Emily Adrian: On Broadening Her Literary Life, Treating Parenting as a Creative Act, and Writing Sex Scenes That Advance the Plot in Her Novel ‘Seduction Theory’

If you’re a fan of contemporary literature, chances are that sometime over the last few years, you’ve read a book that could be considered part of what writer Emily Adrian refers to as “the marriage discourse”—books, both fiction and non-fiction, that have something to say about marriage, often delving into topics like infidelity, non-monogamy, and divorce. Emily’s most recent novel, Seduction Theory (Little, Brown, 2024), is her own entry into the conversation, posing the question: can two people really stay married and in love long-term? Like its peers, Seduction Theory does not shy away from the things that threaten most marriages, including infidelity in the form of both physical and emotional affairs. The result, however, is more Shakespearean comedy than domestic drama—a book that is fun, funny, and sexy, without excusing its characters from the effects of their bad behavior. 

Along with the book’s release in August, Emily also welcomed her second child earlier this year, making this an exciting year for her on many fronts. In addition to her writing, Emily also teaches writing and is one of the cofounders and editors at Great Place Books, making her a triple-threat when it comes to the writing world. Her insights on the way writing coincides with parenting, finding her way into Seduction Theory’s unique form (the novel takes the form of a student’s Master’s thesis, complete with cover page and other meta-textual elements that contribute to the book’s clever, delightful execution), and what it means to be writing about the institution of marriage when so many other writers are focused on its end were thoughtful and inspiring. I was grateful for the chance to talk to her about her writing and life.

Corinne Cordasco-Pak: At this point in your career, what is your writing life like?

Emily Adrian: When I was younger and had less reason to take writing seriously, I had more time. Now—I assume this is common—even though your [writing] career picks up steam and you have more opportunities, you also have pressures from other areas in your life. I love my career more than ever. I have more readers, I’m doing the kind of work that I want to be doing. But I just had a baby in March. She’s really the full-time gig at the moment. I also have an eight-year-old and he goes to school during the school year, but we don’t really have him in childcare otherwise. In my twenties, when I was writing, I had a day job, but it didn’t have any claim on my emotions or my intellectual life. Now, everything that I’m describing really does. So it’s more of a balancing act, but more satisfying than ever.

I am fortunate that writing is a huge part of how I make money, and the other part is teaching. I’m on faculty at the low-residency MFA program at Sewanee in Tennessee, so I work with students remotely during the year, and then there’s a six-week session in the summer. I also teach at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and through the small press that I’m a part of too. It all amounts to a lot more than a full-time job, but none of it is a full-time job by itself.

CCP: What an amazing year: a baby in March and a novel in August! How did that timing work?

EA: I sold the book in April of 2024, and I got pregnant in June. I was so excited about this book. It was the biggest book deal I’ve ever gotten, and a step up from everything I’d done before. The awkward part was when I got the initial round of notes from my editor, it was the end of last summer, and at that point in my first trimester I could not do the revisions. So I just sort of mysteriously asked for more time and hoped it came off as aloof and cool in a hip, writerly way. They gave me more time, and by the time I turned it in, I was able to tell everybody that, in fact, I was pregnant.

CCP: Thank you for talking through that! I don’t often hear about how people balance the physical aspects of pregnancy with writing. Back to more traditional questions: what’s it like balancing your work with Great Place Books with your writing?

EA: It broadens my life as a literary person, because the work that we publish at Great Place Books is really different from what I write. We try to work on stuff that’s not going to get picked up by a major press because we want to be a home for projects that are really worthy and that might also be kind of unconventional.

Getting to be on the editorial side reminds me a little bit of teaching: it allows you to approach literature from a different angle. The task becomes “how can I see what the author is trying to do, perhaps more clearly than they can see it in this phase?” and that’s really fun. We’re very small, we have tiny print runs. It’s me and my co-editor Alex Higley for the most part. It’s fun to be part of the production process and make decisions about how the book is going to look. Leading a book through that process gives me a better understanding of what my books were going through, even though they’re published at bigger houses.

CCP: It sounds like between writing, teaching, and Great Place, you’re immersed in the literary world. What does your writing community look like?

