Issue #149: My Book is Out Today (!) and an Exclusive Expert

Plus 72 hours in NYC.

📚 You’re Safe Here by Leslie Stephens: She’s hereee! Of course I’m going to recommend my debut novel, out today, which takes place forty years in the future. In it, Maggie Endsall is quick to grab a spot on an exclusive retreat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, created by the enigmatic founder of WellCorp, Emmett Neal. Over the course of the six-week getaway, Emmett’s carefully crafted façade begins to fall away—revealing secrets that may put Maggie’s life at risk. It’s been called “dystopia at its best” (Booklist) and “a heart-pumping ride” (Publishers Weekly), with “deliciously paced storytelling sprinkled with secrets galore” (Thao Thai)! Read on for an excerpt—maybe I’ll see you in L.A. tonight with

Joy Sullivan

for our sold-out event! Thank you, thank you for making this launch so special!

📺 “Presumed Innocent” on Apple TV+: The premise of this new miniseries is so compelling—a Chicago prosecutor becomes the prime suspect in the murder of his colleague when it’s discovered that he’s been having an affair with her. I’m three episodes in, but this whodunnit with a star-studded cast (Ruth Negga, Renate Reinsve, Jake Gyllenhaal!) is keeping me on my toes. I’m eagerly awaiting the next episode! Watch if you’re a fan of “The Night Of” or “The Undoing.”

🎥 ‘Fire of Love’ on Hulu: I recently rewatched this documentary on a flight, and was just as in awe of it as the first time I saw it. In it, two daring and married French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft take extreme risks to capture footage of explosions, from both “red” volcanoes and the far more dangerous “grey” volcanoes. Just trust me on this one.

When my editor told the booksellers, “I have an author here to do signings,” I did a literal double-take. Oh, it took me a beat to realize, she’s talking about me. I make a point of visiting

Emma Straub

’s Books Are Magic every time I’m in the city, but it’s always been as a reader (I can clearly remember coming across now-beloved writers, like

Molly Wizenberg

and Elizabeth Strout, there). Even as I signed tens of books, crossing out my typed name on the title page as my editor instructed me is the thing to do, I struggled to absorb the shift in my role from a Reader to now, also, an Author.

Novels were my first love, and my identity as a reader is present on every page of You’re Safe Here. References to books and authors, from Mary Oliver to Willa Cather to bell hooks, and even Dostoevsky, abound throughout it. It is an enormous honor to share with you, my readers (!), the launch of my book, You’re Safe Here, available today at bookstores and online at BookShop, Amazon, Audible and Libro FM, and Barnes and Noble! Below, I’m sharing an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters in the book, as well as a recap from my pre-launch trip to New York, and a special giveaway!

In my conversation with

Georgia Clark

at P&T Knitwear, she asked me which of my three protagonists I resonate most with. On the surface, I’m most similar to Maggie, a woman who attends a state-of-the-art retreat in the midst of an enormous life decision, but I only realized in the editing process how many (less savory) traits I share with Emmett, a toxically ambitious founder of a biotech company. It may be the exact thing that made her so fun to write. In this excerpt, she’s just announced her latest launch—a fleet of floating personal paradises scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean called WellPods—in a keynote.

Emmett had barely finished waving to the audience when a flute of champagne found its way into her hand. She wrapped her fingers around it, gripping the fragile glass as if it were a life raft, as her eyes adjusted to the dark.

“Take a minute,” someone said. “They’re still exiting the auditorium.”

Onstage, she had been illuminated by a spotlight and a glow that emanated from the model WellPod.

Emmett could still feel the reverberations of the applause as she took a sip of the champagne, offering a tight smile to Taylor, who she could now see was the one who had handed her the glass.

“How was I?” she asked her assistant.

“It could have used more energy in the buildup, but nothing that needs any damage control,” Taylor said honestly. Emmett had seen so many of her competitors surround themselves with flatterers, but he always told her the truth. She took another sip and considered her appearance in the mirror offstage, grateful for the dim lighting.

