A conversation with Emma Straub

On dads, grief, writing sex, and drinking Negronis on the treadmill

When I started this newsletter, I wanted to make space for other voices to join me here. Every now and then, I’ll share with you a conversation with someone whose work and mind I admire. Today, we’re talking with the writer Emma Straub, actual delight incarnate, whose new novel This Time Tomorrow comes out on May 17.

I met Emma at a book-world phenomenon called Winter Institute, an annual convention hosted by the American Booksellers Association. If the word convention makes you feel like digging a human-sized hole and lying down in it, you have not been to Winter Institute. A convention of independent booksellers will make you want to live! A convention of independent booksellers is everywhere you want to be. Going to Winter Institute made me want to get a job in a bookstore, because people who sell books for a living are, objectively speaking, the kindest, smartest, most curious, most interested and interesting people on Earth, and I want to surround myself with them every day for eternity. I came home and looked up job listings, for real. Alas, here I am, writing about booksellers, not being one.

Anyway, Winter Institute is this huge multi-day get-together for people who work in and own independent bookstores, with panels and talks about the book business and the craft¹ of bookselling. Publishers send reps too, to talk up their new books, and if you’re an author with a book to promote, it’s a very special thing to be selected by your publisher to attend Winter Institute. It’s work, of course, and you’ll have to put on clothes and talk about your book to dozens or even hundreds of strangers — bookseller-strangers, admittedly the best kind of stranger — but you will also get to meet other authors who’ve been asked to attend and even take home signed advance copies of their books.

In January of 2020, one million centuries ago, my publisher sent me to Winter Institute, which took place in Baltimore that year. I was there to promote The Fixed Stars, which would come out in August, and one evening I did a book signing in a ballroom with about fifty other authors, each of us behind our own pleated-skirt table with Sharpies and stacks of advance copies of our books. I was familiar with the work of a handful of other writers in the room, but I didn’t know any of them personally, and toward the end of the hour, as the room emptied out, I forced myself to get up and make a loop around the perimeter, nervous-sweating in the air-conditioning, to introduce myself, thank them for their writing, and try to foist The Fixed Stars onto them. I didn’t expect anything to come it, and mostly nothing did, but I wanted to know that I had tried.

When I approached Emma Straub’s table, she was already gathering her bags and putting on her coat over a terrific candy-pink dress, and I remember thinking, By god I am going to say hello before she gets away and I’m going to give her this book even if it’s slicked in the sweat of my own clammy hands and she dumps it in the recycling bin on the way out. And to my surprise, she received it graciously, and she gave me a signed copy of All Adults Here in return, and the very next day she actually read my book on her train ride back to New York and then posted wildly kind things about it on Instagram and eventually even talked it up on the fucking Today Show and a bunch of other places. It’s difficult to imagine a more generous thing a writer could do for another writer. I think it was because of Emma that I knew The Fixed Stars would be okay, that it would find its people, that it would be understood the way I hoped it would.

Today Emma is knee-deep in the work of promoting her latest book, This Time Tomorrow. It’s a novel about a woman named Alice whose life is pretty good, but on the eve of her fortieth birthday, her father is ailing, and she feels as though something is just… missing. When Alice wakes up one morning to find herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday, she gets a chance to answer a question that the rest of us can only guess at: is there anything in the past that she would change, now that she actually can? It’s funny, insightful, thought-provoking, moving — I just loved it. This Time Tomorrow doesn’t come out for a month, but everyone should preorder it, because preorders are vital, stupidly vital, to a book’s success². Preorder it from an independent bookstore, specifically. Actually, what you should really do is preorder from Books Are Magic, the Brooklyn bookstore that Emma and her husband Mike own and operate; that way, you can have Emma sign and personalize it for you.

Thank you to Emma for taking the time to hop on Zoom and chat. My transcription software compiled a list of keywords from our conversation — book feel writing read dad people thinking parents sexy Alice eat life kids reader called memoir hospital places love wanted — and it feels exactly right. There are no spoilers here, but we do talk about some of This Time Tomorrow’s events and themes. What follows has been edited for clarity.

photo by Melanie Dunea

Emma Straub: [Wrangling Zoom] I'm trying to push the right buttons –

Molly Wizenberg: And you're doing it! You're doing it. Hi! Thanks for being here. I imagine you are already well down the line on the book-publicity train.

ES: I am. It’s already a lot, but it’s really just because my kids and I all had Covid, one after another. It wasn’t that bad, but it ate up April. Just swallowed it whole. And now I’m like, fuck.

