Exclusive Interview
‘The Favorites’ Author Layne Fargo Breaks Down Kat & Heath’s Love Story and Gives Adaptation Update
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Favorites.]
The complicated love story of Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha has already captured the attention of book readers across the globe. Everyone is talking about Layne Fargo’s newest novel, The Favorites (out now), a sensational Wuthering Heights retelling set in the cutthroat world of ice dancing.
Kat and Heath trauma-bonded as kids and sought stability on the ice. Determined to escape their tumultuous situation at home, the pair seeks a new life, and competitive ice dancing is their way out. Kat and Heath have a passionate and turbulent relationship that spans almost their entire lives, and the world becomes fascinated by their undeniable connection on and off the ice.
However, a life-changing incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a shocking end. Ahead of the 10th anniversary of their final skate, a new documentary renews interest in the one and only Shaw and Rocha. After a decade of silence, Kat is ready to tell her side of the story.
Fargo answered all of Swooon’s burning questions about The Favorites. From Heath’s fate to Kat and Bella’s complicated relationship to the status of an adaptation, the author is opening up about her captivating skating romance.
How did you settle on ice dancing? Were there other sports you considered?
Layne Fargo: It was always ice dancing. The first idea was sparked by Tessa Virtue and Scott Moyer in 2018 and their iconic Moulin Rouge performance, and all the articles about how they must be together, but they say they’re just friends. That made me really interested in seeing the dynamic, perhaps, behind one of these teams. But also, ice dance tends to be older skaters. They do it for longer, right? So that just means you have more time you can cover and have lots of drama and spend many years with the characters.
What was it about the Wuthering Heights story that made you want to put your own spin on it?
Fargo: That kind of came late to the process. I was wanting to write a book about ice dancers for much longer, and then the idea to kind of mash it up with Wuthering Heights came later. But I love that book. I’ve loved it since I was a teenager, and it’s just so passionate. Also, I love stories about kind of awful people who found each other. It’s messy, dramatic, scandalous, and you kind of want to shake them, but you also can’t take your eyes off them. So that dynamic and putting that into this sport that’s already so intense, it adds another layer where it’s not just like, are they going to stay together as a romantic couple or not? If they break up, then their careers are over. The stakes are a lot higher.
Did you ever consider giving us Heath’s point of view?
Fargo: No, I kind of liked keeping him a little mysterious because I feel like Heathcliff in the original we don’t totally know what motivates him, and he’s kind of mysterious to himself almost, right? He doesn’t know his background. I’ve gotten some comments where they’re like, well, Heath’s whole personality is that he loves Kat and is obsessed with being with her. And I’m like, yes, that is his whole personality. And that’s okay. It comes out of trauma, right? He has had this really traumatic background, and he’s latched on to her, and over the course of the book, he slowly starts to kind of develop his own interests and wants and needs, which is essential to them actually having any kind of happy ending. He has to find out who he is and what he wants on his own. I don’t know. It was hard even getting him on the page from Kat’s point of view to share his feelings, so I ended up using a lot of music. He listens to music a lot, and all the songs he’s listening to throughout are really like, if he could say how he was feeling, that song would express it. But he’s not going to be the one to be like, I feel this.
Did you ever think about killing Heath in Russia?
Fargo: I did in some drafts. It was the same setup at their final skate, but then he didn’t make it. The shift for that happened for me after I’d been working on the book for a while. Things were starting to open up after the pandemic, and I went to see Stars on Ice in Chicago, and it was my first time seeing live skating because I just always watched it on TV my whole life. Jason Brown, he’s a single skater, is just effervescent. You can just feel his joy, so seeing him, especially with all the skaters who performed, I could see how much they loved it. It just hit me. It’s kind of like writing that way, where it can be really difficult, and it’s like, why do I put myself through this? Because you love it and it gives you joy. So I turned to my partner at intermission and was just like, “There has to be joy. It has to have a happy ending.” I just put these poor kids through so much. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t separate them again. I know you’re supposed to kill your darlings and put your characters through it, but I wanted them to be together at the end so badly and for them to make it work.
So there was no ending where you didn’t envision Kat and Heath together?
Fargo: There were endings where he ended up with Bella, and he and Kat were more just friends who would always love each other and be family, but he and Bella were together. I kind of played around with different versions of it because I didn’t want it to feel like too easy or too packed because they’re just messy, right? You have all these conflicting emotions, and even in the epilogue, Kat’s like, we’re still together, but it’s been on and off. It’s been tempestuous, but we’ll always be in each other’s lives. Their personalities are not such that they’re ever just going to settle down and be totally chill and never fight again.
Do you think Kat and Heath could have ever been happy and content without each other?
Fargo: I think if Heath had met someone else at that age, he could have been happy with that other person. He just got so attached to her. I think Kat could have been happy single in some ways, but I think they’re better together. Their lives are messier but richer together.
By the end of the novel, do you think they’ve found a way to balance their individual wants and needs?
Fargo: Yes. I feel like they both have enough of what they need at the end. They don’t get everything because no one does in life. That’s not realistic, but it’s not how either of them imagined it would be, like their happy ending, but it’s kind of perfect for them.
You could have easily made Kat and Bella enemies for life. Was it crucial for you to always have that undercurrent of respect between them that could build to a friendship?
