Love Letters and Politics: Casey McQuiston Returns with Alex and Henry

A direct question: do you keep the messages from your exes, or do you delete everything?

Don't answer yet. First let's talk about Casey McQuiston, who has announced that December 2026 will bring Red, White & Royal Blue: The Private Correspondence — an epistolary novella returning to the universe of Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry, twenty years after they went public as a couple. The book will be composed of letters, postcards, and journal entries, covering «sarcastic bon mots to sexy fantasies to emotional discussions about starting a family,» according to the official description.

Borges said the epistolary genre is the most intimate of all, because it simulates absence: you write a letter because you can't be there. McQuiston, it turns out, understands this perfectly. Red, White & Royal Blue was a novel about desire finding its way through the impossible — politics, monarchy, media, parents with too many expectations. Now, with the epistolary format, it proposes something different: what happens when the impossible is no longer impossible, and you're still writing each other letters?

That's the interesting part. This isn't the epic of first love. It's the private archive of a love that already won. There's something very twenty-first century about that: the idea that what we keep — the messages, the photos, the voice notes we never sent — defines our love stories as much as the grand public declarations.

Red, White & Royal Blue became a phenomenon in 2019 and a film in 2023. For many LGBTQ+ readers, it was the first place they saw their kind of love represented with joy — without mandatory tragedy, without bitter resolution. That's a lot of weight for one book. And a lot of weight for a sequel.

Back to my question. I keep the messages. I archive them, carry them from phone to phone, never read them, but I have them. Because there's something in preserving the evidence of having loved that resembles what literature does: leaving a record that something mattered. The Private Correspondence arrives in December. In the meantime, if you haven't read the original, you know what to do.