Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our show with the latest novel by Emma Straub. American Fantasy is the book's name. It's also the name of a cruise ship where the action takes place in the course of three days. The American Fantasy is setting sail on a theme cruise ship that is centered around a '90s fictional boy band like this.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Or maybe like this.

[music]

Alison Stewart: In American Fantasy, the band is called Boy Talk. They were big in the '80s and '90s. They're aging, and so are their fans. The band members make good money doing this annual cruise, and it's an opportunity to keep their fan base emotionally invested. Boarding the ship is Annie, a newly divorced woman. The trip was planned by her sister. She's not really a super fan of Boy Talk, so she feels a little bit out of place. She forges a connection with a member of the band who is lonely and just needs to be seen. American Fantasy is out today. Emma Straub will be in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda tonight at 7:00 PM at First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, but she's here now in studio. It is so nice to see you.

Emma Straub: [chuckles] Hi, Alison. I'm just trying to bring back your MTV youth with the boy band. You know what I mean? This is all for you.

Alison Stewart: You saw me dancing. Let's get this out in the open. You went on a cruise with New Kids On The Block. What made you go on the cruise?

Emma Straub: [laughs] Why would you not go on the cruise, really, is maybe a better question. I went for research.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Emma Straub: I went for research, but the reason that I wanted to write a novel that took place on a boy band cruise is because that's what the inside of my heart sounds like.

Alison Stewart: Because you're just feeling it, right? Oh, my goodness. What surprised you about the cruise?

Emma Straub: Oh, so many things. I had never been on a cruise before. I don't know. The smell of antiseptic cleaning products surprised me. The scope of the buffets surprised me. The crowds, the people, the noise. I packed about 17 different forms of motion sickness medicine, but I didn't need any of it because cruise ships are extremely stable.

Alison Stewart: Hotels on their side.

Emma Straub: Exactly.

[laughter]

Emma Straub: I guess what surprised me the most was really that it did feel like a transcendent experience.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because this fandom you're writing about it's a super fandom. It's a very specific kind of fandom. What made you want to write a little bit about these people who were so dedicated to a boy band that they would go on a cruise?

Emma Straub: I think that I'm interested in getting older. I'm interested in aging because we're all doing it. I'm interested in what happens to-- Bands like this, you're playing to crowds so big that you can't have an individual relationship with any of those people. If you're playing at Madison Square Garden or MetLife or whatever, you're just playing to a sea of people. As the decades go on, that crowd gets winnowed and winnowed and winnowed until you're left with just the hardcore people who love you the most and you've all aged together. It becomes less of a parasocial relationship and more like a symbiotic one. I was interested in looking at that.

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting. The story is told from the point of view of three people. Sarah, a 30-year-old who works for the company that stages events on ships, Keith, one of the Boy Talk singers, and Annie, who was a fan when she was in her teens, but she's really on board only to please her sister. Let's talk about Annie. Where's Annie when we meet her?

Emma Straub: Annie's not thrilled. She was supposed to go on this ship with her sister, but her sister has broken her leg and can't travel. Annie's on her own. She is recently divorced, recently empty-nested. She's having troubles at work. She's struggling. She's struggling, I think, in a way that a lot of women do in middle age when you've checked all the boxes that you anticipated checking in one's life, professional career, family life, et cetera. Now she's finding herself, not to do this, but a bit at sea. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, listeners, that I did that.

Alison Stewart: It's all right. It's okay. I have to recover from that. Let's talk about Keith. He has a strange relationship with fame. He's had it for a really long time. How would you describe his relationship with Boy Talk and with fame?

Emma Straub: I think that one of the things that I was really interested in playing with or thinking about in this book is is that what happens. How does that feel? If you've been famous since you were a teenager, what does that do to your brain? What does that do to your relationship, to your sense of self, your relationship to strangers, to your fans? I think that there are things that Keith really enjoys about being in Boy Talk. He actually likes to sing, and he likes to give people this pleasure. I don't think he likes living under a microscope and certainly not being trapped on a boat with his biggest fans.

Alison Stewart: Sarah. Sarah's just trying to get her job done. How would you describe what Sarah has to do on a regular basis?

