Meet Jessica Mary Best, Author of “You Pierce My Soul”

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What if finding your soulmate wasn’t romantic at all? What if it was mandatory?

That’s the question at the center of Jessica Mary Best’s You Pierce My Soul, a queer dystopian thriller set in a city where an algorithm called Heartsong decides who you’re meant to love. When Zada is matched with someone she feels absolutely nothing for, the supposedly perfect system starts to crack, and so does everything she has been taught about desire, destiny, and what a happy life is supposed to look like.

Best gets into the danger of letting institutions define something as personal as love, the challenge of building a dystopian world that still feels seductive enough for people to believe in it, and how her own experience growing up bi and on the asexual spectrum shaped Zada’s story. At the heart of it all is a point that feels especially worth hearing: there is no single correct way to experience love, attraction, or desire.

What was the moment, person, or question that inspired you to write this story?

One major inspiration for this story was the idea of soulmates, and the possibility of a powerful organization (like a government) taking advantage of that kind of oversimplified concept of love, using it to control people. There’s also an element of You Pierce My Soul that stemmed from growing up not realizing I was on the asexual spectrum and bi. I felt like my experiences with romantic feelings and desires were outside the story that was being told about teenagers (and by extension, me), in a somewhat similar way to Zada realizing that she isn’t in love with the person she’s told is her destiny.

If you could leave one note inside every copy of your book for the next LGBTQ+ young person who reads it, what would it say?

I think I would be tempted to write the note that I myself needed to read when I was young, which would be “Never feel ashamed if the ways you experience (or don’t experience) love or desire falls outside of what feels like the mainstream. As long as you aren’t harming anyone, there really is no way to do it wrong. Also, just FYI, asexuality is a spectrum and it’s possible to be on that spectrum without immediately realizing it, hint hint.”

What are three books other than your own centering LGBTQ+ characters that you think every person should read?

I think different people will naturally connect with different stories; I hesitate to say “everyone should read this” about any specific works at all. That said, three books centering LGBTQ+ characters that have made an impact on me for the better are Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, Gay the Pray Away by Natalie Naudus, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (although content warning that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is decidedly not a YA novel; it contains adult situations).

What inspired you to set the world of You Pierce My Soul in a neo-dystopian city? What elements of the world Zada and Daphne inhabited did you find most challenging, either to write or to personally experience?

Dystopian stories like The Handmaid’s Tale really resonated with me as a teen. Setting the story in a city was partly a matter of convenience because it allowed me to include all the different locations without writing a lot of travel to and from them. The most challenging aspect was incorporating the sci-fi elements in a way that felt grounded and worked with the Regency-inspired style.

I love that we are moving to a place where queerness and queer love are elements of the story, but not out of the ordinary in their existence in the story. What felt important about having queerness be represented in the way it was in the book?

I totally agree! The world of the book is supposed to feel like a dystopia inhabited by people who believe they live in a utopia. If there was no space for queerness in that world, it would transparently be an unsafe place to live for many people.