How to Write About Friendship, Grief, and Growing Up with Samantha Cooke

In this episode, I sit down with Samantha Cooke, author of Love Always, Bailey, a young adult novel that hit #1 in New Releases for YA Mental Health within hours of its November 2023 launch. The book climbed into the top 10 YA bestsellers—just below John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars—and dominated the top three spots across paperback, eBook, and hardcover formats simultaneously.

Love Always, Bailey follows Morgan, who hasn’t heard from her best friend Bailey in seven months, not since their potentially relationship-ending fight on New Year’s Eve. When their estranged group of college-age friends reunites at The Highview, a Florida beach house they visited every summer in high school, Morgan must retrace her steps to understand what went wrong.

Drawing from her own childhood friendships, Sam created a novel that New York Times bestselling author Brendan Kiely praised for showing that “grief and love can live side by side in a heart.” As a playwright whose work has appeared at The Orlando International Fringe Festival and beyond, Sam brings theatrical pacing and snappy dialogue to a story that asks: How do you love and grieve at the same time?

In this conversation, we explore:

• How Samantha transformed real friendships into fiction without betraying trust

• The moment she knew her debut novel was a breakout hit

• Writing grief and mental health in YA without being heavy-handed

• What it’s like to see your book ranked next to John Green

• The role of setting: why Florida’s beaches matter to the story

• Using flashbacks to build suspense and emotional depth

• Her MFA journey and transition from playwright to novelist

• Balancing a full-time communications career with creative writing

• Advice for writers mining their own lives for material

Learn more about Samantha Cooke: https://samanthaelicooke.com/