G O O D R E AD
The write stuff
I M A G E A P P E A R S C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D E D W Y N N H O U K G A L L E R Y, N E W Y O R K
When Emma Straub was a struggling novelist, her best-selling novelist father showered her with praise. But after her success began to rival his? That’s a different story (literally).
I W R O T E M Y F I R S T N OV E L when I was 22. It was a mess—Wuthering Heights set in my high school, with a fire and some incest between unknowing siblings. I didn’t know how to properly format dialogue or how to structure a plot or how to do anything else. Those were all details I planned to work out later—small potatoes. What mattered to me was that I wanted to be a novelist—and voilà, I had written a novel. I gave the book to my father to read, and within a day he left me a voice mail saying that it was terrific and that I was going to sell it for $300,000. This wasn’t just totally pie-in-the-sky enthusiasm. Unlike most supportive parents, who taught French or counted out change at the bank, he knew the industry. My father was (and is) a successful novelist, so successful that he has never had to work
JUNE 2015
another job, a very rare thing in today’s publishing landscape. He’s published more than 20 books, most of them novels, most of them best sellers—the kinds of books you could buy in the bookstore or at the airport or even at the supermarket checkout counter, when such things existed. He wrote his first novel in his late 20s and sent it off to a single publisher, who bought it. I wish I could say the same was true for me, that such luck ran in the family. Instead, and rather quickly, the book my father had so sweetly praised was rejected by
Photograph by Abelardo Morell
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