Layne Fargo discusses her new novel, which stages Wuthering Heights in the world of elite ice dance

Initially, Layne Fargo thought that reimagining Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was an “unhinged idea”, she tells me over video call from her home in Chicago. Early reservations aside, the result, The Favourites, is an utterly compulsive read that uses Brontë’s beloved text as a thematic blueprint for a story set in the world of professional ice dance.

The Favourites follows Katarina (Kat) Shaw and Heath Rocha who begin skating together as children, their chemistry on the ice becoming more electric as they age and their feelings mature. But ambition divides them. For Kat, nothing will be enough until she wins Olympic gold, but all Heath wants and needs is Kat. He skates for her. Kat skates to win.

Things swiftly become complicated when the duo are invited to train at the Lin Ice Academy, helmed by former Olympic gold medalist ice dancer, Shelia Lin. As Kat and Heath train with the Lin twins—Bella and Garrett—tensions mount and reach a breaking point. In the aftermath, we follow Kat’s skating career across years filled with countless competitions and her turbulent, all-consuming relationship with Heath. Fargo’s experience as a thriller writer, mostly published in the US, is evident in the breathless pace at which The Favourites unfolds. The first-person narration is deftly cut with a documentary script from a programme about Kat and Heath called “The Favourites: The Shaw & Rocha Story”. The chapters alternate between the interviews and Kat’s narrative to add context and fuel drama. “They were an obsession,” says the narrator in the opening of the documentary. “Then a scandal... and ultimately... a tragedy.”

Sports romances, where the plot usually revolves around two people, one or both of whom compete at a high level in sport, are hugely popular, especially on BookTok, and can often be singled out by their jovial cartoon style covers that depict the fated pair. The Favourites is not a typical sports romance. There is sport and there is romance, but the narrative is not reliant upon familiar romance tropes: the stakes are higher, the ending uncertain for much of the novel and there is little spice. However, it still basks in the heady mix of professional athleticism and romance. Fargo says: “What interested me about it was the intensity of the personalities. To be an elite athlete you have to be so driven, so disciplined, so ambitious, and I think, in a lot of cases, there’s not really room for love or relationships. I see this a lot in sports romances where it’s like: ‘I can’t get involved with this person right now because I’m trying to make it to the Olympics, I’m trying to win the championship or whatever.’ So, that creates conflict right away.”

The juxtaposition not only creates romantic conflict but has the potential to cause rifts in friendships. One of the most important relationships in The Favourites is the unlikely friendship struck between rivals—Kat and Bella. “It was so important to me to show this friendship between two super driven, ambitious women.” The relationship between the two is complicated yet filled with a deep love and respect that exists beside an innate desire to best the other. Envy and support “absolutely can” co-exist in the same relationship, Fargo believes, pointing to her “friendships with other writers” that operate alongside professional competitiveness. Similarly, Bella and Kat were modelled on the friendship and rivalry between US ice dancer Madison Hubbell and French ice dancer Gabriella Papadakis. The pair have “retired from competition”, but Fargo has “read interviews with them where they will very candidly [say]: ‘Yes, I love her, she’s my friend, but I want to beat her. I want the gold.’”

To be an elite athlete you have to be so driven, so disciplined, so ambitious, and, in a lot of cases, there’s not really room for love or relationships

To win the Olympic gold medal she so desires, Kat has to push her body to the limit. It is a visceral reading experience, feeling the strength that goes into her skating, the dance lifts and the sheer force of will required to compete professionally. The novel “really challenged” Fargo “to be more embodied” in the way that she writes. Although “not an athlete of any kind”, she drew from her experience living with chronic pain. “I do a lot of really intense massages, Pilates, dry needling—very painful treatments that actually help the pain. So, I used a lot of that physical experience to imagine what it would be like to be an athlete, putting your body through all these things.” Previously, Fargo has tried to write a character with chronic pain but found it “too raw”. She adds: “I haven’t found a way to do it yet, but I was able to channel that into Kat without it being about the same condition.” 

Once Fargo “started really digging into” Brontë’s novel and ice dance it seemed serendipitous: “It all mapped out so well. There are themes in Wuthering Heights of class and race differences that really are a huge issue in skating—because it’s such an expensive sport, it tends to be a lot of affluent white people.” Brontë’s depiction of Cathy, a fierce and ambitious woman, defiant of the gendered restrictions of 18th-century England, also became a key touchstone for Fargo’s own unapologetic protagonist.

Kat’s ambition burns through her dire financial circumstances and dismantles the expectations of women in ice skating. Where the judges and the audiences in the novel expect a “waif”, a delicate woman ready to please the crowds, Kat is fiery, refusing to be cowed into submission. “Cathy in Wuthering Heights is really pushing back [against expectations of women] and Kat is also struggling with that. She’s very competitive, she’s very ambitious and you have to be that to be a successful athlete—but in skating you’re supposed to be pretty, well-mannered and polite.” One character observes: “Olympic athletes, female ones especially, are expected to follow a certain script... Kat Shaw shredded that script and set it on fire.”

Kat must deal with gendered questioning from the press that many real-world female celebrities endure. During a live interview before a global competition, Kat is asked about her engagement and bites back: “What the hell kind of question is that?” Fargo purposefully set the novel during the early 2000s, a time where the paparazzi were notoriously vicious when “scrutinising the actions of women”. The author’s online biography states that she writes “unapologetically feminist stories” and when we speak, Fargo explains that she is “always trying to push back against patriarchal heteronormative narratives”, continuing: “Kat is not interested in marriage, she doesn’t want to have kids. The dreams we are told as women that are supposed to be the pinnacle of our existence, she’s just not interested in them.”

The Favourites will be your next obsession. It is a rich exploration of female ambition, desire and love and has the potential to become the next BookTok favourite, offering a welcome escape from a dreary January.