Q&A with Ellen O'Clover

 

Photo by Noah Berg

 

 

Ellen O'Clover is the author of the new novel The Heartbreak Hotel. She also has written the young adult novel Seven Percent of Ro Devereux. She lives near Boulder, Colorado.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Heartbreak Hotel, and how did you create your character Louisa?

 

A: I drew initial inspiration for the book from Tom Petty’s song “Free Fallin’,” and specifically the lines “All the bad boys are standing in the shadows / and the good girls are home with broken hearts.”

 

The entire story grew from the seed of that idea—being “home with broken hearts”—a group of heartbroken people, all in a house together. So my first question—the most important one—was why would they be there?

 

Eventually I landed on Louisa, the heroine of the story, who’s a therapist opening a bed-and-breakfast for the brokenhearted in the mountains of Colorado. The hero is her landlord, Henry, who hates that she’s doing this in his house because he has a secret heartbreak of his own.

 

I wanted Louisa to be this really soft, open-hearted person—such a giver, shaped by a lifetime of taking care of the people in her life (often at the expense of taking care of herself). And Henry, by contrast, is this heartbroken man who’s become so closed-off as a way to protect himself.

 

As Louisa’s bed-and-breakfast gets off the ground and welcomes its heartbroken guests, it creates this safe, special place for people to heal—not just the guests, but Louisa and Henry as well.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Louisa and Henry?

 

A: Louisa’s exactly who Henry needs—open with her heart, determined to help people heal, entirely unembarrassed about confronting tough feelings—which both terrifies and exhilarates him.

 

She pushes him in a way he hasn’t been pushed in a long time. He doesn’t want to give into that, because it’s scary, But when he finally does—it’s everything.

 

And Henry’s who Louisa needs, too: someone who’s always managing to show up right when she needs him, even though she’s the kind of woman used to figuring everything out on her own.

 

Louisa’s always been the fixer, the “mom friend,” and Henry creates a kind of softness in her life for the first time. He shows her what it’s like to fully lean on someone else, and that’s it’s okay to just be carried for a while. 

 

Q: The writer B.K. Borison said of the book, “The Heartbreak Hotel is a lush, romantic, and devastatingly tender story about finding who you are beneath all your broken pieces.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m so honored by it! B.K. Borison is one of my absolute favorite romance writers (you can and should preorder her upcoming release, Good Spirits, which comes out Oct. 21); it’s so special to have her blurb on The Heartbreak Hotel’s cover, and her support of this book has really meant the world to me.

 

I’m especially moved because I feel like she saw this book how I do: The Heartbreak Hotel is a story about love after loss, and about how worthy we still are of every good thing even when we’ve been heartbroken.

 

Being broken doesn’t make us any less valuable—if anything, it means we have more to give one another. Pain creates this deeper well in us.

 

The Heartbreak Hotel is about that: how our most painful experiences can lead us to a truer understanding of ourselves, and the kind of love that’s built on really knowing who we are and how we want to show up for the people we care about.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: There’s a scene in the book where Louisa’s houseguests are comparing their heartbreaks, and she stops them to say that loss isn’t apples-to-apples. She tells them that no one’s heartbreak is any more or less valid than anyone else’s, and that we don’t get to give permission to let things hurt us—they just do.

 

I think that idea is at the center of this story: a reminder that our internal worlds are real, and that we can honor them even when it feels really hard. That sometimes the bravest thing you can do is sit with a painful feeling, and that often the kindest thing you can do for someone else is to sit with them in that painful feeling.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Another contemporary romance! I can’t say too much about it just yet, but it’ll likely be out in late 2026 and it majors in my favorite trope: rivals to lovers.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb