Emma Rosenblum is quite clear: her new novel is not autobiographical. Yes, she’s a successful New Yorker. Yes, she lives on the Upper East Side. And, yes, her two sons attend private school. But that is where any similarity ends.
“This book is definitely not based on women at the private school that we go to, or people I know specifically,” she says via Zoom from New York. “But there are certainly types of people in Manhattan and Brooklyn that this book was loosely inspired by. I live here, so I see them, and I see their Instagrams, and I see how they live. And I thought it would be a funny social set to skewer.”
Rosenblum’s bitingly funny third novel, Mean Moms, out from Flatiron in July, does just that. It follows a clique of wealthy Manhattan mothers—Frost, Morgan, and Belle—whose kids attend the elite Atherton Academy. The book’s mean moms more than earn their title, as they look down on anyone who doesn’t share their socioeconomic privilege, backstab each other in deliciously catty fashion, and respond to the presence of a homeless man at school drop-off by forming a committee called Atherton Parents Against Persons Experiencing Homelessness.
“I love when people say things and they don’t really hear themselves speak,” says Rosenblum, whose other novels are Bad Summer People (2023) and Very Bad Company (2024). She adds that one of the inspirations for her rich-people-gone-wild fiction was the hit TV series The White Lotus. “I thought, I know I could do that. I know those people, too.”
Born in 1981, Rosenblum grew up in Larchmont in Westchester County, N.Y.; her father is a lawyer and her mother a retired real estate agent. She was the middle child and describes her childhood as well-rounded. “I was always competitive in everything I did, and I hate losing,” she says. “I’ve always loved writing. If you read essays and stories I wrote when I was a kid, I sound exactly the same as I do now.”
After high school, she attended Tufts in Medford, Mass., where she studied English and comparative religion and was drawn to writers who shared her fascination with the rich, including Edith Wharton and Jane Austen. “Austen was a very good observer of wealthy people, and she was very funny about it,” Rosenblum says. “She also made her characters into real people in a way that I hope I do. I hope my characters don’t come off as wooden caricatures of rich people in New York City. They are people with motivations and emotions, and you believe them, even if they’re a little bit ridiculous.”
After graduating in 2003, it was back to New York, where she landed a job as an assistant at New York magazine. From there, she worked as an editor at New York, Glamour, and Elle, and as the chief content officer at Bustle Digital Group. “It was the kind of career that unfortunately doesn’t really exist anymore in media,” Rosenblum says, adding that in 2019, shortly after joining Bustle,
she felt her own inner Wharton and Austen tugging her in a different direction.
“At BDG, I oversaw our editorial, operations, and creative teams, and I wasn’t doing any day-to-day writing or editing,” she says. “I really missed it, but that wasn’t my role. So, I decided to try writing as a side project, to scratch that creative itch. I figured that non-
fiction would be too much work on top of my job, so I gave fiction a go. I wrote one chapter of Bad Summer People on a whim and felt like I could keep going. So, I did.”
After about four months of writing, Rosenblum says, she had a draft and sent it to an agent with whom she’d previously discussed a nonfiction project. “It wasn’t for him,” she says, “and so I kind of put it to the side for a month or so, thinking I’d rework it when I had the chance. But then, a few weeks later, I reread the draft and thought, there are way worse books that get published than this one—I think maybe that agent is wrong.”
Because Bad Summer People was about the misadventures of the rich and powerful, Rosenblum decided to send the book to Kevin Kwan’s agent. When she googled the author, it turned out she’d already met his agent, Alexandra Machinist, years ago. “I cold-emailed her again asking if she’d read my draft,” she says. “She loved it, believed in it, and sold it like a week later to Megan Lynch at Flatiron. It goes to show that having the right agent is the best thing for a writer.” The book went on to become a bestseller, and Rosenblum’s side project became her main gig. She left Bustle last year to become a full-time novelist.
In Mean Moms, Frost, Morgan, and Belle throw lavish theme parties, cheat on their husbands, gossip, and pass judgment on their peers. But things go from catty to catastrophic, and it all seems to stem from the arrival of a newcomer: a glamorous Miami transplant named Sofia. And while Sofia seems nice enough, her arrival does coincide with a series of unfortunate events. There’s the scooter incident, in which Frost is knocked to the ground by a malicious motorist. There’s a sudden lice outbreak. And that’s just the beginning, with the mean moms wondering where it will end, who’s responsible, and if Sofia is out to sabotage the Atherton community.
Rosenblum says the seed for Mean Moms was planted by an encounter with a member of Manhattan parenting’s swell set. “I met a mom, and she was so nice, so dripping with kindness, and she was trying to help me with something and was
volunteering for something else,” she says. “It was almost like she was too nice. And I remember thinking to myself, What if she was actually psychotic? What if she’s a serial killer?”
Spoiler alert: she wasn’t. But the thought stuck with Rosenblum, whose fiction often conjures darkly comedic crime among the rich and fabulous. Bad Summer People follows a group of queen bees lording over their peers on Fire Island until a body washes up on the beach, while Very Bad Company pokes fun at the tech industry and tracks a team of high-level executives at a corporate retreat in Miami. With fiction that explores the complicated relationship between money morals, one can imagine Rosenblum’s peer group chasing her down Fifth Avenue with pitchforks or casting her out like the Swans did Truman Capote.
Not likely, Rosenblum says. “The reactions are generally more like, ‘Well, why wasn’t I in it?’ ” she says. “First of all, nobody would ever take credit for being a character that was not an altruistic, perfect person. I also think people kind of like seeing their own community parodied. My mom friends are super excited about the new book and can’t wait to read it.” It helps that Rosenblum’s prose is sharp and often hilarious, as in this description of one of her new novel’s mean moms: “Morgan always knew everything first; gossip found her, nourishing her body in place of the food she barely ate.”
Megan Lynch, executive vice president and publisher of Flatiron Books and Rosenblum’s editor, says the author’s sense of humor
helps her get away with any potential class betrayal. “She has such a lacerating wit. It is directed at the world around her, but it is directed just as strongly at herself. She knows the worlds that she is writing about, and that’s why when she picks a target to skewer, it always hits really close to home and rings true. We are in a moment when everybody likes to enjoy rich people getting their comeuppance, and that is what her books deliver in an absolutely delicious way.”
Rosenblum’s fiction works so well because, while it’s not really about her life, it is about a milieu she knows well and is guided by curiosity and a sense of wonder at the world of the 1%. “Even as a privileged person living in New York City, there’s so many levels beyond where you would be comfortable,” she says. “You walk into these homes, and you meet people and you’re like, Oh my God, you have more money than God. And you sort of wonder what that must be like.”
Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer and was the 2009 Nieman arts and culture fellow at Harvard University.
