Luna Westish is a wanderer, always looking up at buildings and searching for their next coffee. In another life, they write about sustainability, business, motherhood, and their ex-cult experiences. Their study abroad trip and later visits to Scotland are a constant source of fond memories and inspiration.
About Meet Me at the Ruins
It’s 2003, and Margo is reeling from a bad breakup. She’s looking forward to a drama-free semester abroad at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland.
When she meets Ren, her beautiful and mysterious downstairs neighbor, her plans to keep things uncomplicated suddenly vanish. Struggling with the pace of her courses, and unsure of how to nurture her new friendships, Margo’s brain works overtime to make sense of her environment. She longs for Ren, but she’s unwilling to pine away while he figures out his complicated feelings.
Constantly trying to rise above her anxious nature, Margo throws herself into the social – and sensual – opportunities that studying abroad offers.
She discovers that her happiness is made up of small but significant moments. She revels in cappuccinos with fluffy foam, long runs past ancient stone buildings, museums with friends, and surprising, spicy encounters. Despite the low rumble of an existential crisis nipping at her feet, Margo is determined to find her place in the world.
Your next travel read or Book Club pick, this compelling story about belonging will resonate long after you’ve finished. Perfect for fans of Normal People, One Day, and Thunder in My Heart.
The interview
Why do you write in the genre that you do?
Meet Me at the Ruins is a cross-genre novel (upmarket / women’s fiction / new adult / coming of age / romantic-but-not-romance / travel) which reflects the type of fiction I like to read – complex, vulnerable, often with an ambiguous ending.
Are you more of a fan of plot-driven stories or character-driven stories?
I don’t know if this is a cop out of an answer, but I actually love it when a story is both plot-driven and character-driven. I think Emily Henry stories are often like this – you anticipate a denouement or Happily Ever After – but it’s the characters quirks and foibles, and the pace of daily life, that get you there.
Fill in the blank: “People will like your book if they like stories about…”
…complex characters struggling to find their place in the world. Especially if they understand – or want to understand – how challenging everyday life could be as a neurodiverse person before we were having real conversations about anxiety, executive disfunction, and mental illness.
If Hollywood bought the rights to your book, would you want it to be turned into a movie or series?
I sometimes daydream about seeing Meet Me at the Ruins as a “rom com” in the theater, even though it’s not a romance or a comedy. The pace of the story, the core of flawed but relatable main characters, the ensemble of quirky secondary characters, and the study abroad setting all feel like the kind of indie you’d watch on a Saturday night with your friends, with lots of popcorn and M&Ms on hand.
What are your passions/obsessions outside of writing?
I love to travel – I’ve been to 30+ countries. My favorite thing in the whole world is to just walk around a new city.
I love having a destination, but with lots of time to deviate and get lost before I have to get there. Stopping at a cute coffee shop, a thrift store, or a book shop while ambling around a new city is what fuels my soul.
I live in a big city and make it a point to walk somewhere new, or a new way home, every week. I also love learning about trees and plants, trying to keep my houseplants alive, and exploring my city with my family and rescue pup.
Have you ever mentored another writer with their writing?
Yes! I have a really meandering back story, which has given me a lot of perspective. Starting as a book writing experiment, publishing on Kindle Vella (and learning how to navigate that environment), querying agents and publishers, receiving offers for publication but not one that felt right, and finally self-publishing – I’ve learned so much! It would be selfish to keep it to myself.
I run a local Facebook business support group and have been helping several writers from there. Most of them are at the point where they’re learning how to query, so I’ve been helping them with what platforms they can use, what I learned from mistakes I made, and how to narrow down the field of who to reach out to.
There were so many people along my journey who answered questions, walked me through querying, read early sex scenes – you name it, someone probably helped me with it! So I want to do that for other writers, too.
What is the most unique way that an idea for a piece of writing has come to you?
I haven’t actually written it yet, but an idea for a body horror story came to me like a flash of lightening, fully formed. I actually don’t (can’t!) read or write horror stories – my imagination is too vivid and I won’t ever sleep again – so I am hoping at some point to find a co-author or, even better, work up a treatment that I can pass on to another writer.
Have you ever gone away to work on a piece of writing? If not, where would you go if you could?
After about a year of writing for a couple of hours once per week, I set a goal to finish the book with a couple of months, even though I still had probably a third of the way to go! I asked in an awesome local community group if anyone had a cabin or quiet place I could write, and I ended up staying at a friend’s cousin’s vacant apartment for a weekend.
It was a really interesting experience – I actually struggled to get situated, and it took me several hours before I could write anything. But I was really pleased with what I did write that weekend! I’d love to try it again either at a place with a balcony overlooking the beach, or in a cabin by a river in the woods – for a whole week!
What is an annoying thing that a non-writer has assumed about writers or the act of writing?
I can tell you something I used to think before I took writing seriously, that I now find annoying: the idea that if your book is good, it’s an easy path to publication! I genuinely did not understand the intensity of querying, how long it takes from a query to publication (even if everything goes right!), and how you might have to query a dozen folks before someone falls in love with your work.
One thing that still amazes me is how someone can love your book, but if they don’t see a commercial audience for it, they won’t take you on as a client. It’s so much more of a market-based system than I imagined, as a reader, thinking these authors were just tossing ideas out, easily getting representation, and getting paid well!
How do you measure the success of your writing career?
I tend to give myself small goals that I’ll likely achieve – I think it’s a bit of a defense mechanism as a perfectionist who probably won’t achieve everything they dream about. So even though I daydream about watching the story as a movie some years down the line, that’s not success for me.
I think I’ll feel really successful when I organically see someone reading it – maybe a friend sends me a picture of someone with a paperback in a park, or a library features it on an endcap, or I see someone on a plane listening to the audiobook. I think I need to reach that personal definition of success before I can make a numbers-based goal, like earning a certain amount or selling a certain number of copies.
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Terrific that you are shining a spotlight on other Authors – bravo to you both!