Poured Over: Emma Straub on This Time Tomorrow

“That was really what I wanted to get at. The relationships that you have with the people who you love so much, and who you’re so close with that you don’t have to talk to them all the time.” All of Emma Straub’s novels have big beating hearts, no matter who or what or where or when she’s writing about. This Time Tomorrow is her “autobiographical time travel novel” and it’s an absolute delight. Emma joins us on the show to talk about why she writes, giving herself permission to try something new, how she set her rules for time travel (and how she stays grounded), her horrifying teenage diaries, bookselling and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and bookseller guest Becky.

Featured Books:

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures by Emma Straub

The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I am so excited to be hanging out with Emma Straub who’s one of my favorite humans on the planet. I really, really appreciate you. She’s a writer. She’s a bookseller. She’s a good literary citizen. I mean, all of these things that you’d like to see out in the world, but Hey, lady, how are you?

Emma Straub: Hi Miwa. I’m so happy. I’m so happy to talk to you. I just, you know, speaking of good literary citizens, I think that you do so much. And I think that people don’t even like understand like, I feel like you’re sort of like the Wizard of Oz. You are like the Wizard of Oz of Barnes and Noble, where like, people just think that like these things happen. And I’m like, yeah, it’s Miwa.

B&N: I have some really amazing. I have some really, really amazing colleagues who I’m very fond of.

ES: Of course, I’m sure you have an excellent team. But just from my point of view, you are the person who makes excellent choices for Barnes and Noble. And in making those choices, you really boost so many writers, you help so many debut writers have their careers that sounds like hyperbolic, maybe, but I really don’t think it is you really help so many people on their way. Myself included. And just thanks.

B&N: Thank you for the kind words. Laura Lamont came out in 12. We picked it for the Discover program, then. And this was not sort of your standard debut, you decided to write a slightly historical kind of novel that takes us from Wisconsin to Hollywood with a woman that I always thought of as more Lucy Ricardo, but apparently is much more Jennifer Jones, the actress. She’s her own person, but nonetheless. And I remember thinking, Oh, this is just fun, and it’s smart. And it’s unexpected, and I cannot believe how invested I am in this woman.

ES: Thanks, my little Laura.

B&N: Obviously, we’re gonna get to the new book, we are going to get to This Time Tomorrow. But I wanted to start with Laura, not just because that’s when you and I met. But also I really want to ask you why you write?

ES: Well, thank you for starting out with the softballs.
B&N: Ah, you know, you know.

ES: You know, it’s a really hard question. And I think that I have a different answer now than I would have in 2012, I think when I wrote my first novel, and the reason that that was my first novel was because I was filled with ambition, pure ambition. And I wrote because I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted that life and like, I wanted to walk into Barnes and Noble and see a huge wall of my books. And writing was always the way I had expressed myself. And what gave me the most pleasure. But now, a decade later, I can tell you that like writing this time tomorrow, it was like the purest writing experience I have ever had. Because I had a book under contract at Riverhead, I was about 50, or 60 pages into a novel when in March of 2020. And I had to abandon that book. I mean, just because I was home with my kids. And Mike was at the store, like, you know, I there was, there was no working happening. But then in the fall when I was able to write again, when I had Child Care again, I couldn’t go back to that book, because it just didn’t make sense to me anymore at the time. And it was the first time in a decade that what I was working on really answered that question like, Why do I write? And it turned out that the answer was that I write because it helps my brain process things. It brings me pleasure. And it really helps like this time tomorrow, I think is both funny and sad. And I wrote it alone. Obviously, everyone writes novels. Most people write novels alone, but like, I wrote it completely in my own little quarante pandemic world. And it was the place where I got to come to get away from my family to get away from my bookstore, to get away from my reality, and laugh and cry and just be fully somewhere else. It was the best writing experience of my life.

B&N: I’m so happy to hear that because I love this book. And I love Alice, her dad Leonard is pretty cool. And she’s got some great friends Sam and Tommy who pop up who love these characters. It’s a really small cast. I mean, for you. This is a really small cast, which we’re going to come to that in a second. But would you set up this time tomorrow because it has an excellent premise. It is so much fun, you balanced real life. There’s some very funny happy bits and then there’s some bits that we’ve all or are about to start staring at with aging parents.

