In October 2022, Emma Straub was scrolling online when she saw that New Kids on the Block—her favorite 1990s boy band—was gearing up to go on their then-annual NKOTB Cruise, a multiday voyage from Miami to the Bahamas with their biggest fans. As a preteen growing up in New York City, Straub, now 45, had NKOTB posters covering her walls and even dressed up as Joey McIntyre, one of the band’s members, on her 10th birthday. “It was like a lightning bolt from boy band heaven,” Straub says of seeing the post about the cruise. “I knew that that could be a book for me to write.”

At the time, Straub was mourning the death of her father, renowned horror writer Peter Straub, who passed away that September, and going on a cruise wasn’t possible. “I was deranged with grief,” Straub remembers. The author took the trip the following year, and the experience inspired her new feel-good novel American Fantasy, which publishes in April. “It was incredible—everything I hoped it’d be,” Straub says. “It was thousands of mostly women having the time of their life. I felt like I needed physical therapy when I got home. I was going to bed at 2 a.m. It filled me with joy and happiness.”

Straub, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, is celebrated for her witty, insightful, and joy-filled books, about family and friendship, love, memory, nostalgia, the passage of time, and the woes and triumphs of adulthood and middle age. She’s the author of several works of fiction, including the 2011 story collection Other People We Married and the novels Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, The Vacationers, Modern Love, All Adults Here, and This Time Tomorrow—a tribute to her relationship with her father—as well as three children’s picture books. Her works have sold more than one million copies in the U.S., according to her publisher, Riverhead Books, and have been translated into more than 20 languages. Straub is also the co-owner, with her husband, of Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore with two locations in Brooklyn.

Born in Westport, Conn., and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Straub was a loud kid with loads of confidence. “I was close with my parents, and they found me charming and hilarious, so that’s how I saw myself,” recalls the author, who describes herself as a “large friendly dog who will run up to anyone.”

After graduating from Oberlin College in 2002 with a BA in English, Straub received an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and set about becoming a writer. She wrote four novels in her 20s that were never published (“I got some beautiful rejection letters,” she says) before her story collection Other People We Married was picked up by a small press in 2011. “Being a writer was always my singular goal,” she notes, “and the only job I ever wanted.”

American Fantasy centers on a 50-year-old, divorced woman, Annie, who goes on a four-day fan cruise to the Bahamas that’s hosted by the ’90s boy band Boy Talk. Annie, who loved Boy Talk as a kid, initially feels out of place on the ship among throngs of Boy Talk’s rabid middle-aged devotees, who are eager to get drunk and relive their youth. During a meet-and-greet with the band, Annie establishes a connection with Keith, one of the members, as she comes to appreciate that her former teen crush is just a regular guy with problems like everyone else.

The story is told from multiple perspectives, including those of Annie, who’s in an emotional slump and trying to get her mojo back; the members of the band, who are dealing with notoriety and aging in different ways; and an entertainment director, Sarah, who needs to keep the show running smoothly and stop the band from bickering. During evenings on the cruise, Annie attends parties and gets to know Keith, and tries to reconnect with the vibrant woman she once was. It’s a sparkling story about nostalgia and teenage obsessions, and the pivots people must make in middle age as they search for lasting contentment.

Straub’s research process for American Fantasy was the most colorful and chaotic of her career. “I felt like an anthropologist,” she says of her time on the cruise. “I had some ridiculous cocktails and sang along and jumped up and down, for sure, but I spent most of the time taking notes.” Her sole interaction with the band came during a meet-and-greet, when she shook hands with the members. “That experience is a pit of hell. It’s like a receiving line at a wedding, only it takes eight hours. And every single person tells you they love you. It’s a room full of perfume, longing, and desperation.”

Still, Straub says being on the ship was a blast—and a chance to write about middle age from a unique perspective. “What the cruise really is, in the book and in life, is an absolute break. It is saying, I am putting all of my worries, my fears, all of the heaviness of middle age aside for a few days. I’m going to experience life the way I did when I was 12 years old.”

Sarah McGrath, Straub’s editor, compares the author to Anne Tyler and Lorrie Moore, and notes that Straub has a talent for illuminating the human condition in interesting ways. “Emma’s books are instantly relatable but also deceptively deep,” McGrath says. “It’s one of Emma’s superpowers that she understands how people change over time and why it’s important to not forget who we once were.”

Straub was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship while working on American Fantasy, and it was validation for her. She says commercial fiction and genre writers don’t always get taken seriously. “We’re all put into these different lanes as writers, and my lane is definitely not the Guggenheim lane.”

Claudia Ballard, Straub’s agent for more than a decade, praises the author for her ability to establish meaningful connections with others, on and off the page. “Emma’s books feel like talking to a best friend for hours,” Ballard says. “She has the best laugh. She’s a huge bundle of joy everywhere she goes.”

Straub lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two kids, in a house where “most of the rooms and the landing on the staircase are filled with books,” she notes. The place is a short distance from Books Are Magic, which the couple founded in 2017. “I love being a neighborhood fixture, and putting books I love in people’s hands.”

Writing a novel about a wild boy band cruise was a peak moment for Straub, and she hopes readers will get swept away by the story. “That’s what I want: to have a sense of humor about life and the things we love,” she says. “Some things can be simultaneously ridiculous and sublime.”

Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.