“Okay, ready? I can delay them if you need,” Taylor said.

Emmett shook her head. Might as well get it over with. “Let’s go.” Taylor stopped just before the door to the private lobby and pulled a microfiber cloth from his pocket to wipe away the smudge left by Emmett’s lipstick on the edge of her glass. “Remember to make eye contact and smile. The board wants to see you as more approachable.”

Emmett obeyed, stepping forward so that the double doors slid open, unveiling two Reception-Holographs with matching serene smiles plastered to their semitransparent faces. The glass-walled lobby wasn’t quite as large as the adjacent main welcome room, where hundreds of reporters and employees were now spilling from the auditorium, but it still held around two hundred people, each of whom gripped a matching flute. Servers rushed to fill the remaining glasses.

Champagne had always been a luxury, but low crop yield meant high-end collectors had scooped up every French bottle until the price became impossibly expensive for anyone with a net worth under seven figures. Affordable alternatives had popped up in Poland and Scandinavia, but the champagne here flowed from French bottles, squeezed from the last of the overripe and dying grapes. Emmett watched her employees spill unspillable champagne. At their level of wealth, nothing was too precious to conserve. They had about as much substance as the Reception-Holographs that had herded them in, Emmett thought cruelly.

All eyes on her, Emmett raised her glass, taking the opportunity to quickly scan the crowd. She recognized only a handful of the faces closest to her, including the only journalist she had granted access to the room. As with most writers and Pohvee Personalities she interacted with, his name came to her as his full byline, Thomas Fischer. The rest of the group was made up of investors, board members, and the executive committee along with their spouses and partners. Even those who had contributed in later rounds were multimillionaires from WellCorp alone. Emmett smiled as they quieted, careful not to make eye contact with her first investor, Oisín, who stood next to his eager-to-please wife and two teenage sons, visibly uncomfortable in their suits. His eyes were glued to hers, and Emmett could practically feel them boring into her. They had been close once, but any fondness he had felt toward Emmett had been strained over the past few months in the lead-up to the keynote.

“Thank you!” Emmett said, collecting herself. Her voice transitioned seamlessly once more to their EarDrums. “I’m sure you can all understand how close I am to capacity for speeches tonight.” She paused, allowing their polite laughter to fade. “But I will say this: in the past decade, my vision to create a Nest, a womb where people would feel safe became one shared by every single person in this room. Today, reality has finally coopted even my wildest dreams.

“WellPods are our most ambitious product to date,” Emmett said, shifting under the gaze of Oisín’s wife, “and one that will launch us across disciplines, from technology into travel and even deeper into mental and physical healthcare. At the same time, it will provide us with the opportunity to connect with users on a much more significant level. So much more is to come, but for now, please enjoy the champagne. Cheers!” She raised her glass, pulling others as if tethered by fishlines to her own.

Across the room Emmett saw two of her first engineers, and raised her glass to them. The all-nighters they’d spent side by side writing lines of code felt a lifetime away now. Their salaries alone made them unfathomably wealthy, not to mention loyal. But the stock price, which had only grown in anticipation of Emmett’s keynote, guaranteed that not only they but their children’s children would be rich too. It was nearly impossible to envision the seismic waves their net worths would trigger, a ripple effect that would have crippled Los Angeles’s housing in the same way San Francisco’s had been fifty years prior, if not for the luxurious WellHome apartments the company had built for its employees.

Emmett pushed her way through the crowd, her lips curving into a closed smile that got her to the far edge of the lobby and its two sets of doors. One would release her into the main lobby, where Pohvee Personalities and members of the press were frenetically milling, hoping to intercept her exit and get a usable quote or clip. The other led into an underground hallway available to employees and approved guests only. She pushed the door open and walked down the short ramp. Taylor followed like a shadow.

A few employees were already walking back toward the main building to projects that would keep them at their desks until even later in the night. They ducked their heads as Emmett strode past them, walking in the opposite direction.

