Ending a book series can be bittersweet, but Amy Spalding has nothing but warm feelings as she releases the last book in her ‘Out in Hollywood’ queer adult romance series.

“I’m so happy with In Her Spotlight and where it leaves all of our characters — those you’ve just met, those you’ve known longer,” she tells me over Zoom. “You get a little glimpse of people. And it felt like such a nice experience.”

While her peers told her she wouldn’t be quite ready to walk away from the characters she’s spent the better part of the last six years with, Spalding says she has a “season or series finale” feeling about it ending.

She started crafting the series’ first book, For Her Consideration during lockdown. At the time she was writing, she had no idea if the book would even get published, but it did. Even then, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to write any more stories. Then, she wrote another and another and another.

“The fact that I was able to tell these four stories that I was really excited about, I just feel so lucky,” she says.

Getting to write four queer romance novels, especially sapphic romance novels, in the same universe isn’t something many authors get to do. This feels even more impossible in the current landscape.

“One thing that I’ve had to reckon with is: What stories do you want to tell in a world that is more hostile to queer voices than before?” she says. “I’ve enjoyed digging into stories about what it means to be queer in a culture that is not always centering that.”

The final book In Her Spotlight focuses on Tess Gardner, an actress who has spent the better part of her career starring in a Marvel-esque film franchise. During a period of downtime, Tess decides to star in a new play premiering in Los Angeles. And when the male director leaves the project after harassment allegations, Rebecca Frisch is brought in to take his place…the same Rebecca Tess fell in love with in her early twenties and abandoned.

Given her position in the entertainment industry, Tess isn’t out. But Spalding took the closeted celebrity trope a bit further. At the beginning of the story, Tess is afraid to admit to herself that she’s queer. She had buried those feelings so deep inside that it feels impossible to face reality. A lot of those feelings have to do with shame but also how she presents publicly thanks to her job.

“I think depending on what kind of famous you are, it’s really hard to come out in certain categories,” Spalding says. “If a woman is super girly in a certain way, we don’t want her to be gay. We have these rigid rules. If she’s an interesting indie film type, she can be gay.”

Spalding had never written a closeted character before. And she admits she found the process more “emotional” than she anticipated. She went so far as to say it was “very sad and isolating.”

In Her Spotlight is, by far, Amy Spalding’s best work. I say this as a person who has been a fan of hers for years. At first, I thought I loved this book because it combines two of my favorite things: a closeted celebrity and theatre. I spent most of my life training to become an actor. And then I gave it all up and decided to be a writer instead. But Tess’s story intrigued me because I felt like I understood her.

Spalding did, too. “Tess really quickly became her own person,” she shares. “I felt like I was not writing the idea of a queer, closeted celebrity. I was writing Tess Gardner, this very specific woman who’d have this very specific life. I saw why she’d made the choices she had. And I saw all the ways that she sort of was like an unreliable narrator to her own history.”

Despite her own fear of being openly queer, Tess is extremely aware of how and when she is perceived as queer. In fact, Autostraddle gets a direct shoutout in the book for this very reason. Tess is seeking this kind of perspective to give herself permission to acknowledge her queerness. And as she starts giving herself permission, she’s able to accept herself.

“I think earlier in my writing career, I would have been too intimidated to even tackle [Tess’s story],” Spalding says. “One thing that’s been very constant within the work I’ve done and wanted to do is queer joy, no queer trauma and angst. And there’s a little bit of that that’s inherent in someone closeted. I wanted to make sure that this was realistic, but also still found a way to center queer joy.”

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When she first sat down to write Tess’s story after years of dropping kernels about her in other books in the series, she thought it would be a lot more “fun.” And I get why — there’s something fun about having characters slipping under the radar with their queerness. But then she realized that by making Tess closeted even to herself, she had to go deeper into the isolation aspect.

“And it really changed the storytelling completely,” she says.

Since she’d never written a character quite like Tess before, it posed some challenges, but not in the ways people might expect. For Spalding, one of the most time-consuming parts of writing was all the research she had to do about Tess’s work life, both on the stage and screen.

It may have been exhausting for the author, but as a reader, I can say, her hard work did not go unnoticed. I’ve never done a professional stage play before, but I could tell she spared no detail, and not in a way that made it feel bogged down; in fact, it made for a smoother read. Spalding explains she had hours of conversations with friends and people she knew who offered an indescribable amount of insight to make sure those details were realistic and as close to perfect as possible.

Another thing I loved is the way she turned the celebrity/normie trope on its head. Rebecca Frisch isn’t famous. But she’s also not not famous. She’s a niche celesbian who is famous on the r/Broadway sub Reddit for her directorial skills, and TikTok for her fit checks. (I’m not-so-secretly jealous of Rebecca’s effortless sense of style.)

I’m admittedly lukewarm on second chance romance, but this book could make me a convert. I think it’s because we’re seeing the story from the perspective of the person who left, which is another interesting twist. Tess is so used to beating herself up for all of her perceived shortcomings that breaking Rebecca’s heart feels like another thing on the list. Until they’re face-to-face, and then it feels like the only thing on the list. I liked watching Tess turn herself into knots over Rebecca, especially at the beginning. There’s a scene where Tess makes Rebecca dinner, and let me just say, the dessert is…a choice.

I could keep gushing about how much I loved this book, but I don’t want to give anything away. If you love messy coming out stories, niche celebrity lesbians, a pug who is a pup-fluencer, and if you ever wish Brie Larson would just come out already, In Her Spotlight is the book for you.

And if you can’t get enough of the world Amy Spalding created, check out the other three books in the ‘Out in Hollywood’ series: For Her Consideration, At Her Service, and On Her Terms.