Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘The Kissing Booth’ is the streaming service’s one of the most-watched movies. The teen drama took the world by storm when a young girl named Elle fell in love with the elder brother of her best friend. The ups and downs in her story drew the audience and her love story stole their hearts. Despite the dreaminess of Elle and Noah’s romance, the film has something that makes it somewhat realistic. This makes us wonder where the story came from. Is it based on true events? Let’s find out.
Is The Kissing Booth Based on a True Story?
No, ‘The Kissing Booth’ is not based on a true story. It is based on a book of the same name by Beth Reekles and is adapted for the screen by Vince Marcello, who also directs the film.
One of the reasons for the movie’s immense success is that it closely follows the perspective of a teenager, which led to a lot of relatable factors for the young audience. The reason why the author is able to capture a young girl’s point of view so intimately is that she had written it when she was fifteen. It was the time after the success of ‘Twilight’ and every YA romance was covered with one form of supernatural or the other. Reekles sat down, one day, to read something that could give her a simple story of a real girl, but to her surprise, could not find one.
“I sat one afternoon looking for something to read online and I couldn’t find anything because at that point everything was still vampires and werewolves and angels. I was a little bit sick of that genre. I wanted something that was just a regular teen romance. So when I couldn’t find anything I thought, ‘You know what? I’m just going to write my own book,’” she said, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
She looked towards the popular teen romance movies for inspiration and started working on her own story. To create realistic characters, she looked around herself, but also allowed her imagination to do most of the work. However, things like the anxiety of the first date, the feeling of falling in love for the first time, and to maintain a strong relationship with her friends, despite its bittersweet moments, she drew from her real-life experiences and that of the people around her.
She started posting the story on Wattpad after one of her friends recommended it to her as a place to find new stuff to read. Slowly and steadily, her work gained traction, and soon enough, she found herself talking to Penguin Random House about publishing an ebook. From there, it was a jump to America and getting the story in print. When Netflix got a whiff of its popularity, they decided to turn it into a film.
Since then, Reekles has written a sequel, ‘The Kissing Booth 2: Going the Distance’, which forms the basis of the movie sequel. She has also written a novella, ‘The Beach House: A Kissing Booth Novella’, that focuses on the summer that Elle and Noah spend together before he heads off to Harvard. She also published a short story for World Book Day 2020, called ‘The Kissing Booth: Road Trip!’.
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