MW: I’m glad you’re okay.

You know, Covid aside, I wanted to talk about how prolific you are. Your dad [the writer Peter Straub] is also wildly prolific. I don't know what’s going on in your gene pool, Emma. It’s amazing. I was astounded when you announced This Time Tomorrow — I mean, you managed to write a book in lockdown! I know you were a few months into writing a new book when Covid began, but was it this book?

ES: No, no, I was writing a hilarious romp. It was like The Vacationers – the same family on a different trip. And it was supposed to be so fun. It was so fun. I was fifty pages into it in March of 2020. But after that, fun was not really on the menu. I didn’t have any childcare, and my husband was at the bookstore, so there was no way for me to work. When I finally had childcare again in September, October, I just couldn't go back to that book.

Another thing that had happened was my dad went into the hospital. He was there from August of 2020 to just before Thanksgiving. You know how hospitals are: the longer you stay, the more likely you are to get something else, which was what happened. He went in for his heart, but then there's an infection here, there's an infection there. It was a nightmare. But the good part, and the thing that came out of it, was that I would go up there once a week to hang out with him, and we would just talk. We would talk about fiction and writing and books and ourselves and our family, and it was great. It was concentrated time. It was just the two of us alone in a room. 

At one point, I was sort of bemoaning the fact that I didn't know what I was gonna write, and he was like, Oh, you should write a book about a woman visiting her father in the hospital. And I was like, Okay… and then I really started thinking about it, and it just, it just, it made me so happy to write this. I mean, this is a sad book. And it made me so happy to write it, because in it, that was all I was doing: I was hanging out with my dad every day. I mean, it's a novel, a time-travel novel, so it's absurd in many ways. But it really is the most autobiographical thing I think I'll ever write, you know?

MW: I love the way you put that – that you got to hang out with your dad through writing this novel. When I’m writing, I often feel like I'm trying to rebuild rooms and moments from my life so that I can hang out there again. I imagine that the very personal way this story came to you — well, it must have given you lots of openings to live in old scenes again. And then it gave me, as a reader, openings to live in my own old scenes. [When I read about the main character Alice’s high school crush], I inserted my own high school crush there. But sadly, I didn't get to go back and sleep with him.

ES: [Laughs.] You know, we had a lot of conversations, me and my editor and my agent, about whether that was gross or not. Because Alice is forty when she travels back in time, and if you find yourself inside your own 16-year-old body, is it gross [to have sex with your high school crush]? I don't know. We decided that it wasn't. I mean, he’s 18, and she's inside her own body. 

MW: And there are glimmers of her negotiating that within herself, right in the text. I loved the way that you wrote that – that Alice could sort of tune between her two selves, herself at 16 and herself at 40, like tuning into radio stations. 

I want to ask you about New York, where you grew up and where you live. In the book, New York is almost a character in its own right. Though you were locked down there while you wrote the book, was there an aspect of traveling in it, or getting to leave, for you? 

ES: Yes! Getting to leave my house, getting to leave my neighborhood, getting to leave my borough. And most of all, getting to leave 2020. I wanted out of my stressful, fearful, tiny life with my kids. And I wanted to be somewhere where I felt safe and appreciated and happy. And that meant, like, sitting at the kitchen table with my dad, watching Jeopardy! So that's where I went, which meant getting to walk down Broadway, and Columbus Avenue, past all the places that aren't there anymore. And then when I would go into Manhattan, to the hospital where my father was, in Washington Heights, I would drive through the Upper West Side, and Manhattan in those months was a ghost town. It felt post-apocalyptic. I definitely didn't want to be there. So I went to 1996 instead.

MW: Was writing something that you and your dad always had in common, or was there ever a period of your life when you were like, This is his thing, and I don't want any part of it?

ES: I was always reading. I was always reading, and he was always reading. When I think about going on vacation with my parents, I think about sitting next to a pool with my dad – me with a stack of, like, Christopher Pike, and my dad with a stack of books and a notebook. He was always working, every day, and he was always reading. My parents live a five-minute walk from our house, and even now, if he comes over for lunch, or to hang out with the kids, my dad brings a book, just in case they’ll leave them alone for long enough, which you know they will not. As a family, we always had that in common, that books weren’t like important accessories, but appendages. They were attached to us. 

And I loved how hard he worked. It was always very clear to me, how serious he was. It was his life's work. I always saw writing as a job that required total dedication and total self-sufficiency. Self-direction. When you’re a novelist, nobody is ever going to come along and tell you what you’re supposed to do. You just have to do it. 

