthday on my book launch. That was the same day. That Monday was her six month birthday. They’re having all of their milestones together, the book and the baby.

But I’ve said this on Instagram, and I do think it’s true. Writing a debut novel is a terrifying thing, and getting it published is terrifying. And you’re like, “Oh my god, what are people going to think of me? Yada yada.” But becoming a parent is way more terrifying, and it grounds you in a in a very minute-by-minute way. I can’t care what anybody’s thinking of me or the book because the baby is crying, and I’m no longer in that anxiety. I know a lot of people get really anxious when they have a baby. I feel the opposite. I became a significantly less anxious person in general.

So it’s been an ideal thing because it’s like, well, if everybody hates me, this baby really loves me. If everybody hates this book, it’s not that big of a deal anymore.

LIT: So what are you working on next?

AR: Well, I am working on something. It’s not sold, so I don’t know how much of it is secret. Probably none of it. I’m working on another book that’s kind of bridging the the commercial women’s fiction romance genre.

But this time, it’s about a climate reporter. She’s been working on this podcast, and she believes the world is ending, and she’s super depressed. Then she moves next to a wedding venue that is run by her high school crush. That’s the premise. And there’s lot of hope and optimism next door and not a lot of hope and optimism in her head. I guess I’ll leave it there.

Definitely Better Now, published by MIRA Books, an imprint of Harper Collins, December 2024

---

TOC