ES: Yeah. So this time tomorrow is my autobiographical time travel book. It’s about a woman named Alice Stern, who is 40, almost nearly on the cusp of turning 40. And she lives in her hometown of New York City. And she works at the prep school that she attended as a kid and her beloved science fiction writer, Father, Leonard Stern is dying, and everything kind of sucks. I mean, like her life is okay. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. She goes out for dinner with her best friend for her birthday. And even that kind of sucks. She gets too drunk, and she passes out. And when she wakes up, it’s the morning of her 16th birthday in 1996. Her dad is in his late 40s, young and healthy, and that’s the book and it sounds funny like and I recognize that it’s funny to say it’s my autobiographical time travel novel, but it’s true. Even though Alice and Leonard are not me and my dad, you know, because I didn’t want to write a memoir, I don’t want to write a memoir. So it is a novel, and I therefore had the fun of using my imagination to make these characters come to life. It’s This Time Tomorrow.

B&N: It’s really, really fun because the details are there from posters and mixtapes. But also New York, 1996. New York, I hate to report does not exist in any way, shape, or form. It’s gone. The only place that exists is in movies, and television and novels and our imagination 90s New York was so special and so weird. And it’s just never going to exist again like that. So that was part of the pleasure for me. Obviously reading This Time Tomorrow is seeing that landscape again, even though I tend not to go north of 23rd Street if I don’t have to. I will own that I will own I am one of those people. I’m like, Oh, I have to go north. But let’s talk about Alice’s world for a second. Because I think it’s really important that she’s not miserable, but she doesn’t know what’s wrong. And there’s this little nag at the back of her brain. But it’s not that she’s single. And in fact, she says no to a dude that asks her out, she’s like, No, that’s not what I want. And her jobs, okay, but it’s not quite what she’d planned. And I don’t know. But I’m not a planner. I’m not one of those people who does five year plans. No. But there is this sort of malaise. And on top of it, her dad is ailing. So she’s in that exact point where you don’t really get to be young anymore. And all of the measurements are kind of external, like she’s watching her friends, children grow up. And that’s always weird. Watching your parents age and watching your friend’s children, or your own children age. Those are markers of time, there’s nothing like.

ES: It was important for me to like, make this book as true to life as possible. You know, I wasn’t interested in making Alice’s life dramatically terrible. I thought that the regular everyday traumas that we all suffer, parents getting old and dying, those sorts of things were enough. I wanted it to be small. And you know, as you said, this is my smallest cast in quite a while. And I love a big boisterous family. I love family relationships and all that I love an ensemble. But it just felt so right to really slow down because I was slowed down anyway. And just to focus, you know, just to really pay attention and to have Alice’s uncertainty about her career and her romantic life and her changing friendships and her aging father, you know, that, to me, that was enough. That was enough to focus on. I mean, I think that you could look at those things, each of them forever, you know, like, it just seemed like more than enough worries for her. It just really gave me space, like it gave me space to just have Alice and Leonard, walk down Broadway together, you know, like that sort of physical proximity and quiet. That was really what I wanted to get at. The relationships that you have with the people who you love so much, and who you’re so close with that you don’t have to talk to them all the time. You know that like, I mean, I can walk into my parent’s apartment, which is a few blocks away, and I immediately like throw my jackets on the floor, kick off my shoes, open their refrigerator. And that’s like probably before I say hello, because I don’t have to, you know, I don’t have to announce myself. I don’t have to be polite. I can be quiet and just be that’s really what I wanted the chance to do in this book that I really haven’t done before. It’s like let there be quiet.

B&N: And quiet, it’s hard to represent well on the page. So you had to get very, very clever about the ways that you did this. But can we talk about the structure of the book for a second, because you can set your own rules for time travel, which you do, and it’s great, and it’s fun, but Alice goes back to her birthday at age 16. Here she is, with two friends. There’s Sam. And there’s Tommy. And I just want to talk about those characters for a second because it’s clear, you know Alice, inside out upside down. However, much of Alice is Emma and Emma is Alice. We’re just going to let people wonder about that piece of it. But with Sam and with Tommy, and their relationship to Alice, and how it changes through this book. We talk about them for a second, when did they show up for you?

