Her dating life is practically nonexistent though, and everyone has an opinion about that. No Strings Attached has been re-released with a new cover, designed by Tania Arpa, based on photography by Pach Urrea at /romanceclasscovers.Ĭarla’s 29 and a whiz at her job: she’s efficient, reliable, and a total genius when it comes to putting something together at the last minute. We older, wiser readers can handle that, right? So that part I guess is fine as it is, but if I were the kind of writer then that I am now, I’d push for a bigger age gap. But when you’re going through it, you don’t know when it’ll stop bothering you. Carla the main character is 29 and turning 30 in a few months. Now that I’ve seen what the thirties looks like–and it looks great what are you worried about–I guess I now feel that the book portrays a very specific freakout window of time. Then someone said, “You know what’s going to happen, right? We’re going to have to go younger.”

I was in a relationship at the time, but most of them weren’t. We had a lot of conversations about where we thought we would be at thirty, and who we would be with. I was Carla’s age, when I was thinking about this story, and so were most of my friends. Written for a chick lit imprint at the time, No Strings Attached was my third book, and also my first experiment in stepping outside of myself and playing with tropes to form the characters and situations. The dedication page for No Strings Attached, first published in 2010, contains this message:

No Strings Attached by Mina V. Esguerra