We all know love can be exciting and new (well, assuming you’ve seen The Love Boat).
But in Annie Mare’s romantic science fiction / fantasy novel Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), it’s also multiversal, queer, and well-coiffed.
In the following email interview, Mare discusses what inspired and influenced this stylish story, as well as how romantic it can be.
Photo Credit: Alyssa Lentz
To start, what is Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon about, and when and where does it take place?
Tressa Fay Robeson is a cult-famous indie hair stylist who lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She’s fought hard to make a life for herself, with her queer found family, and she might be ready for love again after heartbreak.
On a night she decides not to go out with her friends, she receives a text from an unknown number. The woman on the other end, Meryl, is trying to text a date who seems to have stood her up, but she gets Tressa Fay instead. A lot of flirting ensues, and they decide to meet up and rescue Meryl’s evening. But when Tressa Fay gets to the restaurant, Meryl isn’t there — so now Tressa Fay’s been stood up? Catfished?
She tries to shake it, but still feels there was a connection. Then, a couple of days later, Meryl’s best friend and sister show up at Tressa Fay’s salon. They tell her that Meryl has been missing for a month. They’re in possession of Meryl’s phone, which she left behind. So how had it captured a conversation between the missing Meryl and Tressa Fay, who was a stranger?
This is a multiverse romance, so from here, timelines begin to split. Tressa Fay’s people and Meryl’s people, in the original timeline, try to figure out what happens, while Tressa Fay and Meryl resume texting each other, falling for each other, via the time paradox the phone has created. Meryl lives five months in Tressa Fay’s past, but she is missing in Tressa Fay’s present. Eventually, Meryl decides to connect with Tressa Fay in her own timeline, and so then women are falling in love in two universes, in every universe, over and over and in all different ways, but always finding each other. Always falling in love.
Where did you get the idea for Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon? What inspired it?
I wanted to write a love story with an explanation from our natural world for extraordinary feelings so many of us have felt. Feelings like love at first sight, for example. What if that feeling was because everything is always happening, all the time, including your love for another person? How do our ongoing feelings about another person comfort us in grief, and why do we continue to imagine our lives with people we’ve lost long after they’re gone? Why is it that some people instantly feel like home, like something or someone we’ve known? Introducing the multiverse in a love story gave me permission to explore all kinds of love from all kinds of angles, and to reassure and validate all the feelings my readers have had, connecting them to all of humanity.
So, is there a reason Tressa Fay and Meryl are separated by five months as opposed to 9 or 12? Or 37?
This book is set in Wisconsin, where we have a temperate, four-seasons climate, and it was important for the two to be separated by seasons — and by the deepest part of each season — so that when it was snowy and cold for one of our lovers, it was lake season for the other. When Tressa Fay first connects with Meryl, it is October (cold and dark). Where Meryl is, it’s the beginning of patio season. In this way, they feel more separated. They can’t even talk about the weather as a way to share something. They can’t connect under the same moon. And, most important, they have to find a way to experience the same universe, the same season, at the same time.
Also, is there a significance to Tressa Fay being a hairstylist? Obviously, this would be a very different story if she was a theoretical physicist studying temporal mechanics, but it doesn’t seem like it would change much if she was a barista or an insurance claims adjuster or the regional sales coordinator for the third-largest distributor of bunk and trundle beds.
This book is a love letter to the queer community, and self-expression is at the threshold of coming out, finding your family, and feeling truly like yourself. There is no greater contributor to the queer community than our LGBTQIA2S+ hair stylists, who are often the first to know how it is we want to express our gender, our flamboyance, and our tender queer souls. They are the ones who know there is a big difference between a shaggy mullet with shaved sides and one that’s long with curls and pink streaks, and they understand the vitality of genderless barbering. Sometimes our hair is the only part of ourselves we can feel good about. Sometimes it is the only way we can show our grief. Sometimes it’s how we mark change. At the center of this book is found family, self-expression, and queerness, so the natural choice for the protagonist was a hair stylist.
It sounds like Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon is a romantic sci-fi story, though your publisher calls it a fantasy romance novel. How do you see it?
