‘The Love Hypothesis’ Author Officially Reveals What’s Next With New Audio Book Preview [Exclusive]
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For many, Ali Hazelwood has rapidly become the Queen of Contemporary Romance in literature these days because of her skill at depicting complicated relationships, irresistible chemistry and characters who fall in love despite themselves while discovering that, yes, love is more difficult than they anticipated. Thanks to her books, from The Love Hypothesis to Deep End, her fandom has grown enormously, but her newest release is taking a different approach to romance. Because it’s not just about finding the perfect partner, it’s about discovering what makes you happy in the first place.
Speaking exclusively with Collider’s Carly Lane over email to celebrate the release of her new Audible romance Bad in Bed — for which we are thrilled to debut an exclusive sneak peek — Hazelwood revealed that the story was inspired by her desire to explore female pleasure through a familiar romance trope, but with a rather important twist. Instead of following a character learning how to satisfy somebody else, she wanted to turn the idea of sex lessons into something more personal.
“I really wanted to write a story centered around sex lessons, but with the twist that the character who’s trying to get better at sex is doing it with a focus on herself, as opposed to the goal of pleasing a future partner. Less ‘how to blow his mind’ and more ‘how to blow her own mind.’“
The new release follows characters Max and his romantic counterpart as their relationship develops through an increasingly intimate journey of self-discovery. Hazelwood explained that the story is also a departure from her previous romances, placing considerably more emphasis on the characters themselves rather than an elaborate plot.
“It’s more character driven than usual—nothing I write is particularly plot heavy, but this book is really just two people getting to know each other in new ways and banging a lot while on this journey, which was delightful for me to work on. And I think Max is a bit of a new MMC for me—very comfortable with his emotions, very charming, very good at interacting with others.”
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
Ali Hazelwood Is Bringing Her Latest Romance to Life With Audible
What’s different this time, however, is that Bad in Bed has been developed first and foremost as an audio-first romance, which will give us all the opportunity to experience the story through a full-cast performance. These are very en vogue at the moment, so the timing is certainly auspicious, and having worked with Spotify before, Hazelwood knew what she was getting into.
“I had done it before for some of the stories I published with Spotify, so it wasn’t completely new,” she explained. The author is also particularly enthusiastic about the possibilities of ensemble narration, adding, “In general [I] LOVE listening to full cast narrations, they are so engaging and fun!”
Hazelwood also reflected on the kinds of stories she’s interested in exploring next. Although she’s already written contemporary and paranormal romances, the author admitted that she’s increasingly drawn to characters who aren’t necessarily making the best decisions.
“It’s not necessarily a different subgenre, but recently I realized that I’d really like to write about characters who are flawed and mess up in big ways. Not sure what that says about me!”
The author also shared her enthusiasm for seeing more romance novels adapted for the screen, including several books by other writers. Among her most enthusiastic recommendations was Games by Anna Maria Volkova, which she believes deserves an entire television adaptation. “I would literally give my firstborn (cat, I’m so sorry Bernie) to see an adaptation of Games by Anna Maria Volkova,” she joked, before making her ambitions particularly clear: “Frankly, I want a miniseries. I DEMAND IT.”
Hazelwood also singled out Die for Me by Shirlene Obuobi as a potential gothic movie, Once in a Timeline by Iman Hariri-Kia as a time-loop romantic comedy, and The Princess and the PI by Nikki Payne as another adaptation she’d love to see. She also expressed enthusiasm for The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, the Ninth House series, and As Long As You’re Mine by Nekesa Afia.
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