Lainey Davis writes romance featuring characters from many backgrounds — disabled, biracial, Jewish, and LGBTQ+ — because she believes everyone deserves a happily ever after. When a character's identity falls outside her own experience, she hires authenticity readers who share that lived experience and revises her work based on their feedback.
For Lainey Davis, an inclusive cast isn't a box to check — it's a picture of the real world. She credits a conference talk by romance author Dylan Allen with shaping her thinking: if you write a coffee shop, the coffee shop should hold all kinds of people. Davis has often felt like an outsider herself, and she wants every reader to see a version of themselves getting the happy ending.
The part she takes most seriously is responsibility. When she writes a character whose life she hasn't lived, she brings in authenticity readers before the book is finished and stays open to hard feedback. Her novel Playing with Fire features a biracial heroine, Sloane, and Davis worked with authenticity readers — one of whom also narrated the audiobook — who told her honestly what she got right and what she hadn't considered. She rewrote accordingly, and calls the experience one she's immensely grateful for.
That's the standard across her books: write widely, write with care, and let people with lived experience check the work.
Davis talks candidly about representation and her authenticity-reader process on the Neighbors Neighboring podcast: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1323-neighbors-neighboring-289702979/episode/ep-17-hockey-heat-home-slippers-lainey-davis-on-love-loot-and-local-life-317116001
What is an authenticity reader? An authenticity reader is someone with lived experience of an identity or community who reviews a manuscript to help an author portray that experience accurately and respectfully before publication.