“Hi, Thomas.” At Taylor’s words, Emmett turned around to see him speaking to the journalist, one of the last holdouts of a nearly extinct breed. “Emmett’s not taking any more questions this evening, but I’m happy to schedule another time for you to speak with her.”

Emmett wasn’t in the habit of making allies of members of the press, but Thomas was as close to an exception as she allowed. She had handpicked him to write a subsidized puff piece about WellCorp after the campus was built (she hated its infantilizing designation, “WellPark”), and had granted several interviews since. Emmett trusted him, and he valued that trust too highly to write anything damaging about her. He had been one of the few to know about WellPods prior to the keynote. Emmett stood still as Thomas brushed straight past Taylor to her.

He was in his usual uniform, a sport coat, slacks, and gray T-shirt, which looked like a cheap mimicry of what he thought “serious” journalists wore half a century ago, despite his being younger than most in his industry. Emmett suspected it was a calculated camouflage, a plea for nostalgia to dress like the reporters who had covered Silicon Valley executives during their early tech booms.

“I wanted to give you the article before it goes live tonight.” He looked at Emmett, whose Device buzzed with an invitation to accept the document. “I thought you might . . . it’s not what we talked about.”

Emmett had fed Thomas quotes about the Pods under strict embargo. What had he done? She accepted, downloading its contents.

“I’ll give it a read, thank you.” She glanced at Taylor, who looked annoyed at not having been given access.

Thomas didn’t notice, or pretended not to, addressing Emmett: “Let me know if you have any questions.”

“How long do I have?”

“My editor can wait another two hours before publishing it, out of courtesy to you, but she wants it live by ten at the latest.”

“Thank you,”Emmett said, and Thomas nodded and turned away. She and Taylor had been walking toward the parking lot to head home—she had a limited tolerance for these events, despite her honed façade—but instead she turned back toward the auditorium, to the private elevator that would take her straight to her office.

At the elevator, Taylor tapped his Device against the Reader, summoning its car. “I’ll be here if you need anything.”

Emmett stepped in. “Have some champagne. I’ll be down soon.” Taylor nodded, then turned so quickly he bumped into two women, separating their clasped hands at the moment the doors closed, cutting off Emmett’s view. When they opened again, it was to her office, which she had designed with sunset views in mind. The vast, curved glass walls offered unencumbered views of her slice of California coast and her beloved ocean, but night could be just as stunning. She walked from the elevator to the northern edge of the circular room, leaning her palms against the low bookshelf that ran along the perimeter. People were beginning to funnel out of the main lobby. Beyond them, Emmett could see a string of small jewels bobbing along the coastline: a thousand WellPods docked just a few miles north of campus, waiting to be launched.

She let her fingertips linger over the tops of a framed feather her mother had given her and a gold coin the size of her palm, both leaning against the glass, then walked over to her desk in the center of the room and sat down. The desk had belonged to her father, and the cheap wood held tiny grooves made from the imprints of thousands of ballpoint pens. Most industries at that time had already transitioned to be electronic, but car sales were still done on paper. Emmett would sit at the end of the table, learning to write by mimicking her father’s cursive, which complemented the looping cadence of his Georgia drawl. Sign at the X, with a blue or black pen, ma’am, he would say in the years they could still call themselves a family, before he left them. In a way, her job wasn’t unlike her father’s. They were both selling the promise of a better life through technology. Emmett ran her thumb along the shallow craters, the few sips of champagne making her a little slower.

Emmett clicked on her Device and the headline from Thomas’s article filled her screen. She didn’t have time to catch it before it fell from her hand, the phantom words still etched before her as clear as a projection from her Lens: Radically UnWell: Inside WellCorp’s Sick Culture of Secrets

It’s difficult to convey exactly how magical this trip was—friends from all walks of life, including Portland, college, and L.A., came to support the pre-launch of You’re Safe Here, so the entire weekend felt like an extended, surreal reunion with some of my favorite people in the world.