HARPERCOLLINS BOUGHT MY NOVEL!!!!!

My debut, NOTHING SERIOUS, will be on shelves in Feb 2025.

First of all, I’m dead. On the ground. It does not feel real that my novel will be published, in bookstores, for anyone to read. But here we are:

Update: You can now pre-order NOTHING SERIOUS here!!

The image above is a visual writers know well. To see this card posted on the internet is to understand that a book has been sold, a wish has been granted, the poster has, in some sort of rigid but real sense, become legitimized. I’ve dreamed about this image, with my name in it, for a very long time.

Writing is excruciatingly lonely. Novels, especially. You have to be totally delusional to stare at a word document for years and years, spinning sentences into some form of a story, and believing, despite all the odds that 1) you’ll turn the mess of a document into a book, 2) someone else will ever want to read said book, and 3) one of the few remaining companies in a much dying industry will somehow want to publish it. THEN to do all this without any indication whatsoever that you have even a little bit of a shot—no MFA, no contracts, no agent, just you and your Word Doc. Is…utterly insane. Which is how I felt for years and years, until a few months ago.

In August, my agent reached out two weeks after we started submitting my book to publishers (I finally got an agent in April after 42 cold queries; you can read about that part of the journey here). Apparently, an editor at HarperCollins was interested and bringing it to her editorial board. Two agonizing days later, I heard that the editorial board loved it (!!!) and the editor wanted to speak with me about my vision and inspiration and where I saw my book sitting on the shelves (as if my answer would be anything other than: wherever the hell you want it to, HarperCollins!!). I performed the call in a near out-of-body experience, thinking it went well enough, but also knowing in my core that rejection was always around the corner.

The next day, I expected nothing, busying myself with work. I was on a Zoom call when I noticed a notification in the top right corner of my screen: “Offer for Emily J. Smith.” I did not allow myself to click on the email. I was an active participant in the video call and I was sure my face would twist and tears would run, if they weren’t already. And I deserved the freedom to react. So I waited. Then, the moment I clicked that big red “End Call” button, I lost it.

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I used to feel guilty about wanting to be published, or read at all. If you love writing, some people (who were not writers) would say, then the act of writing should be enough. The implication was that I was not a real writer if my ambitions were to be read. To understand what a “real writer” was (and if I could maybe be one), I listened to podcasts with writers constantly. It was Claire Messud, whose novel, A Woman Upstairs, was one of the first books that made me want to write, who said very matter-of-factly that of course she wrote to be read; writing for her was about communication and connection, pursuits contingent on readers. I also learned that other writers—most, actually—found writing miserable most of the time. I had assumed that if words didn’t magically flow from my fingers, I wasn’t a real writer. Mostly, these podcasts made clear that the whole notion of a “real writer” was bullshit. If you write, you’re a writer. So I kept doing that.

This book, at its core, is a coming of age story of a single, 30-something, career-driven woman in San Francisco. It should be no surprise that it is largely inspired by my own life and the people in it. My editor (it feels wild that I can say that now—my editor—a real human to work with on my Word doc) said on our first call that she loved how true the book felt, which, to me, was the ultimate compliment. But what I also liked about writing this novel was the ability to play around. Clearly, not all the plot points are real; it’s an exaggeration and morphing of the reality involved—no side character is any one person in my life—and that was freeing. But I won’t deny that when I talk about the main “character,” I often slip into first person.

I got the itch to write a novel in my mid-30s when my life wasn’t going as planned. I couldn’t seem to find joy in any of the typical paths I assumed I would, the paths so many others seemed to. I’ve heard a lot of artist-types say they never had a plan, but I did: kill at my career, get a boyfriend, get rich, get married, have kids, be a “girlboss” (these were the Lean In days), etc. But over time nothing felt right. I started to realize how much my life was built, not on what I actually wanted, but what I thought would impress others. The truth was, I hated wasting time on dating, I wasn’t satisfied with work even in my “dream job,” and did I even really want kids? Instead, I felt a compulsive need to be alone with my thoughts, to sit and observe and attempt to process the things around me by creating something of my own. Things not going as planned was the start of figuring out what actually made me happy, and writing sat at the center of that.

It was ridiculous to think I could write a book. I had only started reading novels in any serious way a few years earlier; previously I generally stuck to business and self-help books, thinking fiction was a waste of time. But writing felt like a way to turn my confusion into something tangible, like that story where a man weaves straw into gold (that’s the only detail of Rumpelstiltskin I remember). And it did feel like that, taking my confusion and wrangling it into words, which, even if I grew more and more confused as I pulled the thread, felt, just in the act of pulling, like something close to clarity.

Here is what I know: Getting a book published is another step in a long line of arguably meaningless markers in publishing. Very little will change. People create amazing works of art that take years and years and then they disappear because no one can care more than fifteen seconds about anything. I’m lucky to know enough writers at this point to see that cycle play out first hand, which is depressing and also deeply comforting. There are mounds of talented writers, far more talented than me, getting rejected every day because an agent doesn’t know how to sell their work, or an editor can’t see the vision for it, or any of the other thousands of excuses writers know well. A publisher acknowledging my work as worthy took a lot of work but also, of course, luck. The day my book is published will feel like the most important day in the world, and then it will be the next day.

What I also know: how very much I needed this. I poured myself into the first novel I tried to write for almost five years, knowing nothing about what I was doing, and no one thought they could sell it. So I stopped opening that Word doc (and the fifteen different versions of it) and started fresh on a new one—this one— with similar themes, but also (crucially) with an actual plot. In between all that, I tried four different versions of an essay collection proposal. If this novel went nowhere and I had to go back to the drawing board, I don’t think I’d believe in myself enough to start from scratch again.

That early insanity that allowed me to keep sitting down to write has worn thin—as dreams generally do. I’ve seen up close how fucking hard, and, to an extent, arbitrary it is to make any kind of dent in the writing world. More than anything, this milestone is a much needed wind in my sails. Now, every morning since the day I got the news, I remind myself that someone who knows something about writing thinks that I should keep going, and will even pay me a little money to do it. It’s a voice telling me that I’m not totally insane and I can keep doing what I love, when self-doubt is always nudging me to walk away.