3 Key Takeaways – Out of Love by Hazel Hayes

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7351762553799806241

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my three key takeaways from Out of Love by Hazel Hayes. My first key takeaway is this, playing with timelines can be really confusing if you don’t really nail it down. So this book is the story of a romance told in reverse, so we start with the day they break up and we move backwards in time to the day that they met, ostensibly.

So what actually happens is the author keeps pulling us backwards and forwards in time. So when she’s having the breakup, for example, she’s thinking about earlier on in their relationship. And then, say in the middle of the book, when they’re in the middle of their relationship, she’s thinking about the beginning of the relationship and she’s also thinking about what will happen later on.

And it just gets really confusing because we’re just shuttling backwards and forwards through timelines, like timelines mean nothing. And for me, not only was that confusing, but it kind of ruined the premise of the book. The premise of the book was we start at the end and work our way backwards, when actually we just do this, like ricocheting around constantly.

So for me, that is pretty much a warning. Like if you are doing flashbacks, if you are doing anything where you’re in the future and then going back to the past in any way, make sure that you keep your timelines very distinct. Make sure that you are telling the appropriate things at the appropriate time and just keep it all straight and easy to follow.

Easy to follow is the important thing because if it’s going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, people are going to get confused. My second key takeaway from this book is that there are new ways to tell old stories, right? So this is just a love story. It’s a couple that meet, fall in love, move in together, end up breaking up.

It’s a love story. And even though there may be nuances within that, what the author has done is taken a tale as old as time, literally, and told it in reverse, which is a new way to do it. So there are still new ways to do classic things.

And I see this all the time. At the minute, there are lots of retellings out there, right? Fairy tale retellings and fan fiction essentially for big properties, but with enough change that they’re not going to get sued. There are new ways to tell old stories, and I encourage you to find them and bring some freshness and uniqueness to your book.

My third key takeaway from this book is don’t assume your readers are fans. I just got this book from Unbound as a bit of a press gift, something to read and review and post about. I did back at the time you probably saw me reviewing it and also talking about the fact that I was reading it in the first place.

I didn’t know anything about this author before I read it, and apparently she’s like semi-famous or whatever. So there you go. I didn’t know.

There are lots of references in the book that I didn’t know were references until I read some of the reviews. When I read the reviews, I realised that this is actually a semi-autobiographical, apparently, and that there are references in it to things that she’s talked about in her content, so the things that her followers would be familiar with. I’m not one of her followers, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on here, and I felt very confused by the tone of this book the whole way through because it reads like a memoir, but it’s fiction.

And the reason is now clear is that it is based on references to things that have happened in her real life along with fictional elements, but because I didn’t know that and I didn’t know who she was, that should have been made clearer somewhere in the book, somewhere on the blurb probably is where I would put it, which this doesn’t mention anything about it. And I also will tell you this, it also explains why it’s got all these big name blurbs from people like Aisling Bea and Stylist Magazine, right, because they’re people who are aware of who she is as a famous person, and yeah, explains why they gave her such glowing reviews when I did not think this book was that glowing. Anyway, those are my three key takeaways from Out of Love by Hazel Hayes.

If you’ve read this, please feel free to drop anything that you learned from it in the comments, and let me know if there are any other books I should be reading that give a new take on romance, because I would love to dig into them.