EA: It’s very much filtered through the internet at this point, which is something a lot of us can say about our relationships. Increasingly, publishing as an industry is done online. I live in New Haven, which is not far from New York City, so I get to see the people I’m working with and meet up with writer friends. When I’m at Sewanee, I get to meet up with fellow faculty members and see my students in person for that stretch during the summer when, otherwise, I’m just seeing them over Zoom. But I do pine for a sense of literary community that feels integrated into the rest of my life. I have so many friends whose work I love, and I talk to them all the time. And yet, they’ve never met my kids.

CCP: On a personal level, what non-writing things help you stay connected to your writing?

EA: I think parenting is really creative. It’s a lot of problem-solving on the fly. Especially as a kid gets older, it’s so intellectually demanding. Sometimes my kid approaches me with a problem or his day is ruined in some way and I have to fix it. It’s not necessarily instinctual to meet a kid where he’s at and help him through something. There’s so many times in the day where I just have to think about it for a second, which is not totally dissimilar from writing.

The novel is a really weird form. We think of it as the default type of book, but it’s actually bizarre to try to write a story that goes on for hundreds of pages. Knowing that a novel is a world you have to inhabit over a long period of time and build word by word always felt intuitive to me. But the longer I do it, and the more I have students who are trying to do it, and the more I read my friends’ manuscripts or submissions for the press, the more I realize that this form is not intuitive to a lot of people.

And yet, the novel always has felt like my creative home. I like things that require stamina and commitment. Parenting is definitely an example. It sounds abstract to be like, “parenthood is a project,” but it’s actually parenting your particular child. It’s not, “now I have entered motherhood, and I can achieve these milestones within that field.” No—it’s actually this little weirdo who lives in your home that you have to take care of. And I think that is what a novel is as well.

CCP: This is your sixth book, including two novels, a memoir, and two YA novels. How have your goals changed over your career?

EA: Over time, I’ve cared a lot more about critical attention than sales or even just the ambition of getting published. What that really means is feeling like my work is part of a conversation and that people are engaging with it with the same amount of rigor that I needed to write it. It’s a privilege to even have that expectation, and to be hopeful that you’re going to see your book reviewed in top places or that writers you admire will reach out and say, “Hey, I just finished it and loved it.” It’s nice to have a shift in my own frame of reference for how a book is performing.

CCP: As a more experienced author, do you have any advice for someone who is moving from the writing stage into publishing and promotion?

EA: The most effective stuff is what actually feels good to you. For some people, that might be developing a social media presence. It might look like reaching out to authors you know or admire to get the book into their hands or doing stuff like this [interview] or bookstore events. At the same time, there are things that don’t feel contrived so much as they are anxiety-inducing. I have trouble with public speaking, and I have sometimes been inclined to back out of events, not because I don’t want to do them but because they’re hard for me. I think it’s important to challenge yourself. It gets better as you do it. I bring that up only because I think this sense that once you finish the book and get it published, you suddenly have to do speaking engagements plagues a lot of writers. Every time I have a book out, I have to reacquaint myself with the sensation of people looking at me, but it feels good to get on top of my own anxieties.

CCP: On the topic of publishing, let’s talk Seduction Theory! Where did the idea for this novel start for you and how did you develop it?

EA: There were all of these books coming out about divorce and what was starting to bother me was that the discourse was very focused on marriage as a domestic, economic, and parenting arrangement. The conversation seemed almost hostile to the idea that most of these marriages began in a place of deep love. I didn’t see the point of talking about the ending of that contract if you’re not talking about how it begins in a very impractical, emotionally-charged, sexy way.

I wanted to write about marriage in a way where we are still talking about infidelity, we’re still talking about the challenges of being married to somebody long-term, especially as you get older and you still want to be seen as a person, and you still have pressures from outside of your marriage. But I wanted eros to be centered in that conversation. The book came together when I realized that I needed the perspective of a younger person who doesn’t have any reverence for marriage as an institution and who is sort of skeptical of the idea of monogamy, but still wants attention from certain people. 

CCP: What was it like drawing from the writing world and your own marriage for this project?

EA: My husband has been in academia for a very long time, and we’ve been married since before he was in grad school. A lot of the campus satire elements are not specific to an MFA program; they’re just sort of academics wilding. I like writing about a world to which I have some access, but feel like an outsider. I think a good narrator often is an outcast in some way because they need both the investment in that world and a little bit of detachment to be able to see everything in it in a compelling, nuanced way.

