No One You Know
The long and winding road to publication
We were a good half a mile underground, with the metallic sound of water against limestone, my wife Emma refusing to say anything into this vast and chilly dark.
“Go on, give it a whirl,” our cave guide said in his Yorkshire accent.
“Helloooo!” I called out, with a thousand refrains. “Echoooo!” I shouted. I felt a little embarrassed by this and said, “Sorry, that was dumb,” which then echoed itself a few times, spiraling lamely into the void.
“Want to try?” I said to Emma.
“No thanks,” she said quietly.
“But there’s no one else here,” the guide said, motioning toward the dark cavern.
“I’m good,” Emma said.
We clambered our way up toward the exit, then back out into the light. Just outside the cave’s entrance, I asked Emma, “Would you have called something out if you’d been in there on your own?”
“No,” she said.
“Huh,” I said, wondering about this.
Emma and I walked a leafy mile on a shaded path from the cave entrance back to the village pub. We ate fish and chips and tried to pretend we weren’t anxious. Emma’s novel, the book she’d spent three years writing, then another two years rewriting at her agent’s behest, was out to publishers. We were awaiting news from New York.
“Maybe there’ll be a bidding war,” I said. I knew how risky this was, saying something so hopeful, but I wanted this for her, and it seemed plausible.
The waiting continued, for days. We were visiting the Yorkshire Dales on an uncharacteristically sunny week. Each morning, we started out on miles of green, hilly trails, surrounded by biblical views, rays of light casting dramatic shadows along ancient stone walls. The hikes were a good distraction, but arriving back at the B&B to no news each day, with quiet dinners at the pub afterward, the silence took its toll.
“There is absolutely nothing to worry about,” her agent said on the phone, which was, of course, very worrying. My band’s manager said the exact same thing to me years earlier, just before our record label dropped us.
I remember the first time Emma said it out loud, maybe a week after we came home to New York. All the big publishers had passed by then. “It’s not going to happen,” she said in our kitchen, tears spilling quietly down her cheeks. I just held her, unsure of what to say.
On top of her book not selling, I was dismayed that in this aftermath, she’d stopped writing. It had become my favorite thing, coming downstairs and seeing her writing by the fire, tucked into the yellow easy chair we’d dubbed the Golden Throne. Her writing chair.
At some point I broke my leg, and was laid up in the Golden Throne for many weeks. “Maybe we should just replace that chair after this,” Emma said, eyeing it unhappily.
My daughter laughed. “Are you saying Daddy ruined the chair just by being in it for so long?”
“No, of course not!” Emma said.
“I mean, you kind of are,” I said, noting my crutches stacked against the chair, both chair arms piled with the various trays, books, mugs, and random gear I’d piled around myself. It was like a mini man-cave, a sad little convalescent campground.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I think the chair will be okay, once I clear out.”
Soon I was upright and out of the way again, and Emma was back in the Golden Throne, writing. She came home every afternoon from her job as a middle school librarian, writing before and after dinner. On weekends, she was up for hours before me and the kids, writing away.
This new novel, No One You Know, with a new agent, took her two years to write, followed by eighteen months of rewrites. Emma was sending me revised chapters to read as soon she finished them; I couldn’t wait for more. These pages cracked me up and made me teary, many times over. “It’s so good and beautiful,” I told her. Novelist friends of ours provided wonderful blurbs. Her agent loved it, and sent it out to publishers with high hopes.
Once again, there was the waiting, interminable weeks of silence. At last, the emails from editors started coming in. One Big Five editor said she loved it, but: “I found myself struggling to envision how I could break this out in a big way… to help it make a lot of noise.” There were more emails, similarly disappointing.
Emma was quiet again that week. She sat in the Golden Throne, clicking through these passes from editors. She and her agent pasted the various rejection reasons into a spreadsheet, but there wasn’t a common theme to decipher, no big takeaway. The only commonality was: No.
“Nothing?” I said, hopefully, as she scanned her inbox for good news.
“Nothing,” she said back. Emma’s such a stoic, but I could see how devastated she was, going through this again.
“Well, what do you want for this book?” I said. “It’s far too good to just stay on your laptop.”
She thought about this for a while. “I want to have a book party with our friends,” she said finally. “And to be able to give a copy to my mom.”
“Surely we could do at least that,” I said.
Emma got back to work. She found a hybrid publisher called She Writes Press, signed with them, and we put together a plan of who to send her book to.
Here’s where something amazing happened. Emma started reaching out to other writers on Substack and Instagram—pretty much all women—and the response was overwhelming. It’s good to have things to be hopeful about right now, and these women elevating other women, amplifying each other’s voices, is one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.
Sari Botton, Rona Maynard, Ally Hamilton, Zibby Owens, Alisa Kennedy Jones: all these smart women building audiences and the next publishing empires. I’m so heartened by how uplifted Emma has felt by all these amazing writers who’ve gathered around her, some of whom she hasn’t even met (yet).
Last week, Emma went to sign some pre-orders at Oblong Books, our local bookshop, and there were stacks and stacks, waiting for her.
Our daughter and I then tagged along to NYC to watch Emma record Zibby Owen’s “Totally Booked” podcast at a pop-up bookshop. It was thirty minutes with a Q&A, two dozen people filling the small space.
“I think I blacked out the whole time,” Emma said to me after the interview.
“Really?” I said. “You were great! I love how you said you’re always writing about the heart.”
“Did I say that?” she said, amused and baffled. She didn’t remember any of it!
This shy, lovely Brit who won’t even call out an echo alone in a cave, is putting her words out into the world, and getting up on stage to promote it, nervousness be damned.
I could tell you that her novel is a wonder, and that you’ll love it (I really do think so), but I’m the unreliable narrator here, as biased as I am. So I’ll let Emma tell you what it’s all about, in this brief video she made, live from the Golden Throne, with our son playing video games in the background, and our dog Roxy snoring so loudly nearby that I had to edit out the end.
Happy pub day, you brave, inspiring, brilliant woman. It’s unbelievably good to see you making some noise. x
I’m delighted to support NO ONE YOU KNOW, which is really about almost everyone you know, if you are a parent or live among parents.
I've just gone onto Waterstone and signed up for them to notify me as soon as it is available to buy here in the UK, I'm looking forward to reading it.