The book of the summer is about group chats.
"Romance – real life, or fiction – is just content at this point."
Hi everyone. My birthday dinner last night was at Le Veau d'Or. Their martini comes with a vermouth highball on the side, so you end up alternating between sips of freezing cold gin and salty soda. For dessert, I ordered something called “île flottante” which translates to floating island. Whenever there is a dessert on the menu that is remotely geographic, you must order it (baked Alaska, rocky road). Just look at it!
Today’s letter includes:
is publishing the book of the summer on Substack, Red Hook Tavern’s empire is expanding, The Information is launching show that sounds a lot like TBPN, and is now a winemaker.
I hope you all own a printer (I don’t) because the book of the summer is going to be delivered to you in the form of an email by
. A few weeks ago, Brendon and I met for pasta and discussed our creative projects, and I walked home slightly-buzzed wondering how his summer thriller would take shape. This week, he announced something cool: starting next Tuesday, you will receive a new chapter of a story called ‘Come If You Want,’ a serialized novella delivered right to your inbox over the next four weeks.The story includes everything that a summer read should have, including online dating, how group texts encourage groupthink, and what we get wrong and right about people from their Instagram pages.
Emily Sundberg: You’ve historically published nonfiction and criticism on
. Do you anticipate the reception to fiction to be any different? It's funny, I don't engage with a lot of fiction on Substack, but it's actually how I started on here five years ago.: I believe there is a lot of opportunity when it comes to fiction in newsletters. We’ve seen with the success of #BookTok that people are looking to discuss the novels they love. On platforms like Substack, YouTube, and Threads, novel discussions and book clubs are some of the most active communities. This is why I’m excited to get into the comments each week, ‘go live’ with readers, and use features like the Substack Chat to see what people are receiving from the work.I also think, in a weird way, that you can sometimes be more honest in fiction than you can be in nonfiction and criticism. That’s not to say that the characters in ‘Come If You Want’ are experiencing my truth, but I do believe they experience a truth. And as a writer, it is sometimes more compelling to put that reality bluntly in a story than in an essay. Because of this, I think that some of the scenarios will generate a different type of enthusiasm than what I’ve historically received on LOOSEY.
“I actually find modern dating to be more thrilling than scary. The two sound similar, but I think with thrillers, you have excitement to match the risk.”
ES: How much of this story is autobiographical?
BH: I wish this story were autobiographical! Without spoiling too much, Palmer – the main character – has the summer fling of his life. I think the biggest thing I mined from my real life was the group chat dynamic and how information is presented and picked apart with friends. It’s so strange though… I wrote this story nearly a year ago, and a couple of weeks ago, my real-life group chat, which has never read this story, had the exact exchange as the fictional group chat in the first chapter. I am curious if other readers will have that experience too, and see their friends in the fiction.
ES: Do you consider modern dating to be scary? I think about how we're all so used to staying at Airbnbs and searching for a future spouse on Hinge, but when you think about it too much (or go deep enough on Reddit) these platforms have the potential to be horrifying.