ES: Yeah, so it is fiction. But both of them are, I would say sort of composite characters based on friends of Biden, like Sam, there are certain things about Sam that are based on the woman who was my best friend, from the time I was, like, I would say, like seventh grade through 12th grade ish. It’s her apartment that she grew up in, and her mom, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, because of the way the last couple of years have just like totally messed up life for all of us is that I knew my friend’s parents and their apartments, so well. And my kids just don’t maybe they’re still a little bit young for this, but like, my kids just don’t have that kind of relationship with their friend’s parents because of the pandemic, like we weren’t like in a pod, or whatever that was. So even though they might go over their friends houses, it’s really not the same as you know, what I had in the 80s, which was like, Yes, I’ll go to my friend’s house on 121st street and, and just like, be part of their family for that sleepover, or whatever, or go on vacation with them, or, you know, that sort of thing. And I was really thinking about, like those friendships and those apartments, and just my like, Upper West Side world, which was so much about being really intimate with other people’s families, it was a really nice, nice place to visit. Actually, tomorrow, I have a reunion at my elementary school and middle school on 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. And I was emailing yesterday with this woman who was in my class who, she and I were the two tallest girls in our grade. It was a very small school. So we all had to be on every team. So she and I were the two centers on our basketball team. And I was, as you may imagine, and be too polite to assume, I was terrible. I was a terrible basketball player. But my friend, Bethany, was a great basketball player. And she went on to be on the New York Liberty and still works for the WNBA. It’s fine, it’s fine.

B&N: You play with nostalgia, in a way in this book that’s charming, and smart, and funny, and not slightly terrifying, because there are some folks right now who have a different sense of nostalgia in the world. And it is alarming. I understand that there’s a level of comfort and fun, but you’re doing more in this book than just playing with the past. And you’re asking, do our insides really genuinely reflect our outsides? Like, who are we? So what did you find out about yourself? And about Alice and Sam and Tommy and Leonard while you were writing this book?

ES: I mean, it’s tricky, right? Because I think one of the things that we are told, certainly when we’re young is that things don’t really matter. Like you have a miserable high school experience. Like it doesn’t matter if you get bullied as a kid, everything will be fine. You know, like, I think children and young people are often told to just sort of brush things off and move forward. And even now, like as an adult, when I make mistakes, when I do something badly, like I sort of tell myself that too like, Oh, it’s okay. It’s okay. You can regroup and move on, you know, you’ll not yell at your child so loudly the next time or whatever it is, but that’s not really true that none of those things matter. It’s not true that you can totally leave your past behind and just move on. It’s all of those things that add up to who you actually are as a person. And you know, not to sound like some sort of like quasi spiritual like Instagram influencer, everything matters and all of those things really do salud. Fight Like I’m thinking of like, you know, in Terminator two, where like, all the mercury comes together and the bad guy like, deformed, like it’s like that. It’s like that that’s all of our experiences good and bad. In the book, Alice tries other things, part of the fun that I had was having Alice able to go back and forth that she’s not 40 for half the book and then 16 for a third of the book and then 40 again, at the end, she figures out how she can go back and forth, and in doing that, she’s able to really take the flashiness of time travel out of it. I think. This is not like a go back in time kill baby Hitler type time travel, this is the opposite of that. It’s like, go back in time, sit at the kitchen table. Watch Jeopardy.

B&N: I think it is exactly as you say. It’s all of those little moments that add up bit by bit that ultimately make us and your characters who we are. Yeah. Did you have a favorite moment?

ES: In the book? Or in writing the book?

B&N: Both? Those are two separate things.

ES: Yeah. Yeah. I guess my favorite moment in writing the book was giving myself permission to try something new. And to see that yeah, I am 42. On Monday, yes, I have written books, you know, that have certain things in common that people have liked. And now they might know me for might expect from me. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t try something new. You know, I think that the last two years, really, in a sort of like, if the world is like this, then why can’t Emma Straub write a time travel book? Like, who cares? You know, I’m just gonna write what I need to write. I’m gonna write this for myself. You know, I went to my editor, Sarah McGrath, who is incredible. I mean, she, to her credit, is the kind of editor who I think could edit anything. I did feel like woo, you know, she bought one kind of book from me. And that’s not what I’m going to turn in. And so I was afraid to tell her. But she and I talked on the phone, we had a long conversation on the phone. And I think it was clear to her from that first conversation, just that it wasn’t about time travel, you know, that it was about love. And it was about this relationship, and that she thought I could do it. And then I said, okay, good, because I’m already writing.

