"I really wanted to explore how all these small indignities pile up for women over time and what an attempt at revenge might look like."

Emily J Smith on drafting "in a fit of rage", plotting by spreadsheet, and her killer debut, NOTHING SERIOUS

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Emily’s propulsive thriller, out now.

---

Me: Hi!!

Emily: Hi!

How are you doing? Huge congrats on NOTHING SERIOUS!

Thank you so much!! And thank you for having me, I'm a huge fan of your newsletter. I'm Ok! 🙂 It’s been a while, almost five months, which is crazy, so I feel a little more stabilized.

Thank you so much for chatting with me! Publication season really is a whirlwind, I'm glad you're off the rollercoaster now.

Omg it really is! The first few months were wild, I loved going on tour and the adrenaline was fun, also finally talking about the book with people after working on it for so long, and hearing from readers was incredible. But then I had a kind of depressive slump after that initial high. Now I'm a bit more settled, not constantly stressing that I’m not doing enough, and mostly just thinking about what’s next.

Yeah, the post publication blues are so, so real. But before I ask more about that—can you share what NOTHING SERIOUS is about?

Yes! So to me, the book is a later-in-life coming of age story about a 35-year-old woman untangling from internalized misogyny after a lifetime working in tech, but it’s all wrapped up in a thriller / mystery of sorts.

The main character, Edie, has been (unsuccessfully) on dating apps forever and is somewhat miserable in her engineering job at a tech company, despite years working to get that job in order to financially support her mother. When the book opens, her best friend and long-time crush, Peter—a multi-millionaire tech bro—reveals that he broke up with his long-term girlfriend.

Edie is over the moon; finally she and Peter can be together. But instead he immediately meets an amazing woman on a dating app—a gorgeous, feminist writer—who even Edie becomes infatuated with. But shortly after she and Peter start seeing one another, this woman is found dead in her apartment. Edie becomes obsessed with figuring out what happened to her and what Peter had to do with it.

So juicy. What was the inspiration for it?

Honestly, much of this story (aside from the mysterious death) is pulled from my actual life. Like Edie, I studied computer engineering, went to business school, and worked in tech before getting into writing in my thirties, and so my life was full of men who had been very dear friends to me, had shaped me as a person, but who also, the more I opened my eyes, were pretty insufferable.

There’s an egg-freezing scene in the book (I don’t have kids and the question of whether or not to have children is much explored in the novel), where Peter is helping Edie administer her final fertility shot, but instead of watching the instructional videos, he’s swiping Tinder.

This really happened to me with my best guy friend and it was when the idea for the book first hit. This tension between a man being so eager to help but also so deeply self-involved. Also how different our worlds were in that moment—me spending five figures freezing my eggs for a baby I didn’t even know if I wanted, shooting myself with hormones alone every night, and him so happily swiping on a bounty of younger women that he couldn’t tear himself away from his phone.

I was really interested in exploring how, especially as I inched towards forty, I saw how the lives of many of my male friends had gotten easier with age, whereas typical trajectories of “success”—staying motivated in a capitalist system, finding a committed partner, having children, accumulating wealth, garnering cultural respect—seemed more challenging for women, or at least more complex. I really wanted to explore how all these small indignities pile up for women over time and what an attempt at revenge might look like.

Okay, lots to unpack here (in the best way possible)! First off, let's talk more about men in tech and how the world rewards and punishes ambitious men and women. My first thought was: CARELESS PEOPLE, but a murder mystery!

Have any of your tech bro friends read it?