As an avid reader and entertainment journalist, there is one book I constantly get asked if I have read: Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman. My answer is always, "Yes. It was my TBR before it was even written. The minute it was available for preorder, the charge hit my credit card." It doesn't matter that the Booktok sensation has been on shelves for over a year. People constantly make sure I didn't miss it. Recently, Elissa released her follow-up novel, Once More With Feeling. While I don't expect my friends, co-workers and acquaintances to associate this particular story with me, it almost feels full circle that the author and I have sat down to discuss it.

“I don’t want to live a mundane life,” my sister said quietly over the phone.

We have been doing daily phone check-ins since her breakup. You know the kind. The kind of breakup that leaves you feeling like the very marrow in your bones has been carved out and replaced with hollow listlessness. The kind of breakup that makes you realize writing a grocery list by yourself is the loneliest experience in your life thus far. The kind of breakup that results in you ditching your life, your job, and the home you loved to live with your parents – states away – just to regain some semblance of yourself before you was lost to time.

To love.

To vacancy.

(Perhaps you did not have the latter half of this break-up experience, but you catch my drift nonetheless.)

Laura Hankin and I are not at The Dime. It’s not because we wouldn’t be cool enough. It’s because it’s 10 AM on a Monday and it’s also 2023. Eighteen years ago, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, and other notable names of the early 2000s were constantly photographed outside the dive bar doors. Making the location, or rather Cofax Coffee located next door, the perfect place for us to discuss her latest book, The Daydreams.