{Guest Post+Giveaway} YOU WERE MADE FOR ME by Jenna Guillaume

by Jenna Guillaume

 As a writer, I’m hugely influenced by the teen movies and TV shows I was obsessed with growing up. I always want my stories to feel very contemporary, written for current teens, while also tapping into the joyful aspects of the media that shaped me. You don’t need to have seen the below titles to enjoy You Were Made for Me, but you might enjoy spotting some of the inspiration in them.

Weird Science

This is the most obvious movie connection to You Were Made for Me, because it was the direct inspiration for the book. I absolutely adored this movie when I was younger, but re-watching it as an adult wasn’t as enjoyable as I thought it might be. It’s about two nerdy boys who accidentally create their dream girl one night, and she basically becomes a walking, talking doll who fulfils their every fantasy. It’s a pretty gross concept, and the movie hasn’t aged particularly well (although some scenes are still quite fun!). I wanted to take it and flip the narrative, using it as a framework to explore female desire and the female gaze. I also wanted to give my own “doll”—Guy—a bit more agency and his own journey.

Never Been Kissed

This movie isn’t explicitly referenced or explored in the book (although an early draft did mention it, and I took it out because it felt like a bit too many “vintage” pop culture nods). Never Been Kissed came out when I was a young teen, and I remember sitting watching it with a friend and absolutely dreading the idea I would be like “Josie Grossie” when I grew up. She’s a character who is 25 and never been kissed (a fate that seemed worse than death to teen me—which is not true at all, of course!). In You Were Made for Me, Katie is 16 and has similar fears, so the movie was a good reference point for me to remember what that felt like.

10 Things I Hate About You

This is perhaps the best teen rom-com of all time, and has influenced me in so many ways. I wanted to lean into tropes in You Were Made for Me—it’s literally a romance fantasy, after all—and so I looked to movies like 10 Things for inspiration. The most obvious way this manifested is in the scene in which Guy serenades Katie in school. This is a direct homage to an iconic scene in 10 Things. While I absolutely love it in the movie, I wanted to explore the idea that these grand gestures aren’t necessarily as great in reality as they seem on screen. It was important to me to take these tropes and give them a little twist so they weren’t always quite what you might be expecting.

Dawson’s Creek

I was obsessed with Dawson’s Creek, and have re-watched it several times as an adult. Here’s the thing: while I love a best friends-to-lovers story, I actually really hate the way this trope plays out in Dawson’s Creek. The main characters, Joey and Dawson, are really toxic for each other, and whenever they date other people they get really nasty and jealous. I wanted to take the idea of best friends who have grown up together and maybe have complicated feelings for each other, but give them a healthy relationship. Theo and Katie genuinely want the best for each other and support one another in external relationships, and life in general. Their relationship is my antidote to Dawson and Joey’s relationship, basically.

Blog Tour Schedule:

3/29 – BookhoundsYA

3/30 – Book Briefs

3/31 – Novel Novice

4/1 – The Fandom

4/2 – YA Book Nerd

4/5 – Randomly Reading

4/6 – Crossroad Reviews

4/7 – The Young Folks

4/8 – A Dream Within a Dream

4/9 – I’m All Booked Up