What is the title of your latest release?
GIRL NEXT DOOR
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
A twenty-something freelance writer discovers that her childhood next-door neighbor is the anonymous author behind a wildly successful queer romance based on their senior year of high school—except they were never actually together in real life. It’s sort of my love letter to the rom-com genre. I’m also secretly hoping it’s a rom-com for rom-com skeptics.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
I wanted to write a setting that I knew, so I “invented” a suburban Long Island town similar to the one where I grew up—though there are notable differences.
Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Definitely. We would have so many embarrassing stories to tell each other.
What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Clumsy, funny, kind.
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That the Bosphorus is a strait, not a river. GIRL NEXT DOOR has a running joke about the Byzantine Empire in it, which is just as weird as it sounds. Don’t worry, it’s an extremely small element of the plot. But thank you to my copy editor for pointing out this error in my knowledge of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I edit as I draft. Then, when I’m totally done, I edit again. And again. And again.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Pizza.
Describe your writing space/office!
Over the years, I’ve mostly written in public libraries or a very dangerous storage loft in my garage. I’m now lucky enough to be able to borrow an office from a friend with a private therapy practice. It has a desk and window and a door, and that’s all I need.
Who is an author you admire?
It’s difficult to pick just one. The author I studied most directly while writing GIRL NEXT DOOR was Tom Perrotta. His main characters are always playing into and against expectations in ways that I find both subtle and thrilling. It’s my highest goal to deliver characters that feel as real as his—idiosyncratic, morally gray, and full of human failing. Also his books are so funny.
Is there a book that changed your life?
Several! But I’ll go with the one that feels most relevant to my life at the moment. A few years back, I’d spent nearly a decade trying very hard to write SF/F novels, and hit a breaking point where I was too dejected to read much of anything. I happened to pick up WE PLAY OURSELVES by Jen Silverman, a hilarious book that I’ll call contemporary fiction, about an artist who flees her life in New York City after a series of career disasters. Besides being brilliant and fast-paced, it helped me laugh my way out of a rut that felt like it could’ve been the end of my commitment to being a novelist.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
I got it about a week after I gave birth! My agent had submitted the manuscript to editors when I was still pregnant, and I think we expected a longer wait-time on responses. My water broke three weeks early, and I was in this feverish nap with my newborn when I woke up to a voicemail from my agent that someone had read my manuscript and wanted to talk on the phone. It was surreal. I did a terrible job on the call.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
I genuinely love rom-coms, especially sapphic rom-coms. So that’s the genre I’ve been reading the most for the past few years.
What’s your favorite movie?
The Matrix.
What is your favorite season?
Spring.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
There’s a very sketchy all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant near my house. I like to go there with my wife for dinner, and—for a few hours—let go of my profound guilt over consuming seafood.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE by Emily Austin. I was blown away by how deeply emotional and laugh-out-loud funny it was. Just top-notch writing.
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Sushi. (See above.)
What do you do when you have free time?
I like to box. My wife calls me a “passionate boxing person”—I’ve been training for over a decade at this point.
What can readers expect from you next?
I’m working on another sapphic rom-com that I think of as a companion book to GIRL NEXT DOOR in terms of the second-chance trope and the fact that it’s about summer, which feels like a coda to the “school year” theme I was going for in GIRL NEXT DOOR. So I’m just focused on finishing a solid draft of that!
GIRL NEXT DOOR by Rachel Meredith
In this charming debut rom-com, a young freelancer returns to her suburban hometown to uncover why her childhood next door neighbor’s bestselling book appears to be an epic love story about the two of them.
When MC Calloway’s best friend Joe, an editor at the notorious gossip website Jawbreaker, calls her in for an emergency meeting, MC is unprepared for how frantic he is. But when he shows her a copy of Girl Next Door, the steamy, bestselling rom-com taking the literary world by storm, written under a pen name, points to one of the women on the front cover, and says, “that’s you,” its MC who begins to panic.
Joe is convinced that the author is Nora Pike, MC’s prickly, childhood next-door neighbor, and their former high school classmate – and MC knows he’s right, since the book describes actual events that happened their senior year, down to the tiniest details. But in the book, the characters based on MC and Nora are desperately in love, rather than the awkward acquaintances MC remembers being in real life.
Joe begs MC to go home undercover and get the scoop on Nora. That’s the last thing MC wants to do, especially for an assignment that seems morally dubious at best, but she reluctantly agrees, knowing Joe is desperate to break a big story. Crashing in her childhood home with her older brother Conrad (now married to MC’s secret high school crush, Gabby), MC begins untangling truth from fiction, trying to get close to Nora, who is just as hot and prickly as ever – and now suspicious of MC to boot. But the more involved she gets with Nora, the more it becomes clear they’re both hiding secrets . . . and MC realizes she might be in over her head.
Perfect for readers of Delilah Green Doesn’t Care and Book Lovers, Girl Next Door is a delicious debut brimming with romance, humor, and heart.
Audiobook Narrator- Jeremy Carlisle Parker.
Romance Comedy | Women’s Fiction | Thriller Domestic [Harper Perennial, On Sale: September 9, 2025, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063438545 / eISBN: 9780063438576]
Buy GIRL NEXT DOOR: Amazon.com | Kindle | BN.com | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play | Powell’s Books | Books-A-Million | Indie BookShops | Ripped Bodice | Libro.fm | Audible | Walmart.com | Target.com | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR
About Rachel Meredith
Rachel has been writing something or other her entire life. Born in New York City, raised on Long Island, and now a New Havener, she spends her days as a copy editor and proofreader, where she’s able to put her English degree to use on all sorts of grammatical minutiae. Her debut adult rom-com, Girl Next Door, will be published in Fall 2025 by Harper Perennial.
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