Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon is a gorgeous “multiverse novel about two women who fall in love despite living in worlds that are five months apart, as they try to find a timeline that doesn’t end in disaster” by Annie Mare (she/they). It’s every bit as messy and joyous as it sounds, and I was utterly enthralled.
Annie graciously agreed to an interview. We met virtually, queer-to-queer, and they radiated an earnest, easy kindness. The following interview was edited for clarity and length.
Susanne Salehi: What’s your favorite book you’re crushing on right now?
I’m really into A/S/L (Jeanne Thornton). It’s a queer novel about friends and video games, and it’s so interesting. I’m loving it. Next on my TBR is Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab.
Do you have a formative novel?
Lois Lowry’s A Summer to Die made me understand that books existed with the kinds of stories I was writing in my journals and notebooks. It’s lesser known, but it’s still in print. I came across it as a tween, when I was starting to write stories and poetry. I was a voracious reader.
It’s about a young, tween-ish girl. Her dad’s a writer on deadline and he moves the family out to the country, renting a house in the middle of nowhere. It’s all very disruptive, but also exciting.
She has an older sister who’s beautiful and absolutely steeped in the gilded cishet culture, who exemplifies that kind of teen girlhood. This creates a certain amount of tension because our protagonist is different. While she doesn’t know herself well, she knows she doesn’t fit.
The sister is diagnosed with leukemia and a poor prognosis. In her illness, her sister’s obsession lies in cataloguing botanical information about the meadows around them. In the meantime, the protagonist makes friends with her rural neighbors: an older man who’s a photographer and a hippie family getting ready for a home birth.
The book had all these intersections of identity and relationships with people that are so interesting, but often not available to kids. She had a relationship with a young pregnant woman, heard all about her life, and ultimately ended up photographing her home birth. These were immersive, interesting experiences, with loss and grief and how you navigate those… I didn’t know a story could have all that in it. I didn’t know it didn’t have to be, “Here’s your wardrobe and your monsters and your paranormal adventure…” Again and again, it goes back to thinking about what I want readers to feel when they read my books.
Moving into Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon. Hair isn’t a particular passion of mine, but I was sucked in from the first page; I never realized how artistic and creative it is!
For a lot of us in the queer community, a haircut is the first stop when it comes to exploring identity… It can be the first experiment.
Why this story, why now?
I began this story based on a feeling that I wanted to write a novel in order to fully explain. I wanted to write a novel that validated the feelings that humanity holds in common, feelings like love at first sight, or the way someone feels like home when you first meet them… the way you can feel you’re on the right path, even if there’s no evidence of that, or that you’ve been here before.
I wanted to show that our relationships to each other are infinitely multiplied in the universe we already live in, and all the different ways we’re learning about them and have explained them so far… These feelings are things that are possible within the universe, and the universe is always bigger and more connected than we ever believed it was.
The multiverse felt like the right size of idea for talking about queer love and queer found family. The multiverse is an infinite idea… and so is the idea that this queer found family and all the relationships it generates are multiplied infinitely into the universe, and they all intersect and collide into each other over and over. That—that is something I want to be able to do and say.
Especially right now when there’s an attempt at erasure—and how ridiculous that attempt is—because of how connected we all are to our queer community, and how much impact the queer community has on the entire rest of the world: its contributions, its perspective, its way of loving, its way of seeing fundamental things like gender…
It was so meaningful to read. There’s a quote in there about the whole universe being queer, I think? I loved that so much.
I do believe that the universe is queer, and that the idea of god or some great creative force is queer… How could it not be? How beautiful are the possibilities in queerness and the conviction to identify your selfness in the face of everything else, to stand by what it is you have discovered about yourself, regardless of the threat of or attempt at erasure… For sure, I’m team queer universe.
If Tressa Fay or Meryl had a theme song, what would it be?
Tressa Fay’s seeking connection with her late mom, since she lost her at 3. She’s in her late 20s, early 30s, at the age where she’s feeling that loss in a way she hasn’t felt before. Her mother might explain a lot of the choices Tressa Fay has made, because her mom was artistic and into music and fashion. Her mom was a 90s scene kid. I always imagined Tressa Fay’s salon had a heavy notation of bands like The Cranberries and Bikini Kill, bands that her mom would have been obsessed with, would have gone to see.
