Author Interview: When Love Gives You Lemons by Steven Salvatore

Author Interview: When Love Gives You Lemons by Steven Salvatore

We just love Steven Salvatore’s books, and we asked some extra questions about their newest YA contemporary release When Love Gives You Lemons! See what Steven has to say about why lemons, the inspo material rom-com movie, and more! So grab yourself a sweet lemony treat for when you read When Love Gives You Lemons, available now!

When Love Gives You Lemons

by Steven Salvatore
Published by: Bloomsbury YA
on May 13, 2025
Genres: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA+, Young Adult
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In this exuberant YA romance from the critically acclaimed author of And They Lived..., a budding social media influencer sets out to win back his first love at a family wedding in an Italian lemon grove.

Ever since he was a kid, Fielder Lemon's large, opinionated Italian-American family has lived next to Ricky DeLuca and his large, opinionated Italian-American family. For almost as long, Fielder has known that he wants to marry Ricky one day. And he thought Ricky felt the same way-until Ricky breaks up with Fielder, saying he needs to figure out who he is on his own.

One year later, Fielder is asked to be one of the best men in his cousin's destination wedding on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, but there's a twist: his cousin is marrying Ricky's sister. Fielder hasn't talked to or seen Ricky once during the last entire, terrible year, but he hasn't given up on his first love quite yet-and isn't a wedding in an Italian lemon grove the perfect setting to rekindle their relationship? Except Ricky might have already moved on.

Now, Fielder has less than a week to win back Ricky's heart while also trying not to ruin his cousin's wedding. But if there's one thing Fielder knows, it's that when life gives you lemons, take a bite!

Author Interview: Steven Salvatore

Lemon anything is a favorite of mine, what inspired you to set your story at a lemon grove?

The inspiration behind When Love Gives You Lemons came from a lot of different aspects of my life. It started on a vacation to the Amalfi Coast back in 2019 and visiting a lemon grove. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. The Sfusato Amalfitano are unlike any lemons in the world—they’re more like hand fruits, where you bite right into the flesh and eat it like an apple. It’s sweet and sour like candy. But it was also eye-opening because I learned about how global climate change impacts the lemon crops, which is central to their local economy and livelihood. The lemon grove and its farmers, family businesses, burrowed into me as I learned about their conservation efforts and how global climate change detrimentally impacts their crops, economy, and way of life. A seed of a story, one dedicated to my Italian heritage and family and the beauty of Amalfi’s lemon groves and the existential threat they face, was planted. Over time, Fielder Lemon, the main character, started to get fleshed out in my head.

But, as it tends to do, life happened. After And They Lived… published in 2022, my marriage ended. As a cosmic joke, the premise for When Love Gives You Lemons about a plucky Fielder Lemon, a dreamer with no direction who’s head-over-heels in love with his ex-boyfriend took me hostage. At first, Fielder was a cynic, rebuking his emotions and love entirely, numbing himself with guy-shaped distractions. Art imitates life. But time healed me, and I stopped writing because I was too busy living. I fell head-over-heels in love with my now-husband and the story of Lemons opened up. Loving him was like finally breathing after years of drowning. He made me laugh again—and often—so I fell in love with drafting again and Fielder’s story evolved into a fun, sassy, lighthearted romp, my funniest book to date. Add a little bit of the classic rom-com My Best Friend’s Wedding to the mix, and you got all the ingredients for Lemons.


This isn’t your first novel inspired by a rom-com movie, how hard is it to get the right feel of the inspirational work, while making it wholly your own?

It all comes down to the characters and the beating heart of the story. What makes the characters tick? What are their motivations? Wants? Needs? Goals? My characters are mine, they’re so much a part of me, so that even when I’m using a classic movie as a story framework (like Pretty Women with my adult romance The Boyfriend Subscription) or as inspiration (like My Best Friend’s Wedding and Lemons), it’s ultimately the characters that I craft like living, breathing humans, who do the heavy lifting of creating something wholly unique and original and real, through familiar tropes and stories.

If you had to choose another one of your characters to have been Fielder’s date to the wedding, whom would you choose, and why?

