Channing Tatum Is Writing a Romance Novel With Roxane Gay — and the Premise Is Hot

If you’ve been waiting for the moment literary firepower and Hollywood star power collide in the romance genre, your moment has arrived. Roxane Gay, the celebrated author behind Bad Feminist, and actor Channing Tatum are co-writing a romance novel — and everything we know about it so far suggests it’s exactly the kind of book romance readers have been craving.

A Meet-Cute for the Ages

Every great romance has an origin story, and the tale of how this collaboration came to be reads like one itself. Gay explained the serendipitous beginning of their partnership in a conversation with Dua Lipa on the Service95 podcast.

“A journalist asked him if he knew that there was this writer who had a crush on him and wrote a book called Bad Feminist,” Gay recounted. “And he was like, ‘Oh, I haven’t heard of it, but I’ll look into it.’”

“And then he did. And then someone approached him about doing a book project,” she continued, “and he was like, ‘Yes, I would love to, if I can co-write it with this person.’”