[My husband] definitely read early chapters. I’ve written a lot of things, and he reads all of it. I can tell when he actually really loves something, and it’s a good way for me to measure the times in my career when I’ve leveled up a little bit. I very much respect his insight as a reader, so it was very fun to show him. I think [with] most people’s fiction, if you were to hone in on what they actually took from their life, it’s not the big dramatic arcs. It’s tiny insights or moments. My husband is the only person who knows which of those lines are based in our real life, so my anxiety about him reading it had nothing to do with the premise. It had everything to do with a sentence here and there getting at the reality of marriage and deep, abiding love.

CCP: I’d love to hear about how the third-person point of view that is revealed to be Robbie’s first-person narration came about.

EA: I don’t think I got more than a few paragraphs into the draft before I realized that she was the narrator. Trying to figure out where she should reveal herself was hard. It felt like I should put it off longer than I ultimately did, but I didn’t want to withhold the reveal from the reader just for the hell of it, especially because Robbie’s first person point of view is what gives the story tension. I needed her point of view to drive the narrative forward.

I went back and forth on whether to include the cover page for her thesis, and I ultimately felt like it was the bolder move. The text is meta—it’s someone else’s book even as it has my name on the cover. I have found that a lot of people ignore that page or forget it because they don’t have any context for it yet. But I didn’t hide the fact that it was her thesis.

CCP: I love how messy these characters are, but I find that some readers are critical of characters who act unethically. How do you think about writing flawed characters?

EA: One thing that separates our real lives from fiction is that, in life, we often try not to do things that are seriously consequential. Fiction is about people making irreversible choices. I tell my students all the time “We need for this to be a story and not just a random day in a random person’s life. They need to do something that they can’t take back.”

We don’t actually know exactly what Ethan and Simone do. We just know what Robbie imagines they’ve done. She is honing in on their motivations, and extrapolating the wildest things that they might have done in pursuit of what they want. That’s a more exaggerated version of what I’m doing as a writer, where I take a motivation that’s deeply familiar to me, then I walk the character up to the limit of what I can imagine doing and have them blow past it.

CCP: The book Come As You Are describes how sex in long-term relationships still needs to “advance the plot.” I kept thinking about that in relation to Ethan and Simone’s marriage. How did you approach writing the sex in this book?

EA: You kind of nailed it—no pun intended, although I heard what I said as I said it— when you pointed out that the sex in the book advances the plot. Robbie is literally using sex to advance her own plot. We often think about sex as consequence rather than action: two characters hook up to consummate the story that came before. I wanted the sex scenes between Ethan and Simone to do something in the story. It’s not like these people who have never been together physically have gotten together. It’s like, this husband and wife of twenty years have gone to bed together again. It’s funny, but also a real challenge to make it feel consequential. I think it works because we know as the reader—and Robbie knows as somebody who’s obsessed with them—that they’re not as locked in to their marriage as they seem. Even if it’s incredibly important to them, they’re performing honesty and intimacy rather than fully inhabiting it. It was a deliberate decision to make those sex scenes explicit and dirty, then have Ethan’s affair with his secretary over in two sentences. The details don’t matter; all that matters is that he cheated.

CCP: Without giving too much away, how did you find your way to the ending of the book?

EA: The ending has to answer certain questions. One question in this book is “do Ethan and Simone stay together?”, but I think the main question is: “what did Robbie want?” In the first draft, all we had was what actually happened. I didn’t really delve into the fantasy of what she wanted. One of my best writer friends suggested that I add that fantastical penultimate chapter. [Readers] need that question framed explicitly for the book to actually feel resolved, because then the ending is more of a final comment on what marriage actually is. And it wraps up the project for Robbie as well, realizing how wrong she was about Ethan and Simone’s relationship.

CCP: You mentioned defining success in terms of the conversations your work enters into. What other books do you think of Seduction Theory in conversation with?

EA:Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff—the narrative is experimental and almost reveals more about marriage than the actual scenes. A writer named Erin Somers has a book coming out called The Ten Year Affair, which I read a galley of. It’s also about a long-term marriage and the line between what you fantasize about and what you actually want from your life. I would love to have this book paired with hers.

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Emily Adrian is the author of Everything Here is Under Control and The Second Season, as well as the memoir Daughterhood and two critically acclaimed novels for young adults. Her work has appeared in Granta, Joyland, The Point, EPOCH, Alta Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Originally from Portland, Oregon, Adrian currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut.