Writer Emma Straub discusses her year, her career—and what’s up next

By Brian Braiker

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If a favorite bakery or bookstore in your neighborhood closed down, chances are you’d mourn a little and move on with your life. That’s not how Emma Straub rolls. When her beloved Book Court—a Cobble Hill institution—shut down in 2016, she had a choice to make: Pack up and move, or open her own store.

“This sounds absolutely bonkers because it is: The way we talked about it was, we could either open a bookstore or we could move to be closer to a different bookstore,” she says. “And, at least in my head, staying where we were and opening a book store sounded like the much easier thing to do.” And so she and her husband Michael hung a shingle. They opened Books are Magic the following year and it has itself become a neighborhood beacon.

At that time, Straub had two kids under three and a bourgeoning career as a New York Times-bestselling author, so opening a business was a perfectly irrational thing to do. But like the characters in her books, doing the rational thing would make for a less compelling storyline. Or at least not as fun or delightful—or fraught—as Straub makes her own life out to be on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” where she is this week’s guest.

Straub’s fifth best-seller, “All Adults Here,” is newly out in paperback, one year after its release in the early months of the pandemic. It tells the story of three generations of the Strick family from a small town up the Hudson, all of whom have little secrets they’ve been keeping from each other.

“When the book came out, so many people were like, ‘How do you understand what it’s like to live in a small town?’” she says. “I’m like, ‘Do you understand I live three blocks away from my parents; I walk my children to school, which is the school that I went to, and I also walk to my small community book store?’ My whole life takes place in like a two mile radius.”

In conversation Straub is as charming, easy going and accessible as her writing—and like her writing she can be sly and wry and almost sneakily profound. Still, “All Adults Here” did not get the book tour or fanfare that it might have in a normal year, but then nothing did. Quarantining did allow her to strip her life down to the essentials and, in some ways, return to the do-it-yourself roots of her early career, when he self-published her first collection of stories while selling books at Book Court (and before that worked as an assistant for the band the Magnetic Fields, doing a little bit of everything).

“I like to do everything myself and it does feel like the pandemic has lent itself to that in certain ways: going back to really doing things by hand at ground level. Because ultimately it’s so much more satisfying to do that than to, like, tweet,” she says on the podcast, though life in lockdown was hardly identical to the low-fi early aughts. “Having no childcare at all and being totally alone with two very wild children for many months was … a lot.”

Straub is herself the daughter of a novelist, suspense and horror writer Peter Straub, who struggled at first with passing the torch. (“Were there competitive feelings? Yes. Were they coming from me? No.”) She grew up in Manhattan and attended schools in Brooklyn, where she settled after college. “Starting when I was like 14, I was really just loose in the city streets and on the subway,” she says. “Obviously it was before cell phones so my friends and I would just roam the streets in like packs of wild dogs going from pay phone to pay phone, and diner to diner, and it was fabulous.”

On the podcast, we discuss all of that, plus she hints at what she’s working on now, something with a science fiction twist. “I started something new in October which was all of a sudden a book about time travel and a 40-year-old woman with a dying father,” she says. “It’s strange to say I’ve written a book about time travel and it’s my most autobiographical book yet, and yet it’s true.”

Listen for more, wherever you get your podcasts.