The Husband Auditions Blog Tour

I’m so pleased to be a part of the blog tour for Angela Ruth Strong’s newest release, The Husband Auditions.

You know, one film that makes my favourites list for romantic comedies is How To Lose A Guy in Ten Days. Well, let me tell you, this novel is just like it. Work issues? Out to prove a point? Whitty banter? All the feels? This book has it all, and then some.

I’ll post my book review soon, but in the meantime, let’s see what Angela had to say about the book:

ASKING ANGELA:

Q: Please introduce us to your new book, Husband Auditions. Where did the inspiration for “the list” come from?

Husband Auditions tells the story of Meri Newberg who is the last single woman among her friend group. At the latest wedding, she’s handed a strange present—a 1950s magazine article with a list of “ways to get a husband.” She starts thinking about trying out a few of them because it sure couldn’t hurt.

Her brother’s roommate, Kai Kamaka, sees the whole thing as a great opportunity to jumpstart his career as a cameraman. He talks Meri into letting him film every silly husband-catching attempt for a new online show in the hopes of it going viral.

I got the idea for Husband Auditions from a real article “129 Ways to Get a Husband” that was published in McCall’s magazine in the 1950s. (You may have seen it online when it was floating around Facebook a couple of years ago like I did.) Some of the suggestions were quite outlandish (ex: stand on a street corner with a lasso), and I imagined what would happen if a modern-day woman tried them out.

Q: You wrote your own list for the sake of the book. Can you share what some of your favorite activities from the list were?

While a lot of the ideas from Meri’s list were definitely inspired by the original, I did set out to create my own. I went to my reader group on Facebook for inspiration. I’m so thankful for the help in coming up with some of these. I had so much fun with them all!

Here are just a few:

Wear a bandage in public and have a tale of daring to go with it.
Create suspense like Alfred Hitchcock by buying a convertible to go with your headscarf and cat-eye glasses.
Faint in front of him. Seeing a woman’s weakness awakens a man’s nature to take care of her.
Let your date do the ordering. Never directly ask the waiter for anything.

Q: What advice would you give to single women about the desire to find love and their dreams for marriage?

The best advice I ever got was this: When two people are in a relationship, they have to be relatively close in emotional health. When one person starts to grow, it creates tension in the relationship like a rubber band stretched between two fingers. With such tension, one of three things has to happen. Either the less healthy person chooses to grow, the more healthy person has to regress, or the less healthy person leaves. In all your relationships, choose to grow. If the person you want to be in a relationship with chooses NOT to grow, you are going to be healthier without them. Don’t ever choose “bad love” over no love at all. You are worth much more than that. And you are already loved more than you can even imagine. Let Jesus be your enough, and as you run towards Him, look for a man who wants to run by your side.