[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Christina Lauren’s The Paradise Problem.]
Christina Lauren is a force to be reckoned with in the romance world. Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings united more than a decade ago under the combined pen name and have written over 30 books together. Their latest, The Paradise Problem, out now, is the beach read of 2024.
At the center of The Paradise Problem is Liam and Anna’s love story. Liam and Anna were married back in college just so Anna could have access to subsidized family housing. They barely knew each other while they were married. The struggling artist thought she’d signed the divorce papers back then, but when Liam shows up at her door three years later, Anna gets an opportunity that can change her life. Liam needs her to be his wife at his sister’s wedding on a private island. Liam’s hundred million dollar inheritance is at stake, and Anna’s ready to fake it until she makes it.
However, the more Anna and Liam spend time together on the island, the more they begin to develop feelings for each other. Anna becomes an anchor for Liam as he deals with his tough-as-nails father and family drama. The Paradise Problem is as sexy as any Christina Lauren novel, but there’s a Succession-esque family dynamic that will keep you on your toes as you read this juicy romance.
Hobbs and Billings spoke with TV Insider about the inspiration for The Paradise Problem, how much they “tinkered” with the ending, a possible Love and Other Words movie, and more. Scroll down for the full interview.
Where did the inspiration for The Paradise Problem come from? It feels like if Pretty Woman and Succession had a baby.
Lauren Billings: That’s exactly what we want. Initially, the idea for this book was to have it be a Christmas book where the couple had been divorced, but he didn’t tell his family. The family wanted them to host Christmas, so they had to pretend to be married. We kept trying to write it. It just wasn’t funny. It was hard to make divorce feel comedic in this instance, so we wanted to keep that element of they’re married, but they have to figure out their way through it, and it just sort of came together. I was really obsessed with Succession at the time. I think we just threw a lot of things into the bag and shook it around and this book came out. It was really fun.
You mentioned the connection to Succession. I feel like if Kendall Roy was actually a good guy, he’d be Liam Weston.
Billings: Absolutely. A little bit taller and a little bit less broken.
What did you both love about diving into Liam and Anna’s romance compared to previous books?
Billings: I think we have played with very rich heroes before in the past and also with rich heroines. The billionaire trope is a thing that romance does and has done for decades and decades, maybe even centuries. The truth is, there aren’t a lot of really altruistic, ethical, sweet, genuine beta hero billionaires in the world. I think we had a really fun time playing with the dichotomy of Anna as the starving artist with the billionaire, who doesn’t really want to be a billionaire, and his grappling with his inheritance and his family and what it all means and what he can do with it. He finds this person who has nothing but is so grounded in who she is that she helps him discover who he is. I think as a romance it just felt very romantic to us. It was really fun to bring these two together and just see how they made each other better.
Anna standing up to Liam’s father, Ray, was one of the best moments of the book. It was such a turning point.
Christina Hobbs: Anna comes from this very loving dad, so she’s just so horrified to see this family that apparently has everything and they’re so miserable because of it. It was really interesting to do research and learn what narcissistic personalities are really like. Every accomplishment of his children he just takes credit for it. To him, it’s just a mirror of all the wonderful things he’s done. But when they mess up, they’re destroying him. I’ll tell you, we hated Ray so much. It was really fun to write a character who was really terrible, who did not need to be redeemed. When that moment came up, we were, as the writers, so excited to see somebody just tear him down. For the first time in his life, somebody tells him the truth because nobody else in his family will. I mean, Liam has tried to, but for somebody outside to basically show him a mirror and say exactly what everybody else was thinking was just the most satisfying.
Did you toy around with the ending? Were there alternate endings you considered?
Billings: It took us a while to get the scandal quite dialed in. We had it as it is from the beginning, but the specifics of it and how it unfolded and was communicated to Anna and what was kept from Anna and how it all came crashing down at the wedding reception, I think that was something that was harder to pace because we didn’t want the reader to feel like it was too vague. But we also didn’t want it to feel like it was so obvious that Anna was just being clueless. The way that the ending was paced was something that we tinkered with a lot. But then, the thing about romance endings is you’re given their happily ever after, and sometimes you just want to see a little bit more. For Christina and I, we really feel like having a supportive and stable community is super important to the happily ever after for a couple in modern day. It was hard to imagine how his family would be anything but super toxic for the rest of their lives, so even if they are okay in the end, the family isn’t, so you kind of need to see a way forward for them. Does he just cut himself off entirely from his family? I think we wrote that extended ending because we needed to see what their community looked like at the end of the book. That was the part I think we played with the most.
What does the process of writing and crafting sex scenes look like for you two?
Hobbs: It’s funny because people always wonder: which one writes the sex scenes? Or do we write them in the same room together? And the answer is: no.
Billings: Usually, one of us will write the scene and the other will edit it.
