Renée Carlino

Renée Carlino’s got a knack for tearing your heart out and making you kind of grateful for it. She’s the mind behind a slew of emotionally loaded novels—Before We Were Strangers, Swear On THIS Life, Wish You Were Here, and a bunch more, like Sweet Thing and Lucian Divine. And now she’s rolling out THIS USED TO BE US in summer 2024, tossing readers into the tangled mess of love, marriage, and that slow-motion car crash called divorce. The story takes you through two sides of the same coin—a man and a woman, once madly in love, now trying to pick up the pieces after 22 years of shared history. It’s messy, raw, and uncomfortably real, asking that brutal question: how do you end up despising the one person you were sure you’d love forever? Carlino’s books don’t just hang out on dusty shelves—they’ve popped up in Cosmopolitan, InStyle, USA TODAY, even the Huffington Post. She’s got a thing for getting her stories out there, with her novel Wish You Were Here being adapted for the screen with Julia Stiles, shooting in Jersey. Renée herself is a true California soul—grew up there, still lives in San Diego surrounded by her husband, two boys, and a dog with a name that’s cooler than most people you know (John Snow Cash, seriously?). She’s got this way of making heartbreak feel like a badge of honor, and her stories linger long after you’ve slammed the book shut.