You Were Made For Me: Blog Tour Playlist + Giveaway

Welcome to the You Were Made for Me Blog Tour!

To celebrate the release of You Were Made for Me by Jenna Guillaume on April 1st, blogs across the web are featuring original content from Jenna, as well as 10 chances to win the hardcover!

You Were Made for Me Music Playlist

by Jenna Guillaume

I don’t often listen to music while I’m writing, but I do build a playlist as I work on a manuscript. Usually, I’ll pick one song that I associate with a particular character or scene, or just the general feeling I want to get into while I’m writing. I play that song as I begin a writing session, and it helps me to get in the right headspace. Here are some of the songs on my You Were Made for Me playlist…

“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper

I started with this song before I even wrote a word. I knew I wanted to take the concept of Weird Science—an 80s movie in which two nerdy boys create their dream girl—and flip it so that it was two girls creating their perfect guy. If you watch the original movie, it’s quite sexist, and the girls exist as objects of male desire and not much else. The question in my head was “why don’t the girls get to have fun?”. That was the spark of the idea for You Were Made for Me, and so this became the first song on my playlist.

“I Want You to Want Me” by Letters To Cleo

This is a song that was on the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack—one of my fave soundtracks of all time, from one of my fave movies of all time. I was very much channeling the energy of 10 Things as a classic teen rom-com while I was writing You Were Made for Me. On top of that, the song itself just sums up my main character Katie character so well. She is full of yearning and crushes and a desperate need to be liked (same, Katie, same).

“Boys” by Charli XCX

This is another Katie song. She thinks about boys A LOT, which frustrates the people around her at times. But I really wanted to have a character who would be able to explore her desires and feelings without being punished for it. We so often get to see the male gaze and straight male desire in books and on screen, and I wanted to create a narrative to counter that.

“This Kiss” by Faith Hill

This is a 90s rom-com staple. It’s also fun and bright and instantly puts me in a good mood, which made it the perfect entry point for some of romantic scenes in the book. Katie places a lot of emphasis on her first kiss (as I did when I was a teenager!), and this song encapsulates what she thinks it will be like.

“Golden” by Harry Styles

Guy—the boy Katie and her friend Libby accidentally create one day—is golden to me. This is his theme song. Breezy and light on the surface, just like him. But also like Guy, there’s more to it; a sense of uncertainty and fear. I think this song really conveys the layers to his character that unfold over the course of the book.

“A Real Hero” by College & Electric Youth

This is also a Guy song. Although You Were Made for Me is Katie’s story, I wanted him to have a journey of his own. He’s created to be Katie’s perfect boyfriend, and he doesn’t really have a lot of agency to start with. Without getting too bogged down, I wanted to touch on the existential questions around what it meant for Guy and what his own desires might be, external from Katie. This song’s refrain of being “a real human being” was what kept running through my mind as I wrote about him.

“Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond

In a direct tribute to 10 Things I Hate About You, Guy serenades Katie in front of her whole school. He sings “Sweet Caroline”, only he changes “Caroline” to “Katherine”, Katie’s full name. I wanted the scene to feel really cheesy and over-the-top, so this was the right song for it. I kind of regretted it as I listened to it for the 40th time while I tried to perfect the scene.

“The Slow Song” by Amy Shark

There’s a scene in the book that takes place at a school dance, in which two characters dance together to a slow song. It’s a charged moment for several reasons, and this song was exactly what I needed to tap into that mood. There are some lyrics in the pre-chorus that describe exactly what is happening in the scene, and in general it really captures that heart-pounding sensation of dancing close to someone and being all nerves and raw edges.

If you’d like to listen to these songs while reading You Were Made for Me, here’s the Spotify playlist:

*****

Blog Tour Schedule:

3/29 – BookhoundsYA
3/30 – Book Briefs
3/31 – Novel Novice
4/1 – The Fandom
4/2 – YA Book Nerd
4/5 – Randomly Reading
4/6 – Crossroad Reviews
4/7 – The Young Folks
4/8 – A Dream Within a Dream
4/9 – I’m All Booked Up

“Plenty of early 2000s rom-com vibes and lighthearted mishaps… Guillaume’s cinematic story weaves together beloved romantic comedy tropes touched with magic—or is it science?—and drops them into a fresh, contemporary setting. Despite the playful tone, this isn’t without nuance, taking on serious topics such as male body image, friendship, and asexuality.” —Booklist

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Author Q&A | Discussion Guide

YA author Jenna Guillaume is back with a fun and modern feminist twist on the 1985 pop cult film Weird Science.

Sixteen-year-old Katie Camilleri can’t believe she’s accidentally created a teenage boy. A boy six-feet tall with floppy hair and eyes like the sky on a clear summer’s day. A boy whose lips taste like cookie dough and whose skin smells like springtime. A boy completely devoted to Katie. But silly musings and kitchen antics with her best friend, Libby, have definitely taken a whimsical twist into something bigger than Katie could have ever daydreamed. Turns out the consequences of fumbling a human being into existence are rather complicated. More importantly, does Guy, the golden Adonis Katie’s created, like her because he wants to, or because he has to? And will he be Katie’s very first kiss?

From the author of What I Like About Me comes a hilarious feminist twist on a classic narrative, loaded with laughs, mishaps, and plenty of 80s and 90s pop-culture callbacks. Jenna Guillaume’s entertaining romantic comedy novel features a humorous and relatable voice and will appeal to fans of Jenny Han.

About the Author: Jenna Guillaume was the editor-at-large for BuzzFeed Australia, where she wrote about very important things like pop culture, identity, feminism, social media, and Chris Hemsworth’s biceps. Previously, she spent more than half a decade in the features department of Girlfriend magazine, editing the sealed section (yes, all those questions are real), and writing about everything from bullying and body image to bad kisses and boy bands. She was also a contributor to Girlfriend Life Hacks, an essential guide to navigating a girl’s completely-awkward-but-totally-awesome teen years.