The Holiday Swap is a delicious romantic comedy featuring cupcakes, sourdough bread and a twin sister swap
Karma Brown and Marissa Stapley have co-written a Parent Trap-esque holiday novel
A couple of years ago, as the Hallmark movies were streaming and baking had begun, two good friends decided to collaborate and write a fun holiday romance.
That novel, The Holiday Swap, written under the singular pen name Maggie Knox, is a grown-up parent trap where twin sisters swap lives and romantic complications and high-calorie holiday baking ensues.
One of the twins is Charlie Goodwin, a celebrity baking judge who loses her ability to taste and smell after an accident on set. Back home, her identical sister Cass is overwhelmed running the family bakery and avoiding her ex. The sisters switch places, days before Christmas, to help each other out — but their scheme is complicated by two charming men.
Marissa Stapley in Toronto and Karma Brown from Oakville, Ont., make up Maggie Knox. Brown's bestselling books include Recipe for a Perfect Wife and The 4% Fix, while Stapley is known for novels like Lucky, Mating for Life and Things to Do When It's Raining. The Holiday Swap is their first collaboration.
They talked to Shelagh Rogers about writing their holiday rom-com together.
How did you come up with the name Maggie Knox?
Karma Brown (KB): We went through so many different variations of a pen name. We wanted it to be an "M" and "K" to represent our names. Marissa, the Maggie is related to your grandmother, right?
Marissa Stapley (MS): Yes, I had a granny, Maggie, who was a writer and was super proud of my burgeoning career when she passed away. So when I knew I could come up with a pseudonym I had always had in the back of my mind, it was going to be her name. That's where the Maggie is from.
KB: And Knox is just short, so it was more practical in some ways than anything.
Karma, take us back to Christmas 2019 when this book began germinating. What got you and Marissa moving in this direction?
KB: We were both at different stages of our own writing journey. I was about to release my book, Recipe for A Perfect Wife, and heading into promotion. Marissa was working on edits for her book Lucky, which has since been released. We kind of wanted to switch where we were. Marissa loves promotion. I love edits, and we sort of joked if only we could switch lives. All of a sudden, we had this idea that we would write something fun, festive and we would do it together.
It was a bright spot for us in the dark world.- Marissa Stapley
MS: We woke up one day and it had been written like little elves [had come out].
You're not the only two women who have collaborated on a novel this year. There is Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny, and they talked about the challenges of doing it during a pandemic. Were you on Zoom all the time?
MS: We were texting a lot, right Karma? We moved over to email eventually when we started outlining, when we realized, OK, this is serious, we're doing this. It may have been harder if the pandemic hadn't been happening because we were reaching out for connection. We were texting more than usual and in more contact than usual. I feel like that part of it was somehow easier and we just desperately wanted to cheer ourselves up. It would have been different if we were like, "Let's collaborate on like a dark murder-y thriller." But we were like, "Let's think about Christmas 2021, which is going to be great," and that's what we did. It was a bright spot for us in the dark world.
The fantasy of switching lives, especially as a twin, is just so seductive. I remember when the original Parent Trap came out with Hayley Mills, twin daughters of divorced parents switch the parents they live with. It was box office gold. It's such an appealing story, but why do you think it has such an enduring appeal, Karma?
KB: I was a Sweet Valley High twin-obsessed fan, so that's where the whole twin piece started for me. But I think this idea of being able to step into someone else's life: how could it be different? How could it be better? What can I be most grateful for about my current life?
How important was the idea that one of the sisters had a concussion?
MS: It was pretty key because we needed Charlie to lose her sense of smell and her sense of taste. She's a chef. We're well-aware that concussions and head injuries are serious. We are writing a rom-com where a chef gets hit in the head with a cast iron frying pan in a kind of comedic moment and the rest of this far-fetched and sometimes silly plot has to turn on that. So we did our research and we figured out how to make it work with the plot, but we definitely are aware that if this had happened in real life, it would more than likely not be a fun rom-com situation.
KB: We do get told that. We have had people who want to tell us that head injuries are serious. I came off of writing Recipe for Perfect Wife and I have had plenty of wonderful emails, but also some not-so-wonderful emails about the book. I thought, "A holiday rom-com? I won't get any mail that is anything but positive." Now people are like, "You know, head injuries are very serious," which of course we know, but it's a rom-com.
MS: We think the concussion is important, too, because of course, there's the attractive physician assistant who has to come into play. How can you meet cute medical personnel, when you don't have a concussion?
There's a sourdough subplot at the family bakery, where Cass is the baker and the starter has been kept alive and used in the family's special Christmas bread. Marissa, how do you know so much about sourdough?
MS: I was going to say that is definitely my subplot. I would talk to Karma about my sourdough starter I had acquired just before the pandemic. She was — I don't know if horrified is the right word — but fascinated and alarmed. I kept trying to say, you should take some and she was like, "There's no way. I have a dog, I have a daughter, I have family. I'm not going to try to keep the sourdough starter alive."
Meanwhile, I had mine, which is called Jolene after the Dolly Parton song. It's kind of part of our family now. It was a big part of my life at that time. I had received it from a friend who had received it from a Toronto restaurant called The Depanneur, I think. I believe it's come all the way from the U.K. and has quite an interesting history. That's where that came from. Then we went with it because there was a bakery, so there had to be a complicated sourdough subplot.
I did not take any of the starter, just for the record. I was terrified of the idea of killing it.- Karma Brown
KB: I did not take any of the starter, just for the record. I was terrified of the idea of killing it, which is not that hard to do. Marissa claimed it's very hard to do, but I know people who have killed their starters. I just thought I cannot have this on my conscience during the pandemic. Killing the starter.
While we're on baking, can we talk about some of the desserts in this story? Aperol Spritz Cupcakes, for example. There's also an incredible meal via an Italian restaurant. Karma, what is it like for you to write about food in general?
KB: I love writing about food. In every book I write, I'm always trying to think of a special recipe or something that I can stick in there. I think I might have a problem actually with trying to fit food into books. But Marissa wrote the scenes with the Italian food. It's funny because her husband actually knew. He tried to figure out who had written which chapters through the book, and he knew that she had written those ones because of the food references to the Italian meal.
MS: I'm not as much of a baker and I enjoy cooking somewhat. What I love is eating out and I obsess over menus and not only what I'm having, but what everyone else will be having. I loved writing about that Italian restaurant and researching menu items that you might have if you could go out for dinner, which at the time you could not.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