It’s 100% a romance novel in that it follows the convention that the love story ends happily and with emotional satisfaction for the reader. It’s also science fiction, as it imagines a world where a scientific idea, theory, or imagination applies and contributes to the conflict and plot. Fantasy, in the case of a novel like this, identifies the story as speculative and dependent on world-building, which often encases many subgenres and microgenres. Cosmic Love has a happy ending, explores ideas about the multiverse, and builds its world from those principles as I imagined them.
Also, in terms of the romance, how romantic is it? Is it mushy? Erotic? The kind of thing someone might enjoy even if they’re dead inside…?
Hmm. First, I would argue that no one is dead inside, but sometimes we need something from this world we aren’t getting, or we find ourselves inhibited or traumatized or numb. But life is there and always worth reaching for.
This opinion might be a clue as to how romantic Cosmic Love is, which is to say that it’s optimistic but doesn’t ignore hurt, or grief, or pain. It offers up the idea that love is the entire point, and even if you’re in a place where you can’t feel it, somewhere, in some time, someone is feeling love for you and receiving your love. It’s a romance that follows the relationship of Tressa Fay and Meryl, and their relationship includes physical intimacy, and there are open-door scenes meant to provide insight to the reader about how their relationship is growing and becoming more intimate in other ways. I’m lucky to write romance, as it gives me access to writing so many kinds of feelings — irreverence and reverence, acceptance and anger, loss and hope. That’s how romantic my book is.
Now, Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon is your fifth novel after the two you co-wrote with Ruthie Knox [Homemaker and Big Name Fan] and the pair you wrote as Mae Marvel [Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous and the upcoming If I Told You I’d Have To Kiss You]. Are there any authors, or stories, that influenced Cosmic Love but nothing else you’ve written?
Absolutely! I’ve always known that I wanted to write a book that encompassed the same feelings of coziness and world-building, grief, and love, as Lois Lowry’s A Summer To Die.
How about such non-literary influences? Was Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon influenced by any movies or TV shows? Because it kind of reminds me of that movie The Lake House.
My strongest non-literary influence for this book is the epic love I have for my wife.
Shawn, Jane, Timothy, Snoodoo
And what about your hermit crabs? What influence did they have on Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon? Because we all know they’re hermitic because they love to read, and they’re also big softies, so they must’ve had some suggestions for you.
We have four hermit crabs, who will be glad to know they’ve been recognized, because what hermit crabs love more than anything else is drama. Their names are Jane, Timothy, Snoodoo, and Shawn, and they live in an unbelievably huge habitat that has to be maintained to emulate coastal Florida at all times (80 degrees, 80 percent humidity, half a foot of substrate that includes sand and botanticals, places to hide and to eat and to swim in both fresh and salt water. Hermit crabs are a big commitment).
Their influence is mainly that they are a reminder to be unafraid of constant change, to pile up together with everyone you love (hermit crabs love a sunny puppy pile), and to embrace a timeline that is both slow and fast at once, and a little bit immortal.
Now, a moment ago I asked if Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon was influenced by any movies or TV shows. But to flip things around, do you think Cosmic Love could work as a movie or show?
Screenwriters and filmmakers are incredibly creative and talented, especially when it comes to how to adapt stories and ideas into a movie or show that tells the same story but to a different audience, and in a different way. So I have no doubt that a creative could make Cosmic Love work beautifully in a new medium and expose new meaning in the story that only that medium can. I’m not someone who believes that books are automatically ruined by their cinematic adaptation. If the adaptation is working, it means that there is, and there should be, something new to discover and feel.
So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon?
Definitely consider booking a hair appointment before you read, don’t look at spoilers, and be ready to call / text / hug everyone you love.
Finally, if someone enjoys Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon, and it’s the first book of yours they’ve read, which of your earlier novels would you suggest they read next?
If readers love Cosmic Love, I’m pretty certain they’d love Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous [co-written with Ruthie Knox and with the pen name Mae Marvel]. It explores love and loss from different perspectives, as well as who we were, who we are, and who we’d like to be and how all of those things are connected.