Fargo: That was always the key to their relationship to me, and I thought a lot when I was writing it about my friendships with other writers. It’s not quite the same. You’re not fighting for one gold medal on top of the podium, but you are in any competitive field. The people who understand what you’re going through and understand the industry are your rivals. I have a lot of writer friends, and we are jealous of each other all the time because somebody gets something, but you still support each other and can coexist. I also based Kat and Bella’s friendship a lot on Madison Hubbell, who’s a U.S. ice dancer, and Gabriella Papadakis, who is a French ice dancer. She and her partner won gold at the last Olympics.
They trained together for years and were best friends. They went wedding dress shopping together, but they wanted to beat each other. There’s that respect. And now, they’re both retired from competition, and they’re skating together and doing show programs together. It’s gorgeous, like the two women skating together. I just find it fascinating. I think people would think they would be enemies and at each other’s throats, and to see that you can have that true friendship and respect coexisting with the competitiveness and the jealousy, it doesn’t have to be either or. My intention was always that it’s super complicated. There’s a lot of bad blood between them as well, but ultimately, they understand each other on a level that Heath can’t even understand because they are so competitive, so ambitious.
Do you think if Kat wasn’t part of the picture Bella and Heath could have worked?
Fargo: I don’t know if I see them long term. I think she would have gotten sick of him actually, right? She’s so blunt and straightforward, and she can be kind of manipulative. She’s also the one to just be like, calling the question and putting it on the table, and he’s so broody.
In The Favorites, your love scenes are told on the ice. What was the writing process like in expressing the characters’ love and emotion on skates?
Fargo: Shoutout again to Tessa and Scott and their chemistry. I wanted all of the programs that I showed — because obviously this book covers a long period of time, and you’re not seeing every competition — I wanted it either to be kind of matching up with what’s going on in their personal lives, so they’re expressing that or it’s the opposite where it creates conflict where they really cannot stand each other right now, but they have to pretend to be so in love on the ice. I’m sure any of these teams, no matter their relationship, you’re going to have days where you’re just like, I cannot stand you, but we’ve got to go compete and look like we love each other. So I had a lot of fun with that, just trying to create those strong contrasts. I think the best love scenes in a novel move the plot forward in some way or develop the dynamic between the characters. I wanted all of the skating scenes that I showed to do the same thing where it actually matters, not just the score they get, but in their personal relationship.
Could #GlitterGate have happened?
Fargo: There were a couple things that went into GlitterGate. That definitely is a thing. If there’s anything on the ice, even if it’s so small, the blade can hit it and it just stops the glide, and then you can fall over. All the competitions in this book, everything is the real competition that took place in that city on that day, at that time, if I could find the competition schedule. All the dance styles that they’re doing, those were the required dance styles. At that competition, the short dance that season, there was an element where they had to stand on a specific spot on the ice and do a stationary movement. So that’s all real. You could look up that competition and see the moment where I set that at, which is really nerdy of me, but it could happen. He’d have to hit the exact right spot, but that’s why I picked that, because they had to be on one spot on the ice.
Were there other alternate endings you thought about?
Fargo: For a while, I was going to have Kat and Bella turn against each other at the end. In the versions where Heath died, it wasn’t Francesca [who was behind poisoning Heath]. Bella had something to do it. I had an ending where at the end, Bella went to visit Kat in Illinois again, and Kat lures her out onto the frozen lake, knowing it’s going to crack and she’ll die. Honestly, again, I just couldn’t. I was a thriller writer before. My first two books are pretty dark psychological thrillers, and I just couldn’t go to that dark place anymore, that kind of cynical, edgy ending. I just wanted them to be happy. They’d been so through.
Has there been a discussion about an adaptation?
Fargo: It has been optioned, and there’s a showrunner attached. They’re going to try and sell it sometime this year to a streamer. But you know how these things go. A lot of things never get made, but fingers crossed.
Obviously, changes have to be made when adapting for TV. Are you open to the changes?
Fargo: Definitely. I think the most important thing is just to stay true to who the characters are, but it’s a different medium. One of the things I’ve discussed with the company that optioned it is expanding on some of the other characters that we don’t get to see scenes with them because it’s all it’s Kat’s point of view. Like, Heath and Bella, we never get to see them alone together. I would be really interested to see what that’s like.
When you were writing, did you envision actors in your roles?
Fargo: I always do somewhat. For Kat and Heath, I was sort of picturing a younger Anne Hathaway and Riz Ahmed. Obviously, they couldn’t play it if there’s a TV show because they’re too old now. But of the people who are more of the right age, I think a lot about Molly Gordon, who’s on The Bear, and then Brandon Perea. I keep sharing this fact about him. He used to compete as a jam skater, which is like break dancing plus roller skating, so I feel like that translates to he could learn to ice dance. For Bella, my number one would be Havana Rose Liu. She’s in Bottoms. She has that cool girl kind of, yes, I want to be her friend, but you’re a little scared of her. I think she’d be a great Bella. For Sheila, when I was writing it, I was picturing Ming-Na Wen. Lucy Liu has been mentioned.
Are you working on your next book?
Fargo: The new book is about a Broadway musical, and it’s focused on three women: one who was the lead in this musical when it premiered back in the ’90s and is now producing a revival, the director of the revival, and then the young actress who’s taking on the role now. It’s about the relationships between these three women. They’ll still be lots of sexy backstage drama. I’m kind of early days with that, but the musical is about vampires, so it’s going to be dark and gothic and sexy.
