Why Tia Williams Keeps Resurrecting Her Girls

Some characters don’t stay buried—not because they haunt us, but because we never wanted them to leave. Tia Williams, the reigning queen of high-gloss heartbreak and hyper-literate romance, has done it again: she’s lifted a character from her adult fiction and breathed her into the radiant chaos of YA. Not in a reboot, not in a cameo, but as if to say, “Yes, she’s still here. She matters.” And maybe she always did more than we realized.

In Behind the Scenes, her new YA romcom, Williams resurrects Angie from The Perfect Find—but now she’s a high schooler, a little raw, a little reimagined. It’s less literary fan service and more emotional continuity. She’s not the same, but she is. What does that say about the stories we tell—and who we believe is allowed to grow across timelines?

Characters Who Refuse to Die

This is not a Marvel multiverse. This is literature as legacy. Williams’s decision to reincarnate Angie across genres isn’t just playful; it’s insurgent. YA readers are often denied the layered nostalgia that adult readers take for granted. Why shouldn’t Black girls get to meet themselves at 17 and 37? Why shouldn’t they have storylines that echo—not erase—what came before?

“There was something unfinished about Angie,” Williams admits, with the kind of candor that makes you wonder if authors ever really say goodbye to their creations. Or if they should. Perhaps this is what real authorship looks like in a world saturated with algorithms and book-to-screen deals: keeping your girls alive, giving them new breath, bending time and genre to your own rules.

The Chic, Subversive Power of Remembering

What Williams is doing—quietly, stylishly—is creating a kind of Black feminine mythos, one character at a time. Not icons, not martyrs, but girls in motion. She’s playing with narrative memory the way others play with plot. And it’s working.

By planting Angie in a YA world, Williams isn’t merely writing another teen romance. She’s expanding a universe where love, ambition, and beauty exist in continuum. Where readers—especially young Black women—are permitted to revisit their favorite selves again and again. And isn’t that the most audacious form of hope? To be able to start over, stylishly, as many times as you want.

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And so, Angie lives. Again. In a new jacket, with new stakes, in a world that never truly let her go. If Tia Williams keeps returning to her characters, maybe it’s not because she misses them—but because she knows we do. And maybe the real question isn’t why Angie is back—but who else is waiting in the wings, ready to return.