Hello, new friends!

One drawing of me in a La-z-boy and suddenly there are a lot more of you!

Hi, new friends. And hi, old friends. Substack just sent out my sweet little edition of Substack Reads, and there are about six hundred more of you in the last twenty minutes. So I thought it might behoove me to introduce myself.

One of these is my husband and one of these is Joey McIntyre.

I’m Emma! I will be 43 next month but since I turned 40 in April of 2020, I haven’t actually mentally gotten past 40 yet. Physically, I’m 107, but mentally and emotionally I’m still 40.

I’m the author of a short story collection (some sexy, some sad, some about creepy neighbors), a novel about the Hollywood studio system, a novel about a family on vacation in Mallorca, a novel about sex and music and food, a novel about a geriatric bisexual, adult siblings, and goat cheese, a time travel novel about my father dying, and a picture book about hats.

Some of my books in various editions— UK and Italian versions of This Time Tomorrow, with some Modern Lovers creeping behind.

I also own a bookstore in Brooklyn with my husband. It’s called Books Are Magic and all the links above will take you there. There are now two locations and yesterday I sent this tweet that I thought was very hilarious:

Someone responded and said that they didn’t like we were turning into US Weekly, but I think they were missing the point. It’s not just that they’re both famous actors, it’s that they’re both guys named Paul.

I started this Substack because my mother is on Louise Penny’s mailing list, and I thought to myself, if Louise Penny has a mailing list, why don’t I have a mailing list? Where I can update my readers in a professional but friendly way about my various bibs and bobs? But then, of course, I remembered that I have never been professional a day in my life, and instead started writing about my favorite Keanu Reeves movies and what I was eating on book tour and whatever else crossed my mind. This is not an organized space. This is me, chasing my children around, talking to my cats, writing thank you letters, wearing bright colors, and being a bit of a joyous mess.

This is one of the stickers that Todd Colby made for my dad’s memorial. Each sticker miraculously turns any surface its on into a memorial. Isn’t that lovely?

At least that was the idea. My father, Peter Straub, died in September, and since then, I’ve written a lot about grief and loss and being sad. I’m still doing all the other stuff, but now I’m doing it While Sad. So you can expect a lot of that, too.

I like poems and gossip and the color pink, but as I told my 9 yr old on the way to school this morning, if you have pink skin and get a pink bead on your nosering, it will just look like you have a giant pimple, a lesson I learned the hard way. So you can also expect Good Tips like that.

This is the Power Corner of my office, right behind my head. Above, you will see Sophie Blackall’s pink book and cigarette, Tamara Shopsin’s Thank U print, and a drawing Carson Ellis made for the movie Emma. If you put these three pieces of art into some sort of machine, I would come out the other end.

In honor of Substack sharing my goofy answers, here is a page from the greatest book I own, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life. I’m happy to have you here. Thanks for reading.