Emma Straub's Newsletter

All in the same day! Let’s pretend my glasses are clean, okay? Okay! Please meet Bluey. I love my pink suit so much and I also can never look at it again, I have worn it 700 times in the last two months and I just can’t take it anymore. I went to Argent and bought this blue guy and he’s my new fave, I also love shops where they offer you water, it makes me feel like Julia Roberts in the good shopping scene in Pretty Woman.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably have a few favorite novelists—writers whose books you buy already knowing that you will love them, writers for whom each new book feels like you’re a kid on Christmas morning. I don’t just mean writers you like, whose books you buy. I mean writers you love, whose books move inside your body and stay.

Let’s start with the anxiety, shall we? I am going to Australia in May for the Melbourne Writers Festival—if you live in Melbourne, come! I will be talking with Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow x 4!—and I had to renew my passport. Easy, right? Wrong. I sent it off in January, and now it’s April, and still no passport. Last week I truly began to spiral out of control.

I just did the math and only 1/6 of the books I read in 2022 were by men. It’s actually more than I thought it would be! The reason I mention it is that I just read two (TWO) books by men at the same time and they are both good and I wanted to tell you all about them, and then I had a little moment, like, whoa, two books by men. In a row! True story: when my father was dying I told him that I would read more books by men. LOL.

Hi, new friends. And hi, old friends. Substack just sent out my sweet little edition of Substack Reads, and there are about six hundred more of you in the last twenty minutes. So I thought it might behoove me to introduce myself. I’m Emma! I will be 43 next month but since I turned 40 in April of 2020, I haven’t actually mentally gotten past 40 yet. Physically, I’m 107, but mentally and emotionally I’m still 40.

This week is my father’s memorial service, on what would have been his 80th birthday. I’m also trying to work—at the store, on my screenplay—and you know, be a person. I feel a little bit like an octopus, if an octopus had two jobs and two children and was also a wedding planner. One thing I’ve been doing, happily, through all of this, is reading.

This week is Winter Institute, the annual independent booksellers’ conference. It’s like the Super Bowl for people who don’t know the rules of football. (Just kidding, of course I know the rules— one concussion, you win, two concussions, you lose! Or something.) This year’s conference was in Seattle, and because I spent last week on vacation in California with my family, I had a day or so in LA on my own before heading north. Here is the most expensive room service sandwich I have ever eaten.

Hi there. I was planning to write a goofy newsletter all about television shows but then yesterday morning I was in the bookstore reading poems and crying and thought, no, that’s better. So this is going to be about sad poems. Not just sad poems—death poems. Even within the subsection of sad poems that is death poems, there are so many kinds! Dead mother poems, dead father poems, dead husband poems, dying self poems! I wanted new poems—I love Saeed Jones’s poems about his mother, and Tracy K.

Whew, my friends, it has been a WEEK! I was home! My child had a wonderful birthday. And then I had an epic Storytime at Books Are Magic, where many children wore hats, and I made this face at all of them. Then I got on a plane to Miami, where I had two of the most packed days of my tour. Day One was for grown-ups, starting with the truly fabulous Brickell Literary Society, which was my favorite kind of event: hundreds of (mostly) women is statement necklaces.

Whew! I had my first good night’s sleep in about a hundred years—allow me to HEARTILY recommend the Hotel Zaza, which had a fruit plate waiting for me. You see? I’m not only the president of the club, I’m also a client.