The Kiss Quotient

Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient, published in 2018, follows Stella Lane, an econometrician who is comfortable with numbers and far less comfortable with people. Stella is autistic, and she decides that the solution to her difficulties with intimacy is practice: she hires an escort to teach her how it works, with the terms agreed in advance and no expectations attached to the arrangement. On paper it is a tidy arrangement; in practice it is much less so.

Stella's mother has firm ideas about the kind of man her daughter should end up with, and Stella's own judgement of herself is tested by the difference between the arrangement she set out to make and what it becomes. Her work, her family and her own expectations all bear on the situation she has created for herself.

Hoang wrote the first draft of the novel within ten weeks, and the manuscript went through several revisions before she entered it in Pitch Wars, the online pitching contest, where her mentor Brighton Walsh helped her rework it over another eight months. During the writing she learned that her daughter is autistic. The Bride Test followed as a companion novel to The Kiss Quotient.