A man who does not want to be at a bar picks a rare orange 45 off a shelf, and a woman who is officially there doing research decides to ask him about it. Neither of them mentions where they work. By the time they find out, forty-eight hours later, they have already told each other more than either intended. That is the whole engine of Let’s Kiss and Tell by Joss Richard in one scene: two people who are extremely careful with their public voices, accidentally being honest.
The Column Is the Second Narrator
Lucy Reid is twenty-nine and writes the sex and relationships column for The Rue, a digital magazine sitting under a big Los Angeles newspaper. Her click-through rate has collapsed, her editor has run a focus group, and the verdict is that Lucy’s readers have all coupled up and no longer relate to a woman writing about being gloriously single. Told her column may be handed to someone else, Lucy announces that she is in a relationship. She is not. She has never been in one.
Marshall Oakley is thirty-six, the paper’s new senior news reporter, and has a wedding to attend. The bride is his ex-girlfriend of nine and a half years; everyone he has ever known will be there. He wants a plus-one and not a girlfriend. The deal is five weeks.
What lifts Let’s Kiss and Tell by Joss Richard above its premise is the structure. Between chapters, Richard drops in Lucy’s actual published columns, complete with the paywall cut-off, so the reader gets the private version of every development and then the packaged one. It is a small trick and it works enormously well. Watching Lucy translate a genuine, frightening thing into three hundred words of confident advice, week after week, is a more efficient character study than any amount of interiority, and it means the reader is always slightly ahead of her.
What Richard Gets Right That the Genre Usually Fumbles
Two journalists could easily have become a shorthand for “smart people”. Instead the work is the courtship. Marsh brings Lucy along to interview an escort and an OnlyFans model for a feature and then asks her to go on the record as an expert, which is the single most romantic gesture anyone makes in the book. She teaches him to record how a room made him feel; he teaches her to record what was actually in it. They read each other’s bylines. They are useful to each other, and the novel understands that being found useful by someone you admire is its own kind of undressing.
The comedy is real too. A running bit about the tooth fairy’s housing situation, a six-year-old who names a hypothetical Saint Bernard after a Stephen King dog, an exercise in a parked car where Lucy makes Marsh say a list of words out loud until he stops blushing, which escalates in exactly the direction the reader hopes.
The Grief Sitting Under Let’s Kiss and Tell by Joss Richard
Both leads are protecting an old wound. His sits on the mantelpiece as a small ceramic clementine and is explained late, quietly, and devastatingly. Hers dates to an address she drove to at sixteen with her father’s mistress’s name on a piece of paper, and the book eventually takes her back through that afternoon with her mother in a scene that refuses to make anybody the villain.
Richard is also unusually good on the ambient dread of working in media. Layoffs are discussed the way people actually discuss them, they arrive, and they land on someone the reader has come to love. Nobody gets a soft ending on that front, which is the correct choice; the industry’s contraction is thoroughly documented and the novel does not pretend otherwise.
Where It Falters
Four things hold Let’s Kiss and Tell by Joss Richard back, and the first is the one that will nag at readers longest.
- The rules apply selectively. The company fires two minor characters for sleeping together across publications. The leads, who are more entangled and further apart in seniority, are never touched by it. The risk exists to make the reader nervous and then goes away.
- The feature never finishes. The sex-work story that generates some of the best scenes is tied to a trial that simply stops mattering once it has done its job of putting them in rooms together.
- The big fight is two essays. Each of them delivers a fully formed analysis of the other’s damage. It is well argued and it does not sound like people fighting.
- A late detour drags. A post-breakup encounter for one lead is clinical and slightly airless, and does less work than the space it takes.
None of that undoes the pleasure. The heat is high, explicit, specific, and consistently written with someone asking permission first, which remains rarer than it should be.
Where Let’s Kiss and Tell by Joss Richard Leaves You
The last movement hands the grand gesture to the person who has spent the whole book hiding: he writes about himself, publicly, in print, and it costs him something real with his family. It is the correct ending for a novel whose actual argument is stated out loud about two-thirds of the way through, that being open is not the same thing as being vulnerable. Lucy has built a career on the first and has never once managed the second. The book is generous enough to let her be bad at it for a long time before she is not, and to let the fix arrive through a conversation with her mother rather than through the man.
A three-years-later epilogue closes the loop with a joke about a book title that readers will see coming and enjoy anyway.
Readers should know before starting that infidelity appears repeatedly, that pregnancy loss is central to one character’s history and returns more than once, and that an ex-partner refuses to accept being told no. Share is a reasonable starting point for anyone the loss thread might reach.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Readers who took to Let’s Kiss and Tell by Joss Richard should start with It’s Different This Time, her debut, which is slower, more nostalgic and set across a decade of New York autumns; it has the same ear for what people decline to say. What Happens in Amsterdam by Rachel Lynn Solomon is the nearest tonal cousin on our shelves, sharp and sex-positive and just as interested in what its characters do for a living. Beyond that, Emily Henry’s Funny Story runs the same con of two people performing a couple until the performance stops being one, and Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners is where to go if the comedy rather than the ache is the draw. Anyone who came mainly for the byline plot should try Elissa Sussman’s Funny You Should Ask, which also lets a journalist’s published words become the second voice in the room.