Q&A with Amanda Gayle, Author of Once, Again, Always

Please can you introduce yourself and your debut?

Hello! I’m Amanda Gayle, and my debut novel Once, Again, Always, is a contemporary romance about a woman who wakes up one morning to find that she has lost the last six years of her memories, including the entirety of her relationship and marriage to a man she can’t stand—her former boarding school rival.

Can you introduce us to your main characters, Molly and Aster?

Molly is a high-achieving cat lover with a book collection just this side of a hoarding problem. She’s someone who cared deeply about her academics as a student, pushed herself too hard most of the time, and only discovered the joys of relaxing and taking life at a slower pace as an adult. Lacking her memories of the last six years of her life, her approach to learning her life as it is now is one based in logic, but regularly affected by an intuition she can’t otherwise explain or describe.

Aster is someone who grew up under a lot of familial pressure to succeed, felt stifled and resentful of that experience, and often took that resentment out on others. He experienced autonomy (and therapy) in college, and proudly chose to be his own person. He’s a little reserved, loyal to those who deserve it, and deeply, desperately, in love with his wife.

I’d love to know what inspired you to write an amnesia story. What importance do you think shared memories have for romantic and platonic friendships within the novel, and how did you explore difficulties of them not being present?

I’ve always loved the storytelling asymmetry of one character knowing more about their relationship with another character. I think that sets up such interesting conflicts to unravel, particularly in a romance where attraction and romantic love are a part of the picture too. There’s such great opportunity for yearning!

In this novel, the lack of shared memories between Molly and the other characters informs literally every single interaction she has. Every interaction involves a level of teasing out what Molly knows, what she’s learned but still doesn’t remember, and what she still has yet to learn. We see this show up in how she struggles to know how to interact with others, in how others struggle to know how best to interact with her, and how everyone feels about this loss of shared connection between them. Some handle it with humor, others with quiet frustration, and others with more yearning than seems humanly possible.

Could you talk to us about Molly’s friends and the roles they play?

Molly’s friends play a huge role in her new unfamiliar life. Roughly, they fall into two groups: friends from her life as she once knew it, and friends who became friends in the time she lost. Narratively, these two groups of friends serve distinct and critical purposes. Molly’s old, familiar friends are an anchor and easy entry point into her new life. And her new ones are necessary forward momentum in accepting how things have changed. And between all of them, an element of found family surrounds Molly with the love and support she needs to emotionally heal from what has happened to her.

How did you find the writing and editing process?

Writing the initial draft of something is always hard for me; the act of creating something out of nothing is always so, so difficult. Editing that thing, however, is my favorite part. I love slowly building out more and more layers of a story with each read through. I somethings think about writing a book like a sort of excavation, and I, an intrepid archaeologist. The hardest part is finding a good site, knowing where to dig. But once I’ve found something, the act of steadily uncovering it and revealing more and more detail is the best part. And in the case of traditionally publishing and working with an editor, archeological digs are definitely more fun with company.

What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Keep writing. Which is the oldest, most well-tread advice out there, but truly, that’s the core of it. Keep writing when it’s hard. When something ends up shelved or on the cutting room floor. When it feels like maybe you should stop. Keep writing. Every word on the page is experience, it’s skill-honing, and it’s an opportunity to invest in a craft that demands so much investment it’s almost mind boggling.

Could you share your favorite quote from the novel?

This is so hard. Like picking a favorite child. But I think if forced, my answer has to be “You’re enough, in any iteration,” which is something Aster says to Molly after they’ve finally managed to verbalize their biggest fears and the core of their individual insecurities as it relates to Molly’s memory loss. I love the idea of affirming for someone that no matter what version of themselves they are, even a version missing some memories, they’re still enough. They’ll always be enough.