I never saw myself in any of the characters, so I’d recast them in my head as Black people, which is lame. As a kid, I always gravitated to big, juicy, dramatic love stories by writers like Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, and Harold Robbins.

It was as if the publishing gatekeepers didn’t know what to do with Black characters if we weren’t suffering somehow. There were hardly any multifaceted portrayals of Black people, period, outside of tropes like the thug, the magical Negro, the harried single mother, et cetera, and we were always seen through the lens of Black oppression, especially in books. Things are starting to change, but as a Gen X’er who grew up in the ’80s, there were hardly any positive depictions of Black love in books, movies, or TV.

You told Ebony that you “love an iconic love story and I hadn’t seen one like this before featuring us.” Do you feel like Black love is not represented often enough? I love the fact that Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet lit sparks of inspiration for this book. Vogue interviewed Williams about the success of Seven Days in June, crafting its hot sex scenes, and the power of Black love stories. Like her protagonist, Eva, she bristles at the traditional confines of “chick lit” and the “romance author,” delivering a novel that also digs into generational trauma, threads of racism, and lit-world send-ups that are just too good. Williams, the author of The Perfect Find, wrote the Black love story she grew up wanting to read: one with a diversity of characters who aren’t singularly defined by struggle. “Stop writing about me.” His reply? “In a voice both raspy and low, and so, so familiar: ‘You first.’” Williams nails the delicious tension between Eva, a popular vampire-series novelist, and Shane, a literary wunderkind, when they bump into each other at a Brooklyn publishing event years after spending seven electric days together in high school. At turns gutting, arousing, and sparklingly witty, the New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick is a love story with depth.

What if Romeo and Juliet had lived, grown up into quasi-functional adults, and become each other’s one who got away? This is the premise of one of the best romance novels of 2021: Tia Williams’s Seven Days in June.

Seven Days in June by Tia Williams