B&N: You do totally pull it off. Because the thing is that This Time Tomorrow has the big beating heart that I think of when I’m reading one of your books, no matter where it said or who the cast is, or anything like that. You always have this big beating heart in every novel, and I was like, Okay, there’s time travel on good. And I’m not really a person who reads a lot of genre, but Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility, you know that she’s done time travel too. I was like, Yep, I’m in. Because I trust you to give me the lay of the land. And I don’t care if time travel, actually, there are people in the world who will insist that time travel is, whatever, it’s fine. I just want to hear a great story. And I got really attached to these characters. And I got really attached to their relationships and how they saw the world and how they change and change is so hard for so many people. Yeah, I’m kind of fond of change. I like to kick stuff up a little bit.

ES: That’s so good, Miwa, that’s so good. I mean, this Monday, I was having my picture taken for a magazine. And I suggested to my publicist that they meet me on my parents old stoop on the Upper West Side, and she was like I was sure. It just so happened that the people who bought the house from my parents are selling it in the real estate broker showed up and let me into the house. And my parents sold the house six years ago, which isn’t that long, really. But they lived in that house for 30 years. And so I was five when we moved into that house. You know, it’s where I was in elementary school and middle school and high school and college and it’s where my husband and I got married, and I have 30 full years of memories in that house and I was overcome. I was overcome in so many ways. I am like a fast, impatient person. I move quickly. I make decisions quickly. I’m not a perfectionist. I like to move forward. But I think I do all of those things because everything in my life is so steady like my parents have been married. married for 55 years, they lived in that house for 30 years I’ve been with my husband for it’ll be 20 years in September. I am a person who likes to have two feet on the ground in all of those major ways, because then my brain can be like, on hyperspeed the way it normally is, and I still feel grounded. But yeah, I mean, so much of writing this book was like, just thinking about like going back and how many things in my life, were going to happen no matter what I did, and what could I change? If I could go back? Like Alice does? What what could you change, like, I have the feeling that lives are pretty steady, you know, that, like, sure you could get a job doing that or doing this, and you could date this person or that person and things can change. But I feel like what I kept coming back to is like, the core of who you are, really doesn’t change. And I found that really comforting to think about, especially when faced by such an unstable world, both on like a hyper local level. And on a global level. You know, it was really comforting for me to think like, Well, okay, so this is what’s happening right now in my life and in the world, but it’s going to be okay, like, here we are, we’ve got our feet on the ground.

B&N: It’s really fun watching Alice come to understand what she’s in the middle of. And I’m one of those weird people. I’m actually okay, not getting do overs. I mean, my life has been what it’s been. And yeah, they’re probably some moments I would happily forget. But I’m not someone who’s rushing to jump back in time and say, Oh, well, I would tweak this or I would do it. I don’t mean to be so literal about fun stuff like time travel, but I I had a very nice life. Yeah, I do think that every piece of our experience turns us into who we are. And you know, this idea of sliding doors, right? Like, pardon me for setting a Gwyneth Paltrow movie. But you know, this idea, right? Or like 13 going on 30 any of these things were like, huh, or even Big. Which, if you think about it, because the moments that have not aged well. There’s some moments that have no aged well.

ES: That’s a child, that’s a child in that body.

B&N: Yeah, all sorts of stuff. But it’s so kind of weird to me that we look for ways to change the things we don’t like, but we don’t think about how that would impact the things we do like.

ES: And that those things all work together and that you can’t really just have one and not the other. Yeah. Also, you know, part of the fun for me in writing this book was you just mentioned Sliding Doors and 13 Going on 30. And I really was thinking about those kinds of things. When I was writing this, which was also really fun. Like I in general, as a rule, I like to keep culture out as much as possible. Even in Laura LeMans life and pictures, which is all about the Hollywood studio system, I changed the names of the studios and the movies. And I created my own sort of mythology, because I didn’t want people to feel like they had to know who Irving Thalberg was in order to understand who this character is, or whatever. Like I wanted everyone to have sort of equal access to the story by having it be totally new. And with most of my other books with the exception of maybe like, you know, a couple of musical references, that kind of thing, like the external world really stands out. But in this one, I just thought no, in order for it to make sense to me, I really had to let that stuff in. Because it’s part of how our brains work. If it were me, and I woke up and it was my 16th birthday. My first thought really would be like, Okay, what just happened? Is this a 13 going on? 30 situation is this back to the future like do I have to solve something? Do I have to fix something like I would be like scrolling through my time travel Rolodex of references, trying to figure out what it is. And so once I let all of that stuff in, then like I had to let everything else in too, you know, because we I wanted 1996 in particular to feel rich and identifiable to all of my other like fellow elderly, millennials. Geriatric millennials, something like that.

