Today on the site I’m delighted to welcome Georgia K. Boone, author of I’ll Be Gone for Christmas, to celebrate National Coming Out Day! Here’s a little more about the book, which just released this week from Avon Books:

Bee Tyler needs a break. In the bustling San Francisco tech community, no one ever seems to stand still—especially her perfect sister and business partner, Beth. So when her best friend suggests a getaway on the wildly popular house-swap app, Vacate, Bee decides a countryside retreat might be exactly what she needs.

Clover Mills has had a year. Between losing her mother and making the complicated decision to leave her fiancé, sticking around the idyllic Christmas obsessed town of Salem, Ohio, just doesn’t feel right. So when she hears about Vacate, she jumps at the chance to spend the holidays in the unfamiliar city of San Francisco.

Soon enough, Bee is living in Clover’s cozy Salem cottage, and Clover is living in Bee’s sleek San Francisco apartment. As Clover can’t seem to stop running into Bee’s frustratingly gorgeous sister, Beth, and Bee finds herself spending more and more time with Clover’s ultra charming ex-fiancé, Knox, the two women realize that this Christmas they may find just what they were looking for and more…

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

And here’s author Georgia K. Boone, to talk about the trickiness of writing a Coming Out, as someone who’s done it in real life:

One would think it’d be super easy for a queer woman who has the experience of coming out to write about the experience of a queer woman coming out, but, as it turns out, writing the story of Clover Mills in my debut romance novel I’LL BE GONE FOR CHRISTMAS was sort of a nightmare.

Why? Becomes oftentimes, coming out can be a bummer.

I waffled hard between making her coming out a complete non-issue, a big “Well, of course you are!” to something bigger and more devastating. After all, the story hinged on two big circumstances: her leaving her childhood love, to whom she’d been engaged for years, and then later falling in love with a grumpy but loveable tech bro-ette. The guy she was leaving had to be equally lovable, though, because he was to be the romantic lead for our other protagonist, Bee Tyler, with whom Clover switches homes and cities. And that guy, Knox, would have to be relatively cool with Clover moving on, since she’d be falling for a woman, aka Bee’s sister, Beth.

So, what’s a queer writer to do? Easy coming out? Hard coming out? What’s the appropriate trauma-to-hijinks ratio in a romcom?

It was a quagmire. So many re-writes. So many drafts.

What ends up happening in the novel is a range of easy-to-hard comings-out, because that’s pretty accurate to real life. When you’re queer, you usually come out a lot, and how both loved ones and strangers react can be anyone’s guess.

On National Coming Out Day 14 years ago, I came out to my grandparents – the last in my immediate family to be unaware of my otherwise very boldly pronounced sexuality. It was also the day I’d come home from The National Equality March in Washington, D.C. It was 2010, and I was barely a sophomore in college, but I’d known I was gay from pre-teen years of dreaming about Seiya from Sailor Moon, who dressed in skin-tight leather outfits as a Sailor Scout, an ensemble recently recreated by the iconic Plastique Tiara on the most recent Drag Race All Stars season.

Galvanized by passionate speeches from LGBTQ activists like Lady Gaga and First Lieutenant Dan Choi, who was discharged from the New York Army National Guard under the deeply misguided Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military policy, I stood in the chilly autumn air outside my dorm room and dialed my grandmother’s number. She answered quickly, and with little preamble, I said, “I’m gay.” Her midwestern drawl came out in a slow gasp of surprise. “Oh my goodness,” she said. She asked how long I’d known, and then, still clearly shaken, she ended the call with “Well, we love you.”

It’s a hopeful story, one where the stakes were quite high – I’m very close to my grandparents, and they’d attended every graduation I’d had since kindergarten – and where the outcome turned out to be really easy and sweet. A lovely little memory. I’m, in this particular instance, one of the lucky ones.

In other instances, with other loved ones – well, I wasn’t as lucky. C’est la vie, and all that jazz. One learns to cope, either through meds, therapy, writing, or, if you’re me, all three, har har.

Clover copes in absolutely none of these ways, because sometimes, well, you don’t cope. Maybe, at first, you grow numb. You lose yourself for a little while. You hide. And then maybe, one day, you decide that, if what you’ve known can’t accept you, it’s time to go out and meet someone, or something, or someplace completely, totally new.

Of course, life isn’t that neat, right? There’s the issue of coming out, and then there’s also the issue of sick parents, and old flames, and managing business, and…you know, life itself. Being true to yourself can often take a back seat to just getting through the day, and that’s often the beauty of the holidays. For most of us, it’s a forced pause; a required reset. And for Clover, it’s a reminder of how everything in her life has completely changed, and she can face that…or she can run away.

And honestly, I don’t know who gave running away a bad name, but listen, sometimes you get tired of fighting. Sometimes, you gotta disappear, regroup, gather the mental troupes, go on your own emotional journey, and bring the ring to Mordor another day.

That’s okay. In fact, it’s encouraged. You can’t fight if you’re too weak to stand. So go rest instead. You’ll be surprised at the strength that finds you. For Clover, and her counterpart Bee, that’s where the magic happens – and their true selves finally come out to play.