Casey McQuiston has made a name for themself crafting unforgettable queer love stories: the prince-meets-president’s-kid romance of their 2019 novel Red, White & Royal Blue was followed by a time-traveling lesbian subway affair in 2021’s One Last Stop, and then a foray into young-adult literature with 2022’s I Kissed Shara Wheeler. Now, the author is back with a big, beautiful, extremely bisexual European romp in the form of The Pairing, out this week from St. Martin’s Griffin.
In The Pairing, constitutionally anxious nepo baby and somm-in-training Theo is reunited with their heartbreaker pastry-chef ex Kit on a transatlantic flight to a food and wine tour of Europe. Before long, the two are locked in a contest to see who can rack up more international hookups, pausing at every turn to eat and drink to their heart’s content (and then some). This week, Vogue spoke to McQuiston about their fourth book, their faith in rom-coms, and their love of Anthony Bourdain.
Vogue: How does it feel to see your fourth book coming out into the world?
Casey McQuiston: You would think that by book four, the feelings would be less intense, but I still woke up with a bubble gut this morning. It’s just like, oh, shit, all of the last few years have been leading up to this day. I’m just trying to enjoy it and savor it and not be nervous about it. I’m really proud of this book, and I feel like I accomplished what I set out to accomplish when I was writing it. I think that’s kind of the dream when you’re putting out a book: to know that you did what you came to do. I feel really good about that.
How did you decide to set The Pairing within the endlessly generative world of food and drink?
I mean, selfishly, I love food and drink! It’s always been something that’s interested me, and it’s something that I find really creatively inspiring and that energizes me and makes me excited about the people in the world around me and just being alive. I think when I sat down to write the book, in early 2022, I started thinking about what it should be, and we were all kind of coming out of the dark ages of deep COVID into a different world. After so much time spent not being able to go out and touch and taste and smell and experience things, I think I really needed to reconnect with that part of my humanity. So much of the process of writing this book was about healing my relationship with pleasure and indulgence; so much of life, and American life in particular, teaches you to focus on work, and make the best use of your time, and be economical, and make yourself smaller, and take up less space, and deny yourself pleasure in favor of focusing on something else, and I think this book is 1,000% the antithesis of that. I hope something that people can really take away from it is that this book is an indulgence, and it is not too late to indulge this summer and heal your own relationship with pleasure and indulgence. I want people to feast.