B&N: That does not sound good. That sounds weird.

ES: But it’s like me and like Lisa Lucas and Jenny Han. Like, you know, I have all these friends who are like between the age of like, 40 and like 43. We’re not Gen X. In many ways we are but in all these other ways we’re not. But we’re also not millennial, we’re really stuck in the middle there. And I wanted to make something for the people.

B&N: It makes the book feel much more personal in a way than your earlier work simply because those details are there. And they are so of the moment.

ES: Oh my god. I mean, it’s so personal. I have been keeping a diary since I was 10 years old. And it was horrifying. To go back and read what I was writing in 1995 1996 1987. Like, oh, my God, just like the drama. Ah, yikes. No. I mean, like, in real life, you could not pay me to go back and be a teenager again and be cheerful. Sounds terrible.

B&N: Can we talk about literary influences on this book, too? Because I mean, obviously, you blew up some of the rules. Yeah, that you’d played with before. But again, like the big beating heart of this book is very recognizably you.

ES: Yeah, yeah. When I had my initial conversation with Sarah, with my editor, I felt like I had to explain to her where it was coming from. And so I actually did like, for the very first time ever, I had like a list of books that I was like, This is what I’m thinking about, like, these are the books that are in my head. And those were Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York, which is one of my favorite books of all time, and just really shows the palencest of New York, better than any other book I’ve read about New York. And of course, there are 7 billion but that layered feeling of walking down the street in New York City, and seeing what’s there and seeing what came before and seeing what came before that. And just having that experience all day long. Every day. I was thinking about that a lot. And then I was also thinking a lot about Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, which is just a fantastic novel. It’s like number one, should you pet a feral cat? The answer’s no, even if you want to, because bad things will happen. That’s Lesson number one from Desperate Characters. But the thing that I really love about it is that the main character really spends much of the book almost all of the book, walking around Brooklyn, at night. And that feeling of walking down the sidewalk, New York City, after dark is something that I loved as a teenager. One of my best friends when I was in high school, lived on 64th Street on Central Park West and I lived on 85th Street, but we went to high school in Brooklyn. And so we would often be at people’s parties or whatever, either in Brooklyn or downtown. And so we would come home together, you know, we would take the train, and we would just sort of drop him off. And then I would walk home. And it’s one of my favorite memories of my youth. I mean, it’s something that I did all the time, is just walk home down that stretch by myself at night, you know, because I’m, you know, holding my keys like Wolverine, but quiet and safe. I wanted that feeling of New York City, which is like, safe and dangerous, alone and surrounded all of those feelings, those two books, those are like the ones that I was really, really thinking about the most.

B&N: And New York really is its own place in the world, though. I will shout out the last bit of Harlem Shuffle actually, that Colson does it again there, where he’s, and I’m not going to spoil it for people, obviously. But there’s a moment where the way he’s talking about New York, it was like everything from Colossus of New York in just a very few paragraphs, and it is magnificent. So, so good.

ES: He’s a goodie, he’s a goodie.

B&N: Yeah, right. You’re not just a writer. You’re not just a novelist and writer of newsletters and all sorts of fun things. You have a bookstore that you opened in 2017, with your husband, called Books Are Magic, which all of us love. But I want to talk to you for a second about being a bookseller because I really can’t think of a better way to spend your time I realize you have this side gig as a best selling novelist. But, you know, really, it comes back to book selling, it always comes back to I mean, I did a little stint as a publicist for a couple, three, four years. And I was like, you know, this living with one list thing it?

ES: Yeah, right. Oh, god, it’s I mean, you know, when we, you know, part of the lifecycle of a bookstore, especially a small independent bookstore, is that your booksellers often leave you to go work in publishing, it’s something that happens a lot. And of course, we’re always very proud and supportive and happy for them, but also on the inside. I always feel like why why Why would you want to do that? Like, why would you want to devote yourself all of the hours of your professional life to like, whatever it is, you know, 12 books a year, a season or whatever, you know, whatever it is, however many books it is why that just seems like such a bummer to have to talk about just the same books over and over again. I love being a bookseller, it is so hard. It is hard, and it is so much work. It is by far the hardest thing that I have ever done is open this bookstore. It’s such a beautiful way to spend ones time putting books in people’s hands.