MW: That's an incredible thing to have seen as a kid – someone who can devote themselves to their work not only because it’s a job with a capital J, but because it's work that they really care about. I hope that's what June takes away from seeing me reading, or seeing me, like, sitting here in my office on Zoom or staring into space while I pound away at a keyboard.

ES: I often think that I'm failing as a parent, because, like, oh, my children don't eat anything, anything, just cheese and bread. Like, it’s a miracle they're still alive. And how much television they watch! And then I think like, okay, but what are the things that I know I'm doing okay? I know they see how important books are, and how hard Mike and I work at the bookstore. I know they see all of that, and other things, too, of course. But I feel like we're showing them that, that work, which is what kids really ingest.

MW: In an interview you did in 2020, you described All Adults Here as a book about being in the center of the Venn diagram between being a parent and a kid. As long as you have parents who are alive, you still inhabit this role of being a child, even as an adult. You are two sides of yourself at the same time. I found myself thinking about that as I read This Time Tomorrow, too. Alice is a full grown adult, but her relationship with her father is the emotional core of the story. 

ES: Alice is in that part of adulthood where you've mostly made your big life decisions. I mean, she's 40, so she has time to do other things if she wants, but she’s already made all of these building-block decisions about who to be with, what job to have, where to live. But her primary relationship is still with her father. She’s still a daughter, all the time. There’s this feeling of being in the middle, understanding that you're in the middle and yet still feeling like, Oh no, but I couldn't possibly be in the middle yet. Because there are so many things that I haven't figured out yet, and there are so many conversations that I haven't had with this other person who is not going to be here forever. 

You know, I was having breakfast this morning with my friend Ada Calhoun, who is just brilliant. She has a new book that comes out in June called Also A Poet. It’s like the sister book to This Time Tomorrow. It's a memoir about her father, who is an art critic and a poet. And he was dying of cancer when she was writing the book – he’d been given six months to live – but like my father, he’s still alive. She wrote this whole book thinking that he was going to die, which is sort of what I did too. It was a way of pre-grieving, you know? I was certainly processing what I was feeling then, but I was also trying to process his death in advance. I mean, of course you can't process someone's death while they're still alive – that's absurd. But you can think about it a lot.

I hope that it helps – you know, when the inevitable occurs. We'll see. I mean, what I know for sure is that the thing I feel most grateful for about completing this crazy project is that I did it. I feel so grateful that my dad has written so many books, because I have them all, and I'll get to read them again, and I'll see all of the parts of him that are in those books. My kids are going to have that too – so many parts of me, in all of my books. And on top of that, they have [This Time Tomorrow], which has me thinking about my dad. All those layers. I hope my kids appreciate that.

MW: People often asked me if I worry about what June will think if and when she reads my books – The Fixed Stars in particular. I know it’s well intentioned, but I suspect that behind this question are a lot of misguided beliefs about what memoir is — as though I just printed out my diary and sold it without a second thought, or without putting in a lot of care to craft the story into a book. I feel proud to have written what I wrote, even the stuff that somebody else might think is compromising or not what kids should know about their parents. 

ES: I think it's an incredible gift. It's an incredible gift to be able to understand your parents, their most complex and thorny investigation of themselves.

MW: And June can choose when to look away, right? I hope.

Speaking of the racier parts of writing, I loved the way you wrote about Alice’s thrill at her own body when she first wakes up and is 16 again. I can't imagine there will be a single reader who doesn't stop at that point in the book and think back fondly on their own long-gone 16-year-old body. 

ES: Oh my god, the jeans that I had! I wore the best clothes.

MW: There are pictures on your Instagram feed that confirm this! Everyone should go look.

ES: I had these amazing skin-tight bell bottoms, and slips that I cut in half, and a tiny little t-shirt. That was very fun to think about while I wrote. I was a pretty healthy teenage girl, but I thought I looked horrible. Thinking about it now, oh my god, I was like a beautiful little angel. Like a marble statue. I mean, what is happening to my body right now? I even exercise now, which I never ever, ever did. 

MW: You have a treadmill, even. You and I once had to appear at the same awards ceremony on Zoom, and you did it while walking on a treadmill and drinking a Negroni and wearing what you described as a ball gown from Target. That’s the kind of multitasking the world needs.

ES: Yes! I can drink a Negroni on my treadmill. That’s great.

MW: That’s something 16-year-olds don’t get to do.