The book has a tiny reference to “Linger” by The Cranberries. It comes up when Tressa Fay’s meeting Meryl in real life for the first time. It’s that. Meryl walks in on her dancing to this song and she’s compelled. That’s the collision of their meeting and their attraction: Tressa Fay trying to find a connection with her mom.
Question, but mostly a comment: Did you intend to emotionally devastate us in a romance novel or was that just a fun side effect?
Yes [emphatic]. I’m very interested in loss and what it does to our behavior, our choices, and our decisions. If we make decisions based on fear and love, loss is wrapped up in that—you may be making choices because you’re afraid of losing something and you haven’t interrogated whether it’s something you should be holding onto.
You can see that in the world right now. There’s this fear of the loss of white supremacy and patriarchy, because of whatever those things represent in terms of stability for the dominant culture… and there are all these decisions being made against that loss. But we also make decisions because we’re afraid of losing things that are very precious and we don’t want to have to grieve.
So yes, I was trying to emotionally devastate, but also to provide some hope and solace.
Absolutely. I’m not usually a crier, but I broke down when Phil talked about how it all made sense to him, how he could imagine a universe where he grew old with Tressa Fay’s mother, one where she could watch Tressa Fay grow up.
Well, I had to give him something.
How did you keep all the timelines from getting confused?
Lots of scratch paper, lots of talking it out with my wife and her saying, “But what about this?” And then I’d have to cross that out. I also had a clear sense of what I wanted the rules of the multiverse to be. The dates were a signpost I created in the book for readers. For me, as a writer, every action for every character had effects forwards and backwards.
Revision also played a big role. After I wrote the first version, fresh off all my research reading multiverse theories, my agent said, “This is a beautiful mess. Let’s start stripping away and simplifying it.” At first, I worried about what would be lost. After all, I want this book to be what it is! But I reminded myself how much we can trust readers. Readers get it. You don’t have to lecture them.
So there was that process, and it got to an editor who had a vision for it. She was able to see it from 35,000 feet and help direct the vision. She also suggested playing with things, saying, “Let’s just try putting these three things in linear order and see how it affects the story.” I had a lot of eyes on this book, and anytime you ask a reader to read something like this, that’s important.
Do you have a favorite scene, saying, part of the book, etc.?
I loved writing the scene of Tressa Fay and Meryl’s first date when they went creeking; creeking is a Midwestern or Southern activity that’s exactly what it sounds like: you go to a creek and stomp around and look at stuff. I did it a lot as a kid. It was a place to foreshadow the machine of the multiverse and how things would eventually get resolved. It’s also where we understand the most about Meryl and her own center.
Meryl is a stormwater engineer, a job she ended up in because of her interest in how our world works, what impact we have on it as humans, and how we try to mold and change our earth. Water is pervasive. It only wants to go where it wants to go. I liked writing who Meryl was… She’s a very smart girl that is seemingly laced up… She’s a cis woman who’s very serious about her career but has that same pervasive quality as water, where she goes where she must go, no matter what… and the creeking scene was a way to show that.
Here Meryl is, in her element, helplessly crushing on Tressa Fay, who is not in her element. Previously, Meryl’s only seen Tressa Fay in her element. Meryl knows everything about this creek, is always thinking about it, and we start to understand why she’s making the decisions she makes. I loved being able to write and rewrite that moment, so it was the right kind of yearning and the right kind of sexy, but also the right kind of “Who is this Meryl person?”
Oh, I loved that scene. That was where Meryl talked about how water always remembers where it came from, right?
Yes. We use dams, culverts, jetties, and all of these things to direct water, so we can have the experience we want, but that water retains the memory of where it’s supposed to be going. If you take away the human constraints, it will go right back to where it was. It knows where it should be. I felt like this is something Meryl’s literally thinking about all the time. She lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan. Even people who aren’t from the Midwest can appreciate how big it is. It takes a day to cross on a ferry! And in this setting, we have an ancient stormwater system. Meryl talks about how it always floods, how it’s always trying to squirm out of its restraints.
It was also fun to write locally and mention details you wouldn’t know about a place unless you live there. Cosmic Love contains a combination of fictionalized real places and shout outs to real places. There are a few special easter eggs especially for Green Bay readers.
