Emma Straub’s new novel, American Fantasy (Riverhead, April 7), is about a middle-aged woman who goes on a boy-band reunion cruise. But the bestselling author, 45, who took a New Kids on the Block cruise herself in 2023 (for research!), wants it known that she is not some kind of crazed fanatic. Sure, she was mad for the group when she was 10 (“I had the cassettes, the dolls, the bedsheets—I still do”). Her current fandom is such that “my poor children know every word of their songs.” And meeting Joey McIntyre—her favorite band member—on the cruise confirmed that “he’s the best one, no comparison,” she says, adding, “I did know New Kids on the Block were not cool by the time I was in eighth grade. I was totally normal in high school—I went through, like, decades of normalcy. But once I decided I was going to write this book, I really dove back in hard.”
The result, her sixth novel, is a funny, touching exploration of the enduring role of youthful passions, the complexities of celebrity, and the challenges that come with midlife—set aboard a Bahamas-bound ship filled with giddy, boozy women swooning over the graying members of a ’90s band called Boy Talk. Annie, the central character, at first feels out of place: Her sister, the real fan, broke her leg and had to forgo their girls trip, leaving just-divorced Annie to room with a stranger and marvel at the other passengers’ devotion. What do the fans get from brief interactions with the crushes of their youth? Do the former boys enjoy imprisonment at sea with these rabid admirers? It turns out Annie’s not immune to the spell they cast—but is the whole thing pathetic, or oddly beautiful?
Straub, who lives in Brooklyn with her family, knew she wanted to write this book the moment she saw an ad for an upcoming NKOTB reunion cruise in 2022. Her father, author Peter Straub, had just died, “and I was like, now that feeling seems a lot better than the feeling I’m currently experiencing,” she recalls. Her childhood interest in the group had been rekindled when she was in grad school and saw McIntyre promoting his album of jazz standards at a small club. “The crowd grew prickly—they didn’t care about Nat King Cole—and Joey grew prickly back,” Straub says. “People were calling out New Kids songs and he seemed upset but he finally sang one. And it was like I was possessed—I stood up, walked closer, and started filming him. The power was still there. I kept a loose eye on the group after that.”
The cruise, when she happened upon it, seemed like the perfect vehicle for a novel. “The tension between these women who see the trip as an escape into this little pod of happiness and these men who have a different relationship to it. I thought, how delicious. I knew I could have a great time with it.”
She did have to get over some preconceptions. She’d loved the well-known David Foster Wallace essay about a cruise, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and figured she’d be similarly turned off by the forced cheer and groupthink. Four days on the Carnival Conquest did and didn’t change her mind. “There are a lot of really drunk, really sunburned people,” she says. “There’s a lot of standing around, a lot of screaming, a lot of buffets.” But the bond of a shared love reminded her of the sense of community she feels in the Books Are Magic stores she and her husband run in Brooklyn. “I want anyone who walks into the stores to feel they could hand me their baby—I’d be delighted,” she says. “It was kind of like that. Those people on the ship, if I’d had any sort of medical emergency, I’d have felt 100% safe.”
She also got plenty of A-plus material. “I met each of the band members for like 30 seconds, and their pain and discomfort were so visible,” she says. “Do I feel sorry for them? No. But I do think it’s a difficult life.” Unlike Fantasy’s Annie, she had no romantic moments with the man-boy of her dreams. But she got to know McIntyre later, thanks to their mutual friend (“this is so name-droppy”) Lin-Manuel Miranda, who connected them. “Joey and I talked on the phone for two and a half hours—he told me so much that was useful for the book. He’s smart, he has a sense of humor, and right now he’s reading Margaret Atwood’s memoir. I was right! And yeah, now we’re friends. It’s a delightful surprise that you could have someone who played this important part in your childhood, and then you encounter them at another point in your life and discover they’re terrific.”
This month, Straub sets off on a four-week, multicity tour for American Fantasy. “I truly love book tours,” she says, “but I’m tired already.” Then it’s back to Brooklyn, where she and her graphic designer husband, Michael Fusco-Straub, walk their kids, River, 12, and Miles, 10, to school most mornings before stopping off at Books Are Magic’s Brooklyn Heights location. They opened the first store, in Carroll Gardens, in 2017; their thoughtful curation, author events, political consciousness, and kid-in-a-candy-store vibes have made both shops beloved cultural hubs. Running them is now Michael’s full-time job, while his novelist wife does much of the frontlist buying and pops in whenever she can—especially if there’s a celebrity sighting. “Olivia Rodrigo came in and Miles and I ran over, but we missed her,” she says. “Joe Jonas has been in a couple of times and I haven’t been here, and it makes me so sad. Then there are people like Ethan Hawke, who comes in all the time and wants recommendations. Recently he wanted to talk about Beat poetry. Too on the nose, sir! It wasn’t me there that day, but I would have talked to him.”
Straub’s own enthusiasm, along with her bestselling, delight-infused books, has made her something of a local star herself. “Oh, it’s you!” says a customer spying her in the stacks on a recent morning. “I just want to say I love what you do.” Such encounters warm the heart of the woman who calls herself “a human exclamation point.” “I want this to be a joyful place,” Straub says. “Are there books that I read and don’t like? There are. I’m not a robot. But I will never talk about them in public. The world is so horrible right now, I’m really only interested in being a champion for the things I think are wonderful.”
It’s certainly easier than her other job, “being at home trying to write and failing most of the time”—a job, it should be noted, that won her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024. Lately she’s mostly just looking forward to sharing American Fantasy with readers. “I do not think you have to enjoy boy bands or cruises to get something out of it,” she says. “But it does feel like I’m getting away with something, writing a book about this niche passion of mine. It feels hilarious and wonderful.”
And if the grind of writing ever really gets her down, she has options. “My feeling after leaving that cruise was exactly the same as giving birth to my first child,” she says. “It was like, that was grosser than I thought it would be, and I’m glad it’s over. But I could do it again!”
Kim Hubbard is a writer and editor in New York.
