When Real Life Bleeds into Fiction: The Heartbreak That Inspired A Love Letter to Whiskey by Kandi Steiner
There’s a cultural obsession with the one that got away.
We all know them — the person who came into our lives too early or too late, the one we almost had, the one who made us question everything: our timing, our boundaries, our worth. They’re the person who still shows up in our dreams and sometimes makes them feel like nightmares.
We don’t talk about them often. Maybe they come up in hushed tones over a glass of wine, or in the back seat of an Uber with your best friend after a wedding. Sometimes they’re just a name that sparks a hollow pang when it pops up on Instagram, or a song that still hits the same way it did ten years ago. Maybe they’re long gone, or still lingering at the edges of our lives, existing just out of reach.
There’s a reason #rightpersonwrongtime is a hashtag with millions of posts.
For me, that person was my “Whiskey.”
Whiskey
We were best friends — the kind of friends who should have made everyone around us suspicious but somehow didn’t. We rode around in his car with the windows down and music up. We knew each other’s secrets and shared inside jokes, playlists, and all the little pieces of life that made it clear we were more than friends. But we never said it. We never labeled it. We never crossed the line.
And then life took us in different directions.
I watched him fall in love with other women, and he watched me get married. We grew apart, only for life to throw us back together again and again. There were so many moments when it felt like this time, finally, it would happen. But it never did.
Now, all these years later, I can say I’m glad it didn’t.
What we had wasn’t healthy or sustainable, but it was real. It was messy and electric and meaningful, and it shaped so much of who I was — how I loved, what I tolerated, what I longed for. That relationship, or lack thereof, became the seed that eventually grew into A Love Letter to Whiskey.
But I wasn’t alone in that experience.
When I began opening up to the women in my life about my “Whiskey,” I realised how many of us had one. Each of us carried our own version of that person — the almost, the ache, the gut punch of wanting something we couldn’t have and the confusion of wanting it anyway. We were all “Whiskey Girls,” and I knew I wanted to capture that heartbreak in a way that felt honest. Gritty. Maybe even ugly.
This kind of love doesn’t follow the rules. It doesn’t always come with closure. Sometimes, the story just ends.
The Power of Fiction
But in fiction, I had the power to give my characters what I never got.
I wrote B and Jamie with every ounce of pain I had lived. I gave them the tension, the betrayal, the missteps. I let them hurt each other the way people do when they can’t quite figure out how to love each other right. And then, eventually — after years of pain and separation and growth — I gave them the happy ending I never got.
That part was the hardest.
It felt almost like a betrayal to write a version of that story where things did work out. But it was also healing, like stitching up a wound that my soul had been bleeding out of for years.
It felt like finally saying goodbye.
While I wrote, I started weaving in not just my story but fragments of stories from the women around me — friends who had whispered confessions about their own versions of “Whiskey.” I worked in their specific pain of timing gone wrong and connections they couldn’t shake no matter how hard they tried. Those conversations were raw, vulnerable, and honest — the perfect emotional material for romantic fiction.
Real life, with all its chaos and contradictions, makes the best inspiration.
A Love Letter to Whiskey is still the book readers message me about the most. They come to signings and cry. They write me emails about their own “Whiskey.” They tell me how they felt seen in a way they didn’t expect, how it brought up things they thought they had buried. And I always say the same thing: I get it. I really, really do.
There’s something about “almost” that sticks with us, something about missed timing that feels more haunting than heartbreak. Deep down, I think we’re all a little obsessed with it — with the people we could have been if things had gone just a little differently.
That’s what this book is about.
It isn’t a love story in the traditional sense. It’s a story about emotional warfare, about two people who can’t seem to get it right even though they want to. It’s about addiction — not to substances, but to each other. It’s about the way we excuse toxic behavior when it’s dressed up as fate. And yes, eventually, it’s about redemption — for two characters who maybe deserve it, maybe don’t, but they get it anyway.
As writers, we’re often told to “write what we know,” but I think it goes deeper than that. It’s about writing what we feel — taking those moments in life that broke us open and using them to breathe humanity into our characters. For me, A Love Letter to Whiskey wasn’t just a story I wanted to tell; it was an emotional exorcism. I poured all the confusion, longing, and heartbreak I’d carried into every scene, and in doing so, I found a way to make sense of it.
That’s the beauty of fiction: it gives us the power to rewrite the stories we never got closure from in real life. It lets us explore the messy, complicated parts of love without restraint. And when we’re brave enough to draw from our own scars — and even the stories whispered to us by friends over wine or in late-night texts — that’s when the work resonates the deepest. Readers can feel the truth in it, even if they’ve never lived it themselves.
I’ll never forget my Whiskey. I’ll never forget how it felt to want something that badly, or how it felt to finally walk away. But I’m so grateful for what that experience gave me — not just personally, but professionally. It gave me my most raw, most polarizing, most beloved book.
And maybe, for all of us who have loved and lost someone who was never really ours to begin with, it offers a little piece of closure, too.
About A Love Letter to Whiskey:
From USA Today and #1 Amazon bestselling author Kandi Steiner comes a new edition of this #BestofBookTok favorite – an angsty and powerful story of lovers continually fighting the curse of bad timing. Preorder now and receive the stunning DELUXE LIMITED EDITION while supplies last, featuring gorgeous sprayed edges, exclusive special design features, and never before seen bonus content.
Brecks Kennedy has spent years writing the story of her life, but there’s one chapter that never quite closed… Jamie Shaw.
It all started with a jog, a clumsy collision, and an instant crush. But while B’s heart skipped a beat, Jamie’s eyes found her best friend instead. And just like that, her crush became her closest friend. Bound by shared moments of music, surfing, and secrets, their connection is undeniable, even as they desperately try to fight it.
But between college campuses, chance encounters, and stolen moments, fate has a way of bringing them together when they least expect it, time and time again.
As they wrestle with their feelings and the choices that have kept them apart, both B and Jamie must decide if they are finally willing to risk everything for the love that’s always been just out of reach. Sometimes, love isn’t about finding the right person, it’s about the moment when everything aligns. But what if that moment never comes?
Heart-wrenching and addictive, this is a story of love, loss, and the years it takes to finally get it right.
A Love Letter to Whiskey by Kandi Steiner is published by Arndell Books and is available to buy now. Order your copy online here.
And read more Meet the Authors of Romantic Fiction on Writing.ie here.
