On a New Kids on the Block cruise, Emma Straub found a way past grief
Emma Straub wrote her 2022 novel “This Time Tomorrow” — about a woman who is able to return to her 16th birthday and spend time with her father as a healthy young man — as her own father’s health was declining. It was a love letter to the father-daughter bond. A few months later, her father, the novelist Peter Straub, died.
She was deep in grief when an advertisement for a New Kids on the Block fan cruise caught her attention. She ended up among the thousands of fans who set sail on a four-day cruise with the boy band on board. They performed intimate concerts and other events were organized for their supporters to mingle. Straub decided then and there it was perfect setting for her next book.
“For the first time, I had the whole idea,” said the author of “Modern Lovers,” “All Adults Here” and “The Vacationers.” “I knew it was a book. I could write it and I would have the time of my life doing it.”
The result was “American Fantasy,” released Tuesday. Her protagonist is Annie, a newly single empty-nester who agrees to embark on a fan cruise for a ’90s boy band and ends up forming a connection with one of its members.
Straub spoke with The Associated Press about her new book. Responses have been condensed for clarity and brevity.
AP: Why build your story around a fan cruise?
STRAUB: My everyday life is quite small. I walk the same loop, from my bookstore to my kid’s school and home. When I leave that, I’m reminded there’s a great big world out there. The cruise in particular struck me as novelistic from the get-go. You have a certain number of people trapped together in a small space for a certain number of days. That’s a novel right there.
AP: What did you think when you got there?
STRAUB: I went in feeling like an observer. A fan, but really an observer, because it all felt so foreign. Pretty quickly, I realized I wasn’t any better than anyone else there. I eavesdropped on everything and knew 100% of the New Kids references they were talking about. What impressed me was how much these women had spent so much time and energy planning their experience. They wore costumes, decorated the doors of their cabins and made gifts for each other. These were middle-aged women who had given themselves the gift of doing something purely for their own pleasure. I had never seen anything quite like it.
AP: Your main character, Annie, is 50 and going through a divorce. Why put her at that crossroads?
STRAUB: I have so many women friends who have made enormous changes between 40 and 55. They have changed careers, gone back to school, moved across the country, gotten divorced and gotten remarried. I grew up thinking of middle age as a downward slope. That’s just not true. We are all still making choices and doing things for the first time. I wanted to spend time with a character who was in that struggle of realizing that and ultimately able to embrace it.
AP: What other research did you do for the book?
STRAUB: I got to know Joe McIntyre from the New Kids. He is smart and funny, and introspective. I wanted to know what it’s like to be a middle-aged man who has had this life, and a relationship with these other men who you’ve known for 40 years, whether you love them or hate them, you’re like truly stuck in this work environment. You are yoked to these other men for your entire life. What does that feel like? How does it feel to have these kinds of fans? How it feels to grow up in the public eye? And I was able to ask him all these questions. He was so generous with me.
AP: You and your husband co-own the Brooklyn bookstores Books Are Magic. What have you learned about the publishing world as a bookseller?
STRAUB: In an alternate world, I would be able to say, the things that are selling the most right now are murdery thrillers with this kind of protagonist or, you know, romantasy with dragons or whatever, so I’m going to do that. But, that’s not how writing works, you know? If I’ve learned anything, it is that the best book you can write is always the one that is most personal and most authentic to you. And so, alas, I’ve yet to have a dragon in one of my books.