Hello tea party attendees! I’m so excited to announce that Emma Lord, author of Tweet Cute, You Have a Match and When You Get the Chance is joining our tea party today! Emma is one of my favorite authors, and well loved here at teatimelit! Her stories are fun, creative, heartfelt and filled with characters you can’t help but love!
An effervescent, endearing, joyful contemporary romance of one young woman searching for her birth mother one summer, by New York Times bestselling author Emma Lord.
Nothing will get in the way of Millie Price’s dream to become a Broadway star. Not her lovable but super-introverted dad, who after raising Millie alone, doesn’t want to watch her leave home to pursue her dream. Not her pesky and ongoing drama club rival, Oliver, who is the very definition of Simmering Romantic Tension. And not the “Millie Moods,” the feelings of intense emotion that threaten to overwhelm, always at maddeningly inconvenient times. Millie needs an ally. And when a left-open browser brings Millie to her dad’s embarrassingly moody LiveJournal from 2003, Millie knows just what to do. She’s going to find her mom.
There’s Steph, a still-aspiring stage actress and receptionist at a talent agency. There’s Farrah, ethereal dance teacher who clearly doesn’t have the two left feet Millie has. And Beth, the chipper and sweet stage enthusiast with an equally exuberant fifteen-year-old daughter (A possible sister?! This is getting out of hand). But how can you find a new part of your life and expect it to fit into your old one, without leaving any marks? And why is it that when you go looking for the past, it somehow keeps bringing you back to what you’ve had all along?
Joyous, heartfelt, and brimming with emotion, WHEN YOU GET THE CHANCE is a novel about falling in love, making a mess, and learning to let go that will have you happy-sobbing and cheering all the way to the end.
Links for When You Get the Chance: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
Hi Emma! Thank you so much for joining our tea party today! We’re so happy to have you. All of us just loved When You Get the Chance! What was your writing process like?
Oh gosh, for this it was a weird one. I started drafting this book at my regular pace — about five thousand words a week — in late February 2020 (lol, you see where this is going). When the pandemic hit I really had to force myself to sit down and write because I was, like everyone else in New York, holed up in my apartment and fruitlessly scouring the internet trying to figure out what was going on. Eventually I got home to my family in Virginia, but during the start of the pandemic, writing this book was one of the few times I could shut out the fear and just be my old self for an hour or so each day; I feel like this book became even more glittery and loud and happy than I meant for it to be, because it was written in a time when everything was so uncertain, including the fate of theater itself. I ended up finishing this novel much faster than I anticipated because it was like trying to pump joy back into a world where, at the time, there was so little to be found.
What are some things that readers should know about your book prior to reading? Are there any trigger warnings they should be aware of?
I can’t think of too many — I’d say the biggest warning is probably just in the summary itself, which is that Millie’s mom left her with her dad at birth, and a secondary one is that Millie herself has a form of anxiety.
Which character from When You Get the Chance is most/least like you?
I think I’m most like Chloe, who is a very overly earnest, theater-obsessed bean. Or at least, I’d say my teenage self was the most like Chloe. I think adult me is a little bit more like Millie because I’ve reached a point in my life where I feel mostly confident in my abilities, but I sure as heck wish I could have channeled that when I was her age! I think I’m the least like Millie’s dad, who is very patient and into technology and much subtler in his approach to things. I am loud and unsubtle and break technology with my face!!
What’s an album that describes When You Get the Chance?
Oh boy, I feel like I have to say all of ABBA’s discography. But I feel there are also some “1989” Taylor Swift vibes in there, just the joyful New York-ness of that album.
If When You Get the Chance was a tea party, what would be the theme of the tea party?
I think the tea party would be hot pink glitter themed (with subtle gold accents). Those were the colors I imagined in my head when I was writing the book — lucky me, they ended up being the colors they chose for the cover! There would also be a lot of chocolate chip cookies, which is a plot element in the book, and desserts named after musical theater references (“Donut Rain On My Parade,” etc).
What flavor of tea would your main characters be?
Oooh. Love this question. Millie is a smoky rose black tea blend (hot in the winter, iced in the summer). Teddy is vanilla almond with a whole heap of cream and sugar. Chloe is probably a caramel black tea. Millie’s aunt Heather is a chai tea and her dad Cooper is … probably a boring coffee, if I’m being honest, lolol.
If Pepper, Abby, and Millie all went on a road trip, where would they go, what music would they listen to, and what would their road snacks be?
Oooh, this is an excellent question. I think they’d go to Nashville. Pepper is from there, and Abby loves to take photographs (Nashville is quite the photogenic city), of course, it’s literally Music City, so Millie would have the time of her life at karaoke and checking out the music scene. They’d probably eat at Big League Burger’s original location all weekend and listen to a mix of Taylor Swift and showtunes and current pop hits.
If you could switch places with any of your characters, who would it be?
Oh gosh, I think I’d love to be Carly, the edgy woman who runs The Milkshake Club — a hybrid music venue and ice cream shop — in WHEN YOU GET THE CHANCE. In my mind she is living her best life checking out all the up and coming music all over the city and getting free ice cream every day, plus she gets to help launch careers and make people happy by finding them their next favorite bands. I imagine that is a very satisfying and delicious life to lead. Also in my head she wears a whole lot of plaid and a whole lot of combat boots, which is an aesthetic I aspire to cultivate.
We know you’re a big fan of musicals and so are we, so we were wondering what some of yours and Millie’s favorite musicals are?
*takes a very large breath* My VERY first favorite musicals were Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd, then Les Mis (oops, I wrote 150,000 words of fan fic about it the summer I turned sixteen) and West Side Story and Wicked and Newsies and Legally Blonde and Mamma Mia (I even got to see it in Paris, where everything was in French!) and Spring Awakening, then in my twenties The Last Five Years and The Heathers and Waitress and The Greatest Showman (do movies count??), Six, and, of course, Hamilton. Also anything to do with Disney. Millie’s favorite musicals are all pretty much the same as mine, except she probably has some more obscure ones that I don’t even know about.
What kind of message do you want readers to take away from When You Get the Chance?
I just want people to walk away with that feeling you get when you’re all wrapped up in a thick blanket, eating your favorite dessert and watching your favorite movie. I want to make people feel happy and satisfied in their bones. Also I want to get ABBA stuck in everybody’s heads for eternity, because I do believe it is good for the soul.
Emma Lord is the NYT bestselling author of YOU HAVE A MATCH and TWEET CUTE, a BuzzFeed market editor, and dessert gremlin living in New York City, where she spends whatever time she isn’t writing either running or belting show tunes in community theater. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a major in psychology and a minor in how to tilt your computer screen so nobody will notice you updating your fan fiction from the back row. She was raised on glitter, a whole lot of love, and copious amounts of grilled cheese.
