You never really move on from something like that, but you move forward, and she’s not moving forward. It picks up two years later, and she’s very much still broken. There was a certain timeline in Sloan’s book - something really big happens on the two-year anniversary of Brandon’s accident and then something really big happens on the two-year anniversary of his death - so I knew that I had to replicate that timeline in The Friend Zone. While we were in submissions, I told my agent, “What do you think about me going back in time two years and writing Kristen and Josh’s love story, so we can live through the events that make Sloan the person she is in her book?” So that’s what I did. So I had this idea to write this book about a woman who finds this dog, and I wanted it to be a book about grief. She dealt with anxiety, she couldn’t hold down a job, and this was somebody who was very driven prior to this happening. It was kind of baffling to me it was this horrible ripple effect where her entire life just imploded after this thing. I didn’t know at the time, but what she was struggling with was actually called complicated grief or extended bereavement. Two years after his death, she was very much still broken.

I had a friend who I was very, very close to and her husband died. So, how did it end up being the second in the series?ĪBBY JIMENEZ: Not the idea I actually wrote that book first. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You said you had the idea for this book first.

The friend zone kristen