Emma Straub: Sarah's like the big cat wrangler, basically. She's trying to Siegfried & Roy this thing. She's got to get the musicians from their room onto the stage and back. She's got to make sure everything goes smoothly. She is an extremely capable young woman and actually quite likes Boy Talk, or at least Keith. She likes Keith. Sarah's the voice of reason on this ship, I'd say.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Emma Straub. Her new novel is set on a cruise ship designed for fans of a '90s-era boy band. It's called American Fantasy. You're going to read a little bit from the book. What are we going to hear?

Emma Straub: All right. Let's see. This is from Annie's point of view. It takes place at 7:42 PM on deck 3. Katherine, that's Annie's sister. Katherine wanted pictures, and so Annie was taking pictures. She took pictures of women's outfits, of the sexy sunrises, those are alcoholic beverages, of the red velvet chairs in the theater, and of the five men on the stage. Myra was taking pictures, too. Her phone never left her hand, and her hand never dropped. It made Annie's arm feel tired just watching.

On stage, the guys were dancing around in their matching outfits, so many matching outfits, and everywhere they went, women screamed. Shawn pointed to whatever corner of the crowd he wanted to scream the most, and they did. Annie did. Keith hung toward the back of the stage, and she watched him with interest. The faces he made, the way he wiped his sweat on his sleeve. She'd let it all go. The cloak of indifference she'd been holding on to, reluctance, propriety, shame. When she heard their voices, Annie was young again, unencumbered.

Myra lit a cigarette right there in the middle of the crowd and passed it to Annie, who took a quick drag and handed it back. Maybe she was young again. For a split second, Annie thought, "I could do this forever. This exact moment." Everything complicated left on land, and nothing but delight at sea. Two years ago, Annie had gone to her 30th high school reunion. It was an absurd number, but the older she got, the smaller 30 sounded. She'd been happy to go and sit in the gymnasium to eat crudite and drink bad white wine and look for people she used to know inside the bodies of people she no longer did.

There were some people she was glad to reconnect with. A nerdy girl who'd become a stage actor and had a shelf full of Tony Awards. A boy she'd kissed once and wished she'd kissed again, who was there with a pretty wife who looked not unlike Annie. So many different kinds of lawyers. Events like that were tricky, though. To be confronted with who you'd been on the outside and the inside, with friends you'd lost for reasons neither of you could remember. You sat across the table from someone and wondered what they saw, who they saw.

Boy Talk was different. The beauty of a one-sided relationship was that there was no disappointment, no holding oneself accountable for mistakes, no thinking about what could have been. There was only her own love rushing back. It felt like watching a wave reach a tide pool, the water easily gliding back over where it had once been. Katherine, that smart little so and so, she had known. Annie turned her phone around to take a picture of herself, her eyes closed, with the stage behind her, and sent it to her sister.

She was happy she'd come. She was happy she'd come alone, even a thought that Annie had thought was physically impossible. No one understood better than the talkers what it meant to push pause on everything else in your life and to make a choice for yourself. That was what Shawn meant at the very beginning when he told them that they were going to have the best weekend of their lives. It wasn't a joke.

Alison Stewart: That was Emma Straub reading from her new book, American Fantasy. It's so interesting. How's the cruise ship? How has it become a place where a woman of a certain age-- I can say as a woman of a certain age, how a woman of a certain age can be free?

Emma Straub: Oh, yes. First of all, just imagine being in a crowd like a shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, and it's all women, and you've had 14 slushy alcoholic beverages, and it's two o'clock in the morning, and you feel totally safe. I think that's part of it, that it's mostly women, but I think also it's all mostly middle-aged women. Everyone is showing up as they are, as they are now, ready to enjoy themselves. There's no sort of compare and despair. There's no like, "Oh, I wish I was 20 pounds lighter," or, "I wish I looked like I did when I was 30 years old." It's really about enjoying yourself now.

Alison Stewart: In that passage you read, you talked about Myra. This turns to be Annie's roommate, who's just like a rule breaker. She lights a cigarette, she feeds with other talkers. What does Annie like about Myra?