Jack Reid from And They Lived…. I think Ricky from Lemons and Jack are very similar, so if Fielder were to bring a Jack-type to the wedding, Ricky would probably spiral, and Fielder would have a lot of fun with that. They’d probably get into a shirtless poetry slam duel. Which, to be honest, I’m here for.

But it’s funny you ask that question because long-time eagle-eyed readers of my other books will recognize characters from other books, too. Like Monroe from Can’t Take That Away, Benny from And They Lived…, and Tyler from No Perfect Places: A Novel. I wanted to create a bridge between all my books but do it in a way that you don’t need to have read any of them before reading Lemons…it’s more of a “thank you” to my small but loyal audience who have been with me since day one.

I am a sucker for the ‘person next door’ trope – what is your favorite romance trope to write?

This won’t be a popular answer at all, but miscommunication. It’s probably the most hated trope in romance, probably because it’s frustrating. But that’s exactly why I love it. It’s not just frustrating—it’s real, and that is the heart of why readers get irritated by it. It holds a mirror up to the reader and makes them feel uncomfortable because most people struggle with healthy communication and confrontation in real life. If every problem could be solved through healthy communication, we’d have no problems, and the reality is that most people don’t have healthy communication patterns. People are messy. Teens, especially, are messy because they’re learning and confronting their own emotions, autonomy, and hormones all at once. Adult gays are similar because we suppress so much of ourselves that we act like teenagers as adults. To that I say: Let characters—especially gays who don’t often get enough grace to be nuanced— be messy, and to readers, it’s okay to feel uncomfortable! That probably means there’s something important to be gained and learned from reading…

Other than having a fun reading experience, what do you hope readers find in this story?

When Love Gives You Lemons is proof to never give up on love. It’s about second chances existing in all forms. It’s a cheeky fourth wall-breaking LOVE WITH YOUR WHOLE CHEST unserious manifesto about emotional messiness and figuring out what moves you. This book is a celebration of that breadth: heartbreak and mending, friendship and family, forgiveness and growth, and loving in a world that doesn’t showcase the complexities of capital G-A-Y love and sex because our stories are too often filtered through straight and other indirect, inauthentic voices and lenses. Life is messy and so are humans, especially humans who love with their entire being. With that in mind, it’s also very deep emotionally if you give it a chance.

Don’t take it too seriously, yet do acknowledge gay complexities—because these aren’t cuddly hetero-acceptable gay characters; they’re messy as hell and make lots of mistakes. I hope readers can acknowledge that, and be okay with that. It may not go the way you want, and the characters may not act how you want them to act, despite all the typical romcom tropes like “only one bed” and “enemies to lovers” to “second chance romance” and “miscommunication.” To that I say: Get over it and just enjoy the ride. Laugh, scream, cheer, cry, throw the book across the room, feel the urge to punch both Fielder and Ricky for their mistakes (and there are PLENTY!) Hate it or love it, I implore readers to feel something.

As an adult who loves reading queer YA novels, as it fills a space that was missing in my youth, I love how many YA authors are writing adult romances as well. So having published YA and Adult novels under your belt now, was it difficult to change frameworks/mindsets?

There’s a lot of crossover between YA and adult romance in terms of being character-driven. A quintessential element of YA is its use of voice, perspective, and emotional interiority and complexity, which sets it apart from general (adult) fiction, whose prose is usually third person and more distant, lacking emotional interiority while using character and plot to showcase the complexities and nuances through more “situational awareness” (aka adult characters who have already learned but are set in their ways until they’re forced to grow.) The real difference in construction between YA and adult romance is the age of the characters, how voice is used as a vehicle to drive the character forward in the story, and, obviously, subject matter and situations.

Honestly, it’s a learning curve. Each book is an opportunity to learn something new, to push myself past what I thought I knew. With each new story, I’m teaching myself how to write again, which is important for any author. If stepping out of YA contemporary has taught me anything, it’s that I’m still discovering a lot of who I am as a writer, and I have a long road ahead of me. What that means, I’m still figuring out.