Christine Pride Was in a Love Triangle With the Same Men Twice — and It Inspired Her New Novel (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Christine Han; Atria Books

Publishing veteran Christine Pride has been an editor, a co-author and pens a regular column onCup of Jocalled “Race Matters” and now she’s opening a new chapter as a solo author with her debut novel,All the Men I’ve Loved Again.

The book, out July 8, 2025 from Atria Books, follows a woman who finds herself in a love triangle with two men in her early 20s and then again — with the same two men — in her 40s.

The publisher calls it"a big-hearted coming of age story for anyone who’s thought ‘what if’ about a past love, who’s wondered what it would be like to have a second chance, whose thoughts wander to the one who got away or never was."

Below, in an exclusive essay for PEOPLE, Pride explains how this story came from her own real life.

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Atria Books

As a longtime book editor, reader and author, I’ve always loved stories that you can sense are anchored in some aspect of the writer’s deeply personal experience; give me autofiction or a loosely veiled memoir any day. The essential emotional truths in those novels tend to hit harder and feel more real and raw the blurrier the lines get between fiction and reality.

But when I became a writer, I never – ever — thought I would use my own life as a source of inspiration. It would be too messy, too exposing. Then an intriguing turn of events in my love life changed my mind. It was too compelling, too stranger-than-fiction to pass up.

InAll The Men I’ve Loved Againa young woman, Cora Belle, finds herself in a love triangle with two men in her twenties, and then, in a case of déjà vu, withthe same two men again on the eve of turning 40.  If that premise sounds too juicy and too outlandish to be true, think again.

When I was in college, I had a boyfriend whom I dated for several years, spilling over into that fragile eve of “real” adulthood. We found ourselves at that fraught crossroads where you’re trying to decide whether or not  you can go the distance, while also figuring out your own individual paths — law school for him, a career in media for me.

While he and I were taking some time apart, wrestling with what the future held for us, I met another man at a job interview, of all places. We had a sparks-flying, mystical-feeling connection that I couldn’t brush off. But we were too young, too overwhelmed and ill-equipped for what that sort of serious relationship and commitment would mean. It was more practical to keep it as a fun fling. Safer.

Fast forward 20 years.

My college ex and I drifted back to each other after his divorce and in the middle of the pandemic. When everyone else was making sourdough, I was off reliving my love life in reverse. Shortly after that, in the lead-up to my first novel being published (how meta) I reconnected with my other blast from the past, spinning me full circle — dating the exact same two men back-to-back, two decades after I’d done it the first time.

It was a plot twist straight out of fiction; in my days as a book editor, I might actually have advised a novelist that it was too unrealistic, too contrived to work. Who would believe it? And that’s exactly what made it such an irresistible inspiration. Who among us hasn’t wondered, at one point or another, what it would have been like to get a do-over? To reconnect with a past love? Or asked themselves, as I did: How do we decide who to love and when? What’s more powerful: Fate, timing …or our hearts?

These are some of the provocative questions that I lent to my character Cora inAll The Men I’ve Loved Again.

That took me a long time to understand. After these whirlwind romances of my youth, I was fully, extravagantly, single for most of my adult life — never married, no kids, never even lived with someone — and then revisiting these romances in my forties changed everything. I ended up with the person that my 24 year-old self, reckless and naïve as she may have been, knew deep down was right for me. It’s an improbable second chance love story with a happy ending ripped straight from the pages of a novel. Or, in this case, the other way around.

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source: people.com