B&N: We have the best gig. There’s no other way to say it. We have the best gig in the world, because it isn’t just talking about books. It’s literally connecting with other human beings and saying, Hey, listen, I think it’s easy to forget sometimes too we get people at their lowest moment when they’re looking for some sort of comfort or care or you know, they’re looking for a book on divorce. They’re looking for a book on grief. We do get people at moments where they’re really, really vulnerable. And to be able to step in and say, Hey, listen, I hope things get better. But by the way, this might help. I don’t want to sound too mawkish about it. But it’s a privilege to be able to do what we do in a lot of ways. And sometimes it’s really, really fun. And sometimes it’s hard. And sometimes you think, Oh, wow, yeah, we’re gonna sell that aren’t we? Ok. Because I mean, books ultimately are about the wider world, and they’re about nostalgia, and they’re about the future. And they’re about where we are right now and who we are, and how we can do better and what we don’t want to be I mean, they’re kind of cool these things, these books, they’re kind of amazing, even when sometimes they’re not.

ES: God, they really are. And, you know, I think that one of the reasons that I felt like I could do this was because I have never been snob. You know, I say that, like, I think that I have good taste. It’s not that I like everything. But I think that being a bookseller does feel in some ways, like being a doctor, you know, like being like, oh, what ails you? Or like, what are your symptoms, and here’s what I prescribe, you get to be quite bossy, and quite forceful with people. And they really respond because they’ve come into your space. And they’ve asked you, you know, it’s like, I think that, you know, not to say that, like, everyone who walks into a bookstore needs or wants to have a bookseller tell them what they want to read. Many people do not, and that is fine. But I’m talking about the category of people who come in and say, like, I just need something funny, like, I just need something to make me feel better, or I just want like something sexy, or I want to cry, or whatever it is. And then you know, the bookseller gets to be like, Huh, okay, and what did you like last? And you know, they really, they really go through a examination of the person in front of them. And then they come up with answers. And it’s just amazing. And I would say my favorite part of being a bookseller of owning the bookstore is the booksellers themselves who work in the store. They are individually and so smart, and so weird, and interesting, and funny and terrific, and hardworking and young. I mean, in our case, like so many of our booksellers, not all of them, but so many of our booksellers are in their 20s. And it’s been amazing. You know, going back to what we’re saying about change, I think that I have changed more in the last five years than I had in the 15 years before that, probably, without a doubt, not probably without a doubt. And it’s really because of my community of booksellers, because I have learned so much from them about how to be a person in 2022. It’s so easy to like, you know, you have your friend group or whatever. And, you know, as you age, your friends age, and there you are all talking about whatever, you know, film directors, or bands, or whatever it is that you like, that’s your thing, and then all of a sudden, everyone you know, is still exactly like you. And it’s been transformative to be around younger people who I just feel like I understand the world more, and I’m really grateful that they let me hang out.

B&N: They’re so great. They’re just there’s no other way to say it. They’re just so great. What’s next for you?

ES: So next week is my 42nd birthday.

B&N: Happy birthday in advance.

ES: Thank you. It is Books Are Magic’s fifth birthday. And then I get shot out of a rocket ship on my book tour. You know, I usually, like I said, you know, I’m a very good like, busy worker, person. And previously, I have always been sort of waist deep in my next book, when I have a book coming out, it can be so hard to find that momentum again, especially when you’re traveling, all that stuff, it’s really easy to just, you know, lose three months of time, but I haven’t I haven’t started anything. I mean, I’m working on a film adaptation of This Time Tomorrow. And I’m working on a TV adaptation of All Adults Here. So I’m working on those. But you know, those projects are much more like concentrated. So I might work on them very much for a little while, and then I turn something in, you know, it’s not as steady. So yeah, I really have to start writing a new book Miwa.

B&N: We can be patient. We can be patient. There’s other stuff. It’s okay. I’m Astrov. I’m so happy to see you. I’m so glad this book is out in the world. And for those of you who are listening who’ve read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, you really need This Time Tomorrow, like you really really need this book. So Emma’s latest is out now it’s so good to see you. Happy birthday, even though by the time this airs, you will have been 42 for more than a minute.

ES: But thanks. Thank you Miwa. I love talking to you. You’re an empress. I adore you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you. I love to be Poured Over.

B&N: Thank you. Thank you and everyone go get This Time Tomorrow.

ES: You’re the best Miwa.