Is there a celebrity who you imagined Tommy [Alice’s high school crush] looking like? Like, maybe Keanu, circa 1996?

ES: No, no. It’s a specific type of boy, an Upper West Side rich boy who lives in this nice building and goes to private school. So he would have a Chris Evans kind of face. A Ryan Reynolds kind of face. He could play lacrosse. [Laughs.] And this boy, he’s tortured. I think he’s tortured by his fate because he knows; he knows he can’t escape the life he’s got ahead of him. 

MW: How do you decide how far to make your sex scenes go? They're always fairly short, never lingering or explicit, but they’re very satisfying. 

ES: I was thinking about this the other day because I was talking to a friend about the types of books that are really popular right now, which I would say are quite sexy. People have always liked a sexy book, but I think right now there are two categories of sexy books that are very popular: literary-sexy, like Sally Rooney or Raven Leilani, and then there are romance-sexy novels, which I’ve also been enjoying for the first time in my life. And I'm like, That’s how you sell a book nowadays! So… why don’t I write a book about my dad where there’s like, almost no sex in it? [Laughs.]

My books have never been romance novels, but romantic relationships are often central to the story. In This Time Tomorrow, they’re just not. That’s not what this book is about. 

MW: But I did find it very satisfying that in the sex we do see Alice having, she takes real agency. That’s a pleasure to read.

ES: I mean, if I could go back in time to my 16-year-old self, man, I would just tell her to take charge. Like, understand her body and how it worked and how to do things that make her feel good. Mmm hmm.

MW: Um, speaking of sexy, I have to tell you this: I love that you got Michael Chabon to blurb This Time Tomorrow. I have been a massive fan of his since I was 16 and first read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh that summer. I’ve had the hots for him ever since. It’s sort of creepy, because when I think about it, he looks a little like the men on my dad's side of the family. So I try not to think about that. Michael Chabon is brilliant. And of course he should blurb your fantastic novel about time travel. 

ES: We've hosted him at the bookstore, and I've known him for a number of years – not well, but I wrote to him and I said, “You don’t have to do this, but I just think you would like this book.” His father had recently died, and I thought it would move him. He said such nice things. 

MW: He did. He said your book was a “beautifully-made, elegant music box of a novel that sets in motion its clever clockwork of delight.” I MEAN.

MW: Speaking of delight, in an interview in the spring of 2020, you said of being in lockdown with your family: “I want to keep giving people things that will bring them either like solace or joy, you know? I also feel like it's my job as a writer, too.” 

That feels spot-on for how your books make me feel, and I want to ask you more about it. When I was writing my first book, I remember listening to a tremendous amount of Radiohead, because their music never fails to make me feel a whole spectrum of emotions, and I remember thinking, I want this book to make people feel things the way I feel when I listen to, like, mid-career Radiohead. Like, Amnesiac, or In Rainbows. So I wanted to ask you: is there something out in the world – some music or art, maybe – that makes you feel the way you want your work to make other people feel?

ES: What comes to mind most immediately is the room I most like to be in, and that room is in the book, actually. It’s the whale room at the Museum of Natural History. When I walk into that room, I feel like I’ve just had an hour of therapy. I feel calm and content and interested, and peaceful. I don’t really know if that’s how I want people to feel after reading my work. But I want it to be satisfying. I want it to be satisfying and amusing. I want to make people laugh, and I want to make people cry. I love that whale so much that I have it on my arm. [Emma holds up her arm to show a whale tattoo just below the elbow.] Now they're doing vaccinations underneath the whale. I wish I could have done it there. I went to the Javits Center. The Javits Center does not make me feel peaceful. 

MW: Okay, last question: since you are such a tireless advocate for other people's books, what's the last book you read that just left a mark on you?

ES: That’s hard. Also A Poet, Ada Calhoun’s book. I really, really loved it – like, with every cell in my body. Oh, and I’ll give you one more. It’s called Funny You Should Ask, by a woman named Elissa Sussman. It’s a romance novel about a journalist who writes a profile of a hunky movie star, and it’s about their relationship. 

MW: Anything else we should say or do? 

ES: No, you're just the best, and this is so nice. I'm just glad we're friends. 

MW: Me too. Thank you. I'm so thrilled that we had this time. And I know this book is going to go off like a rocket ship.

ES: Well, from your lips…

1. It is not just a business; it’s an art!

2. Seriously, it’s nuts how important preorders are. Read all about it: https://bookriot.com/what-are-preorders/