Music is an integral part of my writing process! Usually before I’ve even started drafting, I’ve built the beginning of a playlist. Though my official playlist for THE EX VOWS has dozens of songs, these are the songs that most accurately capture the spirit of Georgia, the main character, Eli, her love interest, and the book as a whole.
“Forever” by Noah Kahan
When I listen to this song, I think of it being told from Eli’s POV. There’s so much nostalgia attached to it, which aligns perfectly with Eli and Georgia’s past. They met at fifteen and were best friends for years before they got into a relationship, so I always think of Eli looking back on all of that with the same kind of wistfulness and fondness that we see throughout Georgia’s narration. Eli and Georgia both have to work through a lot of loneliness in their lives, and I love the line “I won’t be alone for the rest of my life/I’ll build a boat for when the river gets high/And I’ll meet a girl in the heat of July/And I’ll tell her so she knows.” To me, it represents this idea that he’ll never give up on his love for her, that he’ll keep her steady when things get hard or messy. It encapsulates so many of the most important feelings that rise to the surface in the book.
“it was supposed to be us” by EXES
Mazey Eddings sent me this song one day and told me it was Georgia and Eli in song form, and my jaw dropped when I listened to it. I’m not convinced this song isn’t literally my book distilled into these lyrics and melody. “Now all of my friends are in love/I’m watching them all getting married/I don’t want to meet anyone/It was supposed to be us.” THE EX VOWS is set amidst the wedding of their mutual best friend, and so “I’m watching them all getting married” is exactly what they’re doing, made ten times more painful because at one point Georgia and Eli thought that would be them. Despite being broken up for five years, Georgia hasn’t been able to move on, and we see through her eyes what Eli’s journey has been like since they broke up (spoiler: neither has he). They’ve both been stuck in this sort of purgatory where they can’t be together, but they can’t be with anyone else, and meanwhile they’re watching their friends settle into the lives they thought they’d have with each other.
“Rivers and Roads” by The Head and the Heart
I personally have been crying to this song for more than a decade, but when I was listening to it recently, I realized just how perfectly it fits for THE EX VOWS. In the book, Georgia is at a crossroads in her life where she and her friends are moving into different eras: moving, getting married, starting families. It can be a really painful time, especially for people in their 20s when those changes are especially prevalent. “Rivers and Roads” speaks to the ache those changes make you feel: “A year from now, we’ll all be gone/All our friends will move away/And they’re goin’ to better places/But our friends will be gone away.” It also talks about a journey, and how they’ll take rivers and roads until they reach the person/people they love. Georgia places so much value and importance on her friends, who are her family in many ways, and would go any distance to stay in the orbit of those people. She’s just scared they won’t do the same.
“This Love” by Taylor Swift
I have so many Taylor songs on this playlist that it’s almost impossible to choose just one to support the thesis of this book. For instance, The Tortured Poets Department came out after I wrote this book, but I SWEAR she wrote it for Georgia and Eli, because “loml”? “The Alchemy”? “Down Bad”? “The Prophecy”?? All accurate to their journey in some way. That said, if I had to choose one song that perfectly encapsulated the entirety of Georgia and Eli’s relationship, it would be “This Love.” It’s a song about a love that was lost and came back—“This love is good/this love is bad/this love is alive back from the dead.” What particularly connects me to this song is that Taylor talks about having to let it go free, and how it came back to her. Georgia and Eli broke up when they were twenty-three, and in the book we see them five years later. My favorite thing about second chance is the growth that must happen in order for a relationship to work again, and Georgia and Eli both did so much of that in the intervening five years they were apart. They had to get it go to get it back.
“Second Chances” by Gregory Alan Isakov
“If it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone” is a lyric that is repeated throughout this song, and it’s at the heart of THE EX VOWS. It takes so much bravery to come back to a person who hurt you, or whom you hurt, or both, and open yourself up to them again. Georgia and Eli both show a lot of courage, I think, in really allowing the other person to see them—the messy stuff, the vulnerabilities, the wounds and the love—because they come to understand that in order to give each other a second chance, they have to see one another that way.
THE EX VOWS by Jessica Joyce
Estranged exes must stick close together to save their best friend’s wedding after a string of disasters in this swoony and steamy second-chance romance from the USA Today bestselling author of You, with a View.
Georgia Woodward lives by her lists, none more so than the one about her ex, Eli Mora. It’s full of the ironclad dos and don’ts they’ve been following since she returned to the Bay Area after their cataclysmic breakup five years ago.
With the wedding of their mutual best friend, Adam, looming, and them about to step into their roles as best woman and man, Georgia’s never needed it more. She refuses to threaten their tight-knit friend group with her messy—and still very present—feelings. The rules on that list will keep her cool, calm, and compartmentalized.
What’s not on her list? Eli arriving from New York with a new rule-breaking attitude or the all-inclusive venue burning to the ground, leaving the bride and groom in dire straits. Nor does she anticipate Adam asking her and Eli to help him make a miracle happen. Together.
As Georgia and Eli rush up to Napa Valley to pull off the perfect wedding, their old chemistry comes back in technicolor. Somewhere between cake tastings gone wrong, disastrous DJ auditions, and Eli’s heated attention, Georgia starts recognizing the man she fell in love with before. And if she lets herself break her rules, she might find what they’re building isn’t the something old that ruined them—it’s a chance at something new.
Romance Contemporary [Berkley, On Sale: July 16, 2024, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780593548424 / eISBN: 9780593548431]
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About Jessica Joyce
Jessica Joyce lives happily-ever-ongoing with her husband and son in the Bay Area. When she’s not writing character-driven, realistic and relatable tales of millennials who are just Doing Their Best while falling in love, you can find her listening to one of her dozens of chaotically curated Spotify playlists, trying out a new skincare face mask, crying over cute animal TikToks, or watching the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice.
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