You might not have heard the names Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings before, but if you’re a fan of romance novels, it’s likely that you’ve read at least a few of their books. The co-author duo writes collaboratively under the pen name Christina Lauren, and for the past 17 years, they’ve created innumerable memorable characters and couples that we’ve followed through their ups and downs (but always with a happy ending).
Currently, they’ve got a lot on their plate: A fun romance anthology that came out in January, a brand new full-length novel coming out in July, and a bunch of exciting adaptations headed toward the big screen, including In A Holidaze and Beautiful Bastards.
What’s most important to this author team? They are all about empowering women, keeping romance real and alive, and giving women the fantasies of their dreams while also letting them know that the bar for men can be just a little higher in real life.
Scary Mommy sat down with the romance powerhouses to discuss everything from realism in bedroom scenes to if they’ve watched Heated Rivalry, to if they ever fight while trying to write their next best seller. Plus — their partnership with K-Y and why it’s super important to them to signal-boost anything that can make women’s real-life sex lives better.
Scary Mommy: I like to start every conversation by talking about lube.
Lauren Billings: Us too!
Christina Hobbs: Who doesn’t?
Scary Mommy: Can you tell me about your recent partnership with K-Y?
Lauren Billings: As romance authors, we love writing all these details that people think about, but don’t say out loud. We’re partnering with K-Y to help normalize this discussion of lube as just another part of a healthy, satisfying sex life. It feels very on-brand for us as romance authors. Great sex shouldn’t just be written on the page. It should be in real life too.
Scary Mommy: Let’s talk about sex on the page. How do you balance keeping the sex true-to-life and true to women’s experiences, but also balancing that out with women’s fantasies?
Christina Hobbs: When we’re doing sex scenes, it’s really important to include what the people are feeling and hearing and thinking — and how it’s going to affect what’s happening tomorrow. Romance is about advocating for women’s pleasure and their needs. And those are the things that we want to be really focused on.
Lauren Billings: There’s a lot of discussion in media about the sex in romance being unrealistic. And in some cases, I think it probably is. But I think in a lot of cases, we just need to raise our bar a little bit for female experiences in the bedroom.
When women read about a woman having an orgasm so quickly or easily or whatever, they think, “Oh, well, that’s so unrealistic.’ And it’s not necessarily. It just might be that you haven’t figured out what works for you. So this is giving us an opportunity to talk about ways that you can experiment with pleasure. You can make sex more satisfying and comfortable.
Scary Mommy: I like to imagine you two collaborating when I read one of your books. It feels like being part of the friendship or something. But I have to know, do you guys fight?
Lauren Billings: The thing about Christina and I is we’ve been friends for 17 years now. And so we’ve been friends, we’ve built this Christina Lauren brand, we’ve traveled the world, we’ve had experiences that most just friendships never have. And so we have to balance being best friends, business partners, photonic life partners, soulmates, all of these things are kind of baked into our relationship. And so of course we fight.
We don’t fight about the books, though. And partly that’s because Christina Lauren isn’t a real person. Christina Lauren is a creation that the two of us have put together. So there’s no me and there’s no her. It’s this thing that we’ve built. So we’re not going to fight about the books because if her idea is the better idea for what we’re doing, then great. I think from the very beginning, we tried to put away our egos in that way.
It helped that we started writing as a pair versus started out as two separate authors with a following, with a career, and then joined together. We started out as nothing together, and we built that from the ground up. So I don’t have a separate career away from her. And I think that that helps keep the peace when we are talking about the book. But — it’s just like you’d fight with your sister or your best friend. We drive each other crazy sometimes.
Scary Mommy: I know you guys work on a bunch of projects all at once, but what are you working on now that you’re excited about?
Christina Hobbs: We are getting ready to start edits on our 2027 novel. We’re super excited about that because we were going to put out in 2025, but we finished it and we just went, “You know what? It’s not ready yet.” And so we set it aside and we’re coming back to it. We’re really happy about that because that’s what we did with Love and Other Words too. That was a book that we started in 2010 and we didn’t know what we were going to do with it. So we put it away until we were ready and it turned into one of our biggest books. So I’m really excited to jump back into that.
And then obviously we have The Romance Revival is out in July.
Scary Mommy: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about Heated Rivalry.
Christina Hobbs: Love it.
Lauren Billings: Love it. We have an author group, a text group, and there’s five of us in there, Christina and me, and then three other authors, and they are on fire about this show. And we loved it too. We watched it, but it’s so funny just watching them sort of dissolve into fandom. It’s been really joyful for us. We love fandom.
Christina Hobbs: It’s a good adaptation. It really is. The sex is great. It shows you everything, but doesn’t show you. I love the way that their relationship sort of progresses through the sex and becomes more real. It’s really lovely. So well done.
Scary Mommy: You have several projects in production right now, too. Tell us about them.
Lauren Billings: We have a number of things that are in different stages of production, but the one that started filming in January is In A Holidaze. We’re going to go visit the set. The writer-director is Tiffany Paulson. She’s amazing. She’s been sending us pictures from the set and it’s just so surreal because we’ve been at various stages of the adaptation process since basically 2012.
In the book world, if you sign a contract, there’s a 99% chance that book is going to get published. But in Hollywood, when you sign a contract it’s the opposite. It’s maybe 1% that this thing will get made. So we’ve been patient and had ups and downs, but this one is really exciting. We love the crew.
Christina Hobbs: She sent us a picture of her director’s chair that had the In A Holidaze art on it and her name, and I was almost in tears. It just was like, “Oh my God, it’s real.” And then to see all those people, because there’s a video where they pan around and there’s just so many people. And to realize they’re all there because of this thing we created felt like magic.
Scary Mommy: I ask all of my interviews for their best piece of parenting advice.
Christina Hobbs: You’re going to mess up. You’ve got to be okay with it.
My daughter is 25 and is just a little unicorn. And I think the thing that I’ve had to really realize is that she’s just her own person and I just have to let her be that person and love her unconditionally no matter what. I get to just enjoy the person she’s turning into.
Lauren Billings: I feel like I have two kids who could not be more different from each other. I mean, truly the most different people. I think I have learned that I just have to let myself figure out on the fly what works for each kid. Because what worked for my son, who felt very easy to parent, does not work for my daughter. I have to be patient with myself, let alone them. I’m going to get it wrong. That’s okay.
Scary Mommy: What have you read recently that you absolutely love? Do you read outside of your genre? Give me a couple of book recommendations.
Lauren Billings: I just finished Dungeon Crawler Carl. It is so fun. And The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. That one is amazing. And The Raven Scholar I listened to on audio, by Antonia Hodgson, and it is so good. So all three of those are perfect, no notes.
Christina Hobbs: I’ve been listening to the anthology [The Improbable Meet-Cute: Second Chances Collection] that we are doing in with our story, “Accidentally Yours.” I’ve been going through those and those are super fun. And then I’m reading The Seven-And-A-Half Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle. I love the writing and the atmosphere. It’s so much fun.
This conversation has bee lightly edited for length and clarity.