Who was your favorite “side” character? Why?
Guy has their own kind of compelling charisma. It’s because of how hard Guy had to hold onto their identity, with both their hands, and how precarious and tenuous it was over every universe, but how they triumphed every time. I have so much love and tenderness for that kind of bravery and tenacity, and I think that is often true of the trans experience—that it’s both tender, pulpy, and unformed, but also tenacious and constant. So, I have a lot of big feelings about Guy and how it all comes together for them, over and over again. It was fun to give them what they wanted—including a good haircut!
I noticed you included some gentle “lessons” in the book. The one about polyamory comes to mind. Was that intentional?
Definitely. I wanted to show how the multiverse is a metaphor for our queer community, how it can give us the opportunity to heal our relationships with each other, even multiple chances to heal those relationships.
There’s work we all have to do. This Pride, there’s been lots of discussion about biphobia and bi erasure. I’m still hearing queer comedians joke about polyamory, whether it’s real or not.
Linds, queer polyam mystic of her found family (everyone needs a crystal dealer!), knows all the good books and movies and weird stuff… Tressa Fay has never not known her. When you’re that person in your friend group, it can be easy to be dismissed, for people to be delighted and entertained by you, but not to validate your identity.
Linds is in that position. Her friends have not been unkind or cruel, but they haven’t taken her relationships and her journey with relationships as seriously as they’ve taken their own, and that’s hurt her. She’s in a constant state of forgiving them for it, while trying to love the people she loves. It was important to give Tressa Fay and all her friends the opportunity to repair with Linds, to heal the way they hadn’t given her the support she needed.
It was also important that I represented polyam relationships and the different possibilities of queerness in relationships—both friendly and romantic—in a multiverse book. Everyday Green Bay, Wisconsin polyam isn’t something I see represented often in queer books. There’s good representation out there, but it can be easier to find more eroticized versions.
Queer people are always trying to impress on our relatives and the rest of the world that our romances and relationships are not exclusive to some kind of special queer community. My wife and I are moms. We live in Wisconsin, we have a bunch of pets, and we have to mop the kitchen floor. There isn’t a lifestyle that’s significantly different from anyone else who’s made the choice to have a family.
Oh! It’s giving: “Queers, they’re just like us.”
Or: “Queers, we’re just like them.”
Was there anything you had to cut that you wish could have made it in?
Of course, there were things I thought would be very emotionally poignant or symbolic that I wished could have fit. Originally, Meryl and Tressa Fay’s relationship was a little more affected by time. We were going to get their first kiss after they’d been in their relationship for longer, but I had to ask: What is my higher value? Do I want to accurately reflect all the ways the universe changes our perception of time… or is my higher value a love story? That was the guiding principle behind the editing.
So, these two are maybe the same question, but what do you want readers to take away from this experience? And if you could tell readers one thing, what would it be?
In the book, there are flashes of other multiverses and these vignettes of things that aren’t part of the timeline you’re reading; they’re part of some other timeline, some other multiverse. And all of those things are integrated! Back to Guy (and Michael): they’re the best example of that. There’s no universe in which they didn’t love each other, but how they got there was different in every universe. Similarly with Tressa Fay’s mom and dad: there’s no universe in which her parents didn’t have an effect on the person she became, but how that came to be was different.
I want that concept to comfort people and validate where they’re at. Every single moment, you’re doing the best you can. Thinking anything else is unkind self talk. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing at any moment.
What’s the best way to keep up with you and what you’re writing?
In terms of accessibility, I’m most often on instagram @spinster_press, but if you go to anniemare.com, you can reach out via my contact form or sign up for my newsletter. That’s where I overshare, when there’s news to share. I also write with Ruthie Knox, my wife. We write queer romance as Mae Marvel and mysteries as Annie Mare and Ruthie Knox. My Patreon incorporates all those projects. I’m always super happy to hear from readers!
Susanne Salehi (she/they) is a queer Iranian American writer and editor happiest when reading, cross stitching, gardening, or accumulating silly tattoos—they’re particularly proud of the screaming possum. They’re a 2025 fellow of the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & they write queer heroes. More at susannesalehi.com.