Emma Straub: We all like the bad girl friend. Those are the fun ones, the girls who break the rules. I think that that's true when you're in high school, and I think it's true in your 50s. It's good to have someone who's breaking the rules just a little bit.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about American Fantasy. It's out today. My guest is Emma Straub. We've talked about Keith. Who are the other boy band members?

Emma Straub: There's Keith's older brother, Shawn, who is the really the boss of it all. There's Terrence, who's the creep.

[laughter]

Emma Straub: Terrence is a creep with a ponytail. There's Scotty, who has, since the band was popular, come out of the closet. He sells vitamins on the internet. Wait, who else? How many did I name so far?

Alison Stewart: Shawn, Keith.

Emma Straub: I did, Shawn, Keith. Oh, my God, who else? I feel like I'm forgetting someone.

Alison Stewart: Terrence. Terrence with a ponytail.

Emma Straub: We've got Terrence. Oh, my God, this is horrible. This is public. This is live radio.

Alison Stewart: We'll come back to it. I can't remember either. Hey, we're three women of a certain age. We can't remember the fifth member.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, though, but Keith, he has a weird relationship with his brother.

Emma Straub: I think that it's impossible to imagine working with one's sibling, I think, and especially-

Alison Stewart: Corey.

Emma Straub: -Corey West. You know what? I think Corey deserves it, though. Corey deserves it because the thing about Corey West is that he's the one who broke out on his own and had the biggest stardom. He is the one who would be most upset at this situation.

Alison Stewart: He's timberlaking it.

Emma Straub: He's timberlaking it.

Alison Stewart: He's timberlaking it.

Emma Straub: You played both New Kids On The Block and NSYNC at the top of this segment. I think that's good, because I don't want anyone to think that this is just about one boy band. It's not. It's totally fictional. I will say, when the body cam footage of Justin Timberlake getting arrested came out, I did think about Corey West.

Alison Stewart: We're laughing because the book, it has jokes. You got lots of jokes. Annie describes herself as not being "ready to slink off" into the corner of an Eileen Fisher until her desiccated bones start to disintegrate, or it seemed impossible that it was only two days ago that three drinks had felt like a lot of drinks. Why was it important to make the book funny?

Emma Straub: Oh, God, don't we need it? Don't we need it right now? This project, for me, was all about pleasure. It was about giving myself pleasure while writing it and about giving the reader pleasure in some distant future. I wanted to make myself laugh. It is inherently funny to me, the setting, like, these poor men trapped on this ship with all these women who have been obsessed with them for decades. You could go one of two ways. It could be hilarious, or it could be like a horror movie. This is the direction that I went.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting on your book tour because you're having two people in conversation. You're talking to Lin-Manuel Miranda. On Friday, you'll be in LA talking to Susanna Hoffs from The Bengals. What does a format like that allow you to do on a book tour?

Emma Straub: Oh, it's so fun. That's the best part of a book tour, is being like, "Okay, who can I talk to in this city that will elicit a different conversation?" I talked to Lin quite a lot as I was writing this book, and Susanna Hoffs was who I only know because she wrote a novel.

Alison Stewart: Really good novel.

Emma Straub: Yes. This bird has flown. She's a great novelist, which should be no surprise because she's a fabulous writer. I interviewed her, I guess you could say, too, about what does it feel like. What does it feel like to write a song that 30 years later, people still want to hear? Are you happy to sing those songs? I can't wait to have that conversation with her at the bookstore.

Alison Stewart: Also, we should point out you did actually speak to a member of a boy band. We won't say his name if you don't want to. What was one piece of information that he gave you that helped you write this novel?

Emma Straub: I'll say his name. It's Joey McIntyre. He let me put him in the acknowledgments, so it's all right. He was really very generous with me and answered so many questions that I had just about, I don't know, what does it feel like to grow up in this way? It's such an unusual childhood and young adulthood and now, middle age. He was extremely generous to me, and he talked to me all about the cruise lifestyle, and what it feels like on the other end.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is American Fantasy. Tonight, Emma Straub will be in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda at 7:00 PM at the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn. Emma, it is always nice to see you.

Emma Straub: Thanks for having me, Alison.

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