Loyal readers of the author Kristen Nicole Arnett may not be surprised to learn that the night she met Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, she was at home in Winter Park, Fla., sipping wine from a 7-Eleven store.
Ms. Arnett, 43, whose novels include the New York Times best-selling “Mostly Dead Things,” was unwinding after work on Valentine’s Day in 2019 when she slid into Ms. Upadhyaya’s DMs on Twitter. “Kayla had been posting what the kids call ‘thirst traps,’” or alluring pictures of herself, Ms. Arnett said. Emboldened by the “terrible” wine, she told Ms. Upadhyaya that she was cute and hoped she was having a good day.
But it hadn’t been a good day at all for Ms. Upadhyaya, 31, also a writer. Although she knew of Ms. Arnett through online L.G.B.T.Q. circles, she decided to open up. “I replied a little too honestly,” Ms. Upadhyaya said. By the end of the day, Ms. Arnett knew that she was living in Brooklyn, had been through a recent breakup and was feeling “adrift.”
“I’m having a pretty bad day, but this genuinely brightens it,” Ms. Upadhyaya wrote her.
Two months later, Ms. Arnett finagled a trip to New York to meet Ms. Upadhyaya in person. “Mostly Dead Things” would not be published until late 2019, but advance praise was building that spring, and Tin House Books, Ms. Arnett’s publisher, had arranged for her to sign 2,000 first-edition copies in Pennsylvania. “My editor said, ‘We’ll get you a flight there and back,’” Ms. Arnett said. “But I said, ‘Actually, if you can fly me there and get me to New York after, I’ll fly myself home.’”
On April 11, they met at the Ace Hotel’s bar in Manhattan. “Everything felt really easy and really romantic,” Ms. Arnett said. Less than a year later, after multiple visits between their cities and meet ups during Ms. Arnett’s cross-country book tour, they were living together in Las Vegas.
