Author Interview: Amy Plum (Die For Me)

Hey guys! Last week(ish) I review Die For Me by Amy Plum. I gotta say, this was one of my favourite debut novels so far, I love it and I strongly recommend you guys checking it out either on NetGalley or when it gets released 10th May!

Anyway Amy, who is such a sweetheart, agreed to answer a couple of questions for me, which is awesome! Here they are with her fantastic and very well thought out answers:


Favourite flower: For looks, peonies. For smell, lilacs. And when I’m down, Gerbera daisies
always cheer me up.
Favourite book as a child: The Little House on the Prairie series
Favourite smell: I have two: freshly cut grass and oil paints (not together!)
Favourite perfume: I don’t wear perfume. (Allergies.) But I used to wear Issey Miyake’s l’eau
d’Issey, and love that scent.
Place you’d most like to travel to: the Galapagos Islands
Favourite fictional character: Holly Golightly
Favourite book as an adult: A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin

I found the setting of Die For Me, Paris, to be really unique and this definitely increased my
enjoyment of the story. Did you always want to base a book here, or did the premise of Die
For Me seem to suit this location specifically?

Since this was my first novel, I thought I would follow the “write what you know” rule. I
know Paris pretty well—lived there for five years and return often. (I live three hours away
now.)


And quite honestly, writing about Paris is like writing a love letter for me. I am madly in love
with the city. So when I knew I was going to write a romance, it was the first city that came
to mind. From my point of view, there is nowhere more romantic on the face of the earth.


At the same time, Paris is so steeped in history that there is also a creepy aspect to it. All of
the beheadings, murders, and war crimes that happened there lend to its being the perfect
setting for a supernatural war between good and evil.

What inspired the creation of the Revenants?

When I made a list of all of the supernatural beings out there, I couldn’t find one I wanted
to write about. So I knew I’d have to come up with my own monsters. Revenants came from
a mix of two beings on my list: gods and zombies. It took a while for me to figure out what
they were, but when I did it was like a lightening strike. I drove over to my friend Nathalie’s
house and started blah blah blahing about this undead boy who keeps dying and coming
back to life. She had that “Okay, my friend has gone insane” kind of scared-for-me look in
her eyes, but she just smiled and nodded, and it was exactly what I needed.

I loved the back stories of each of the Revenants Kate meets, was it hard coming up with
these?

Coming up with the revenants’ back stories was one of the most fun things about writing DIE
FOR ME. I could write a book about each of them, they are all so fascinating. For Vincent, I
used a bit of my husband’s grandfather’s story. He was in the Maquis in the south of France,
and told me stories about that. But the way Vincent died just came to me. It felt like it was
already there, waiting for me to find it.


I’ve read a lot about World War II and occupied Paris. It fascinates me. So Charlotte and
Charles’s story wasn’t hard to come up with. I think I might have flipped through IS PARIS
BURNING (which I’ve read about ten times) to refresh my memory, but their story was
waiting for me too.


I based Ambrose on a real person, as I did Lucien. Gaspard’s story took me the longest to


think up, but once I had, I started fact-checking dates and places and discovered that I had
been RIGHT ON THE MONEY with it all. Everything fell together. It’s like there was this little
Gaspard-shaped hole in the fabric of history just waiting to be patched in.


I had to research mustard gas for Jules’s story. That’s the only hint I’ll give you about him!

Do I detect a love triangle blossoming in the later books...?

Oh, you might Cait. You just might.


Fantastic answers, non? So I'd like to say a massive thanks to Amy Plum for taking the time to answer these for me!


You can read my review of Die For Me here


About Amy:


Amy Plum grew up in Birmingham, Alabama before venturing further afield to Chicago, Paris, London and New York. An art historian by training, she finally traded a tiny apartment in Brooklyn for a rambling farmhouse in a village of 1300 people in the French countryside. She lives there with her French husband, two young children and big red dog Ella, and spends her time writing in a tiny ancient stone house in her garden.

You can learn more about Amy on her website and I strongly suggest following her on twitter (@iheartrevenants) cause she's awesome!


For a little extra treat, here's a video of Amy introducing and reading from the first few pages of Die For Me. I included the version she did for Little Brown UK (YAY for UK fans!)