Ashley Winstead Mixes Romance and Texas Politics in 'The Boyfriend Candidate'

Academic turned novelist, Ashley Winstead, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss her latest romantic comedy, The Boyfriend Candidate. Set in Austin, Texas, this witty novel follows elementary school librarian, Alexis Stone, as she decides to pursue a one-night stand after the end of her last relationship. What she doesn’t expect is to meet fiery, gubernatorial candidate, Logan Arthur, instead. But when the two are caught in a compromising scandal that night, they embark on a fake romance to avoid hurting his chances of being elected. For Winstead, Austin was the ideal setting for this book due to its political and innovative environment. She explained, “It is this bright blue, politically speaking, city in the middle of a really red state here in Texas and not that Houston and Dallas themselves don’t vote blue because they tend to… but just that Austin has this reputation for being just very liberal, very progressive, very weird, which all things to celebrate, and so I really wanted to play on that dichotomy…”

Concerning the fake dating romance trope, Winstead reflected on how she was able to create a novel that stood out from others in the genre. “…I wanted to do something, try to make fake dating fresh and so… what that means to me is it’s going to be really high stakes. If Alexis and Logan… if they mess up or act unprofessionally or reveal that they’re not actually dating, it will have major repercussions not only for his campaign but the political future of Texas… To [Alexis] it’s a new adventure, an empowering, kind of zany, thing. She’s asking the universe to expand her horizons and it’s put Logan Arthur in her lap and this opportunity. So it’s a lot about Alexis’ development as a person and growing outside of her shell… but every dimension of it becomes real, not just her relationship with Logan, but her owning the political platform she chooses and becoming an advocate for herself and her colleagues, who, you know, educators… that was how I tried to make it fresh.”

Winstead, who initially set off writing murder mysteries and thrillers, eventually transitioned to writing romantic comedies during the pandemic. While she was working on her thriller, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, she needed the catharsis of writing something sweet and light amidst all her dark emotions. She explained, “…With Fool Me Once, which was my debut romantic comedy, it was in middle of the pandemic and In My Dreams hadn’t come out yet, so I was sitting with a lot of pre-publication anxiety about how that was going to be received… and it was, again, in middle of lockdown and I needed to live mentally in a happy place with a guaranteed happy ending, a place where the tone was comedic and light and sunshine-y, so I started writing this book about this chaotic woman and her love story, and I was like, I’m pretty sure I’m writing a romantic comedy and this is going to be news to my agent and hopefully she doesn’t… kick me off her list or something for being so chaotic with my writing choices… Those books were what I needed at the time for myself and because they sold, they kind of set the path for my writing career now going forward.”