For the Girls Who Overthink Everything: A Conversation of Anxiety and Romance With Brooke Averick
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Brooke Averick doesn’t open our conversation talking about her book. We share our nerves and talk about bangs, like I was on Facetime with a new friend. There’s something fitting about the casual intimacy, the shared awkwardness– it’s the same tone that’s made her a beloved online presence, and now, what became the foundation of her debut novel, Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It.
With Phoebe Berman, Averick steps in as a new voice for that anxious girl in romance. Phoebe is a hopeless romantic desperate for love, but crippled by a fear of dating and intimacy– which is why, at nearly 30, she’s still a virgin. Facing her 30th birthday in 30 days, she gives herself a deadline to finally lose it. Buoyant with a self-made checklist she believes will get her there, Phoebe embarks on a chaotic quest that introduces not one, not two, but three potential love interests.
What began Averick’s deep dive into writing about Phoebe were two major moments: one, the debilitating anxiety of dating, and two, descriptive notes in the notes app of an event that happened in her personal life. “I think there were kind of like two separate sparks. “[There was] this general feeling of there being a lack of anxious girl representation in romance. And when I say anxious, I mean, like debilitatingly anxious,” she explains.
“The second spark was, like, a very descriptive note I had in my Notes app of something that had happened to me a few years ago,” Averick says. “I was like, wow, this would be a really good book idea.” The note lived there for years. “So what Phoebe is, it’s basically a combo of that: what was in that Notes app and just the anxious girl in a romance.” The real-life incident, which she won’t fully reveal for spoiler reasons, became fuel rather than heartbreak. “Instead of being like, oh, this is horrible, I was channeling that more creatively and thinking, wow, that could be a great book. It was more so a coping mechanism,” she says.
However, Averick’s personal way of reacting diverges from Phoebe’s completely- despite Phoebe’s anxious thought patterns being “pretty much copy and paste” from Averick’s own brain. “She’s very go, go, go, hyper-focused, and organized. I’m the opposite. I shut down,” she admits. With creating that distinction, Averick made Phoebe become her own person rather than a projection of herself.
Phoebe feels so real she starts to feel like your friend– the one you want to grab by the shoulders and beg to make a better decision. That instinct, Averick admits, was baked into the writing process itself. “The self-sabotage scenes were really, really hard for me to write,” she says. “They’re hard to read, too. When you’re reading a romance novel, conflict is such a key element. A lot of it comes from self-sabotage, and it’s never pleasant. You always want to reach through the pages and shake someone.” The difference, she explains, is that she was the one in control. “It was worse to write because I have full control over this character, and I don’t want her to do this. But for the sake of the plot, and for what she would actually do, she has to.” At one point, a five-page scene took weeks to finish. “I was like, ‘Phoebe, just maybe, no.’ I didn’t want her to do it,” she admits.
Averick became a lot more aware of her own self-destructive actions “I've been really conscious of that and able to redirect myself in a positive way,” she smiles. “Writing it was half cathartic and half exhausting, but in a in a way that was good for me to hear. I was like, [Phoebe is] being so exhausting right now, and so the next time that I have these spirals, I am going to check myself and know how exhausting it is redirect myself.”
Writing Phoebe’s character helped Averick slow down and learn how to let go. Creatively, Averick wanted to continue to work on Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It, but it had to come to an end eventually. “It got to a point where I finished the book, and then I just kept going back and tweaking little things. Like any creative endevour, there will need to be a point where you finish. Averick advises that perhaps a second party is needed to let you know when it’s time to let it go. “I'm so thankful for my agents. They were like, ‘you're making it worse,’ so it does get to a point where you have to let go.”
Though Averick is known for her witty online humor, comedy didn’t necessarily land the way it does on her podcast with co-host Connor Wood, Brooke and Connor Make a Podcast. Learning this difference allowed Averick to find her voice– and how to separate herself from Phoebe. Averick tells about how riffing with Wood helped her write “real” dialogue. “I wanted to include dialog that represents the way that people, like actually speak. So I think that the podcast really helped me do that. There's a lot of back and forth, quick banter in the book,” shares Averick, which perfectly translates her own comedic style from online to the novel.
But Averick is pulling away from the relatable anxious girl rom-com energy– she’s blending sharp humor with true, debilitating anxiety and self-consciousness. Phoebe has 30 days to lose her virginity, and Averick leans into the uncomfortability of being hopeless romantic in a world full of hook-up culture. “Something that's not explicitly said in the book, but, I think that a lot of the romance recently has been like, people are able to have sex and date really casually, which is great for some people, but I think Phoebe just really cannot do that, and really needs to be connected to someone, even though she wants to just hook up with someone without any feelings attached.”
Phoebe is just a different approach to the casual dating scene, making lovers like Averick herself feel seen. “I think there are a lot of people, myself included, that can't casually hook-up. And so that definitely kind of influenced the way that I wrote Phoebe.” She elaborates on another source of Phoebe’s anxiety, where online, it seems everyone is doing just fine–except for you. “It's really easy to jump onto the comparison bandwagon in a way that wasn't before social media. There's a lot of moments in this book where Phoebe spirals, especially on social media and making those comparisons.”
Which is why Averick believes there is a lesson that can be learned when reading Phoebe’s story. Phoebe exists in a world where society expects women to fit in a particular mold, and Averick ensures that this is not the case for Phoebe. “I think that when you stop trying to make yourself digestible and please everyone, that's how you really find yourself and your crew. It's totally fine to be loved by the few that you really love than to be loved by everyone. I think that you see that in Phoebe; she has found her people because she's so authentically herself. Not everyone might love her, but the people that matter do.” Maybe the reader is not a young woman; but Averick believes anyone can take that away from the book. “Anyone can get something from this book, because even if you're not an anxious girl, you probably know one. My dad and my brother, who are two straight guys, learned a lot about me while reading it. And I think that any guy would learn a lot about an anxious girl in their life while reading it.”
If there’s one thing Averick hopes readers walk away with, it’s this: loving a flawed character can feel a lot like forgiving yourself. “You fall in love with Phoebe, who is someone that is deeply flawed, and also realizes that she's deeply flawed,” she says. “And they'll see themselves in that and realize, okay, there's nothing wrong with this girl. She's great. Maybe there's nothing wrong with me.”