Hobbs: It’s the same with everything else. We are just trying to write stuff to get a reaction out of the other person. Some of our books are steamier because it just depends on the characters. Liam and Anna were just going to throw down. They just were. That’s just the way it was going to be. If we can write something that is going to be make the other laugh or cry or swoon, that’s our whole goal. Because if we like it, then we’re going to assume since our readers tend to like all the same things as we do.
Billings: As romance writers, especially if you are writing some steam, you have momentum to that point. You want your characters to get together. You want them to kiss and roll around. When you finally get to that point, you’re like, I want to write this culmination of all this tension we’ve been creating. Those are usually the scenes that need the least amount of work because it’s a reward.
Liam and Anna were married in college, but only so Anna could have family housing. Did you ever consider having them hook up then?
Billings: I think in an early draft I had some sort of moment where they’d kiss or he’d slept with her and held her in his arms, but we ended up taking it out because it felt unrealistic that she wouldn’t remember him as well. We kind of needed her to be like, “You look really familiar” when he shows up a few years later.
When you write your characters, do you ever envision actors?
Billings: Sometimes we use an actor when we’re first brainstorming and outlining, so we kind of have the same features in mind. So when we’re describing the characters in our individual chapters, we have the same kind of idea for who they look like. But inevitably, as we write it, they become their own person and stop looking like this specific person and more of who they become in our heads. We’ll use actors or models, but for the most part, they become unique once we stat writing.
When you were crafting your mood boards for Liam and Anna, were there actors on there?
Billings: I think Liam looked a little bit like The Vampire Diaries-era Paul Wesley but taller. I think with Anna we found a model. I don’t know her name, but she had pink hair and was so stunning. As soon as we saw her, she was exactly how we envisioned Anna.
Love and Other Words has exploded on BookTok over the last couple of years. How does it feel to see such a reaction to Macy and Elliot’s story now?
Billings: It’s awesome. The funny thing is, that book came out in 2018, so it’s six years old now. You never know when a book is going to find its audience, and when that book came out, it did well. Readers liked it, it got good reviews, but it didn’t explode in the way that some of our other books have. The Unhoneymooners came out and immediately hit the Times bestseller list, and Love and Other Words was a bit quieter. That was fine, we loved it. We were proud of it. We knew it was a good book and knew it would find its people. So when it really started to take off in 2020-2021, it was very satisfying because we were like, yay, Macy and Elliot have found their people. But you can never control what readers are going to take and run with, so you just have to be grateful for every response you get.
Hobbs: It really does show that the only thing we can control is the book we write. Because it’s the same book that came out six years ago, but the situations are different.
When did you both decide to write the Elliot chapters for the special edition?
Billings: I think we had some written, and Steamy Lit approached us wanting to do a special edition. And then we were like, oh, we know what we can use these for because we had written some Elliot point of view and didn’t know what to do with it. When they came to us, it felt like the perfect situation to use them and give a little bonus content. We expanded it from there. There were maybe two chapters we had, and we wrote a few more.
Are there any updates about film adaptations of your novels?
Hobbs: There’s lots of things that are going on that we can’t talk about yet. What we can say is that for Unhoneymooners is we have a director, we have a studio, they have the money. Unfortunately, the pandemic slowed things down and strikes slowed things down, so things are starting again. They’re casting it right now. Roomies, we have our lead, we have our director, we have the money, we have the script that we wrote.
Billings: We just have to finish casting that one, and then we have another big announcement coming soon about another project. There’s a bunch of other things in the works, but those are the three that are the farthest along.
Have you been approached about a Love and Other Words movie?
Billings: Yes.
Would you want to see that happen?
Both: Yes
Billings: Maybe it’s a series? Who knows.
Are you two working on your next book?
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Billings: We just actually turned in our 2025 book, and it’s much more along the vein and tone of Love and Other Words than The Paradise Problem. We have the Christian Lauren rom-coms like Unhoneymooners, Paradise Problem, Josh & Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, and then we have the more sweet, angsty romances like Love and Other Words and Twice in a Blue Moon. It’s definitely more along the lines of Love and Other Words. It’s the story of two childhood rivals who have a night together on graduation night and sort of fall apart for reasons that you learn in the now chapters. It was very fun to revisit that childhood nostalgia tone.
Hobbs: We have a Tangled book that comes out in June, and then we have a third of what we think will be our 2026 book.
You two have been working together for over a decade. What does this partnership mean to the both of you?
Hobbs: I think one thing we really learned when we wrote The Soulmate Equation was soulmates aren’t always romantic. We really do truly feel like we are soulmates. We’ve become family. I’m taking her daughter on a cruise this fall. She texts me Happy Mother’s Day. We are so woven into each other’s lives. We put as much thought into our friendship as our partnership, so it’s really wonderful to be 30-plus books in, and we respect each other even more than when we first met.
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