Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner chat Lady’s Knight and female friendships
Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner chat their newest collab, Lady's Knight, and the female friendships and queer representation in the book.
We last interviewed Amie Kaufman on her solo work, The Isles of Gods, but we are certain that you must also know her as part of a writing duo with Meagan Spooner. Lady’s Knight is their latest work, and it’s a fun read inspired by A Knight’s Tale, celebrates female friendships, and features a sapphic romance. What’s not to love? We are honoured to have Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner here today to chat about their new book.
What is it like working together again? Is it any different from your previous collaborations with each other?
We have actually never stopped working together since our first book, which came out in 2013 – and, actually, we were writing together for many years before that. We’ve always got at least one project together in the works, either in the drafting phase or in the editing/publishing phase. For us, working together is just a natural part of life – we’re always checking in via email and chat, both about our lives and about our work. As far as this project goes, the only thing that’s different is that we really focused on making this project joyful – not just the finished book, but the process of writing it, too. From the very beginning, we knew we wanted this one to be full of fun and love from day one.
Actually, please tell us how Lady’s Knight came to existence! Did you watch A Knight’s Tale together?
We did! It was in the middle of the pandemic, and because we live on opposites sides of the world, we had to get creative to find ways to feel like we were spending time together. Movie night was one of those! But we were so bummed that while A Knight’s Tale was still fun and funny, there were almost no female characters in it, and the ones that were were pretty two-dimensional. We decided right then and there that not only were we going to do a version with real, fantastic female characters driving the story, we were going to make it funnier and even more joyful than the original film.
Lady’s Knight is such a fun read and we love how the dialogue is anachronistic. Why did you decide to use contemporary language?
The film inspiration was a big initial part of it – who can forget that scene of the jousting spectators singing “We Will Rock You?” – but mostly, as we were writing, we knew that we wanted our jokes to really sing and resonate with modern audiences. We are all so familiar with medieval fantasy tropes, and a way to highlight those tropes in a loving but teasing way is to bring them into a modern light with modern language and perspective.
In fact, how did you ensure the medieval setting still feels authentic despite the playfulness, such as our characters’ love for cheesecake on a stick?
There’s actually a surprising amount of research that went into this book. We really had to know the historically accurate elements well, because that was the only way to throw out or subvert the elements we wanted to while still creating a believable world. So even though it feels totally irreverent of history, it actually shows our deep love of that subject!
We love how the female friendships in Lady’s Knight are very wholesome and supportive, which is rare in a court setting. Why did you choose to depict these friendships this way?
We love that you picked up on this! It was a very conscious and deliberate decision on our part. As you mention, it’s really common to see a lot of backstabbing and betrayal in books about court intrigue, because that’s a really easy way to inject drama into a situation. But we also knew from the very beginning that this was a book about female friendship as well as queer women-who-love-women romance. If we had a ton of mean girl backstabby friends around our two lovers, it wouldn’t really be sending the message we had in mind. It does take a bit more effort that way, because you can’t just do the soap opera thing of “ah, but what if they’re all lying to each other!” thing to create tension and drama; you have to do that in other ways. But we felt it was worth it.
We also love how queerness is not that controversial in Gwen and Isobelle’s world. Why is it important to have a normalised sapphic relationship in this fantasy novel?
We had a LOT of conversations about this as we planned and wrote this book. Can you really have a story about characters fighting the patriarchy and misogyny without also having them fighting homophobia? And the truth is, in our world, no – those two things are pretty interdependent. But above all, we wanted joy and humor to dominate in this story, and we simply didn’t want bigotry to be a barrier for Gwen and Isobelle in that way. There are hints of it, of course: Isobelle’s lack of queer models and representation are a big part of why she doesn’t figure out she’s attracted to Gwen right away, and there are a lot of complications introduced by the fact that she doesn’t get access to her dowry unless and until she’s married to a man. But deep down, we simply didn’t want to write a book about them being hated because of who they love.
Finally, please tell us a fun fact that you two researched for Lady’s Knight but couldn’t include in the book.
We went into suuuch a deep dive about the origin of the word “cocktails,” because in Lady’s Knight there’s a bar whose female owner basically “invents” cocktails, at least as far as their existence in England goes. So we did soooo much research about that, where the word came from and when they were invented, but, of course, we couldn’t just stop the book for a three-page aside about pretty boozy drinks! Maybe for the sequel? 😉
