When I picked up reading again as an adult several months ago, everyone told me to read Kennedy Ryan. Taking their advice, I bought the first two books of her Skyland series, Before I Let Go and This Is Us, and fell in love with the characters. By the time I got around to Can’t Get Enough, I didn’t think I could love her writing anymore. I was wrong.
Ryan, a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, releases the third installment of her Skyland series, Can’t Get Enough, on May 13. The book centers around Hendrix Barry, a go-getter girl boss who finds herself falling for Maverick Bell, a tech mogul who will give her everything she wants—if she’ll let him.
As Ryan tells Glamour, “My intention was a love letter to women and to Black women to rest, to shine, to thrive, and to choose when you resist. Choose when you are doing those things that feel necessary. A lot of times, we are put in spaces where we are in survival mode. People often say Black women have to work three times, four times as hard for half as much. I’m so tired of hearing that, and yet it’s still true. So, Hendrix is the balance of all of those things.”
In Can’t Get Enough, Ryan blends social commentary with love and relationships. “A lot of people think about romance in this sense of escapism,” she says. “There are elements of it that are escapist—the fact that there’s a guaranteed happily ever after—but romance doesn’t have to be an escape from life. It can inform life when you’re talking about, ‘This is something that gives me hope. This is a way to think about not having kids.’ I want to write stories where this is how life could be.”
“Can’t Get Enough” by Kennedy Ryan
Amazon
Each book in Ryan’s Skyland series follows the women’s journey to finding love again through friendship, sisterhood, and family. Hendrix, who is in her early 40s, doesn’t have children and doesn’t want children. “Hendrix is childless by choice,” Ryan says. “What’s been amazing to me is all the women who have reached out and said, ‘I’ve never read a romance novel where a woman was so clear about why she didn’t want to have children.’ Bodily autonomy is reproductive rights. It is what we decide to do with our life as far as children are concerned.”
Ryan is also just as intentional about how the men in her novels are represented. As she says, “All the guys I write are feminists. I am always writing men who come from that space who say, ‘Your dreams are as important as mine. Your goals are as important as mine. You are as important as I am. I am going to respect you. I’m going to be faithful to you. I’m going to celebrate you.’ In my writing, I want it to be modeled so that women, all women, see this.”
Below, read more of Glamour’s conversation with Kennedy Ryan in which she talks about her new book, Can’t Get Enough, intersecting personal experiences into her work, and potential casting choices for Before I Let Go’s television adaptation.
Glamour: In Can’t Get Enough, we get to see Hendrix and Maverick’s relationship develop. Was it intentional to have the book focus more on their relationship?
Kennedy Ryan: In the first book, Before I Let Go, there was so much history with that couple. A lot of that story was laying a foundation for the fact that, yes, they were married. These things happened that broke them up, but then they really couldn’t come back together unless they did a lot of individual healing.
In the second book, This Is Us, there’s so much about self-love, which is unusual in a romance novel. With Can’t Get Enough, everybody’s invited to the party, but I’m really celebrating Black women and centering softness and joy for Black women. Hendrix has her luxuries and sits courtside and she’s on the yacht and she is living that life. At the same time, we see her pouring into her community, establishing and running a venture capital fund for Black female founders, and meeting resistance.
There’s a moment where Hendrix and Maverick experiment in the bedroom. Why was it important for you to include this as a part of their sexual relationship?
I like for my books to feel like real life. A lot of Black women who are dating Black men will recognize those conversations. There was a version where maybe there was a little bit of pegging, and my next heroine is bisexual, and we see her in a queer relationship with a woman, and we see strap-ons. I am interested in this spectrum of what sex and sexuality look like.
A key theme in Can’t Get Enough is Hendrix and Maverick being vulnerable with one another, something that you do as an author by including real-life stories (autism in This Could Be Us, Alzheimer’s in Can’t Get Enough). How do you decide which parts of your life to include in your books, and which ones to keep for yourself?
When I started writing Before I Let Go, in the middle of it, I got so bogged down with what I thought was writer’s block, but it was actually depression. It was serendipitous that the book that I had chosen to revisit happened at the same time when I was diagnosed with depression, and then I could bring the healing that I was experiencing in therapy to that story to make it better.
With This Could Be Us, I’m an autism mom, but I had never written about autism. I was like, I will know when it’s right. I will know the story when I want to write about autism, which is an extension of my experience.
In every book, that happens. Some kind of intersection with my life. You mentioned Alzheimer’s, and I talked about my grandmother in the author’s note who passed away after a long battle with dementia, literally the week after I turned the book in. I always find these intersections with my life.
Across the series, Josiah, Maverick, and Judah are presented as pretty stoic and powerful men on the outside. It’s only when they are with their respective partners that they let their guard down, but all of the men are amazing fathers. How have your observations of and relationships with Black men influenced their depictions?
It’s very deliberate. I don’t accept male toxicity in my life. I’ve been married for 27 years to the same guy. He is so amazing, and he’s a Black man. My husband is incredibly secure. There are a lot of big things happening for me right now. And he is like, I’m going on the road with you. I’ll look over, and he’s holding my purse. A lot of men don’t know what to do when their women are successful. They don’t know how to handle it.
It was announced in 2023 that Before I Let Go is being adapted into a TV series by Peakcock. Are there any updates on that? And in terms of casting, will we see familiar faces or more up-and-coming talent portraying Yasmin, Soledad, and Hendrix?
Teyonah Paris is someone who comes up a lot for Yasmin, and so does Tika Sumpter. Wunmi Mosaku has come up for Hendrix. For the guys, I definitely have heard Kofi [Sirobe] and the actor who plays Alex Cross [Aldis Hodge]—he’s one of my favorites, and he gets suggested a lot. But the strikes happened, which set us back, and then we had to wait for all of that to pass. Then we dove right back and we’re working hard. But we should have updates soon, I’m hoping.
The post Kennedy Ryan’s Can’t Get Enough Is the Love Story We All Deserve appeared first on Glamour.
