Emma Straub is having a moment: the belle of the Brooklyn indie lit ball, her collection of short stories Other People We Married is getting rave reviews, she was recently featured in The New York Times, and she's setting off on a wholly unique tour—reading each of the stories in her book in the city it takes place in. Oh, and have we mentioned that she lives in Brooklyn, works at BookCourt, and also runs a graphic design company, M + E, with her husband Michael? Because she somehow finds time for all of that, too.

Tomorrow night, she marks her return to Brooklyn, with a Largehearted Boy-curated reading at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, featuring Straub in conversation with none other than her father, horror novelist Peter Straub. We caught up with the author while she was en route from a reading in Ohio back home to New York.

You're on your way back from Oberlin, to New York now? Where is this whole tour taking you? I will admit that I have not been very good about my tour. It's a brilliant idea, and I have read in a few of the locations. There's one place that takes place in Manhattan so I read at McNally Jackson, there's one place that takes place in Brooklyn so I read in Brooklyn. There's a story that takes place in a town very much like Oberlin, Ohio, so I just read there, there's a story that takes place in Palm Beach, Florida, so I did a reading there. There's one in Massachusetts, so I'm reading in Boston. I'm going to LA, because of the Palm Springs story. I'm being a bit loose, but I'm trying, working my way through.

Sounds like you're doing a pretty good job with this tour to me. [Laughing] I haven't booked my flight to Rome, and one story takes place in Rome.

Are you driving to all of these places? Sounds like quite the road trip.
Well, I'm flying to California, like a normal person. But I'm driving most of the other places with Mike. He's so much a part of my daily existence that I can't imagine doing it without him. Plus, he likes to drive much more than I do. He's a much better driver than I am. I grew up in New York City, so I'm a very fearful driver, but he grew up in Florida so he's like a warrior. I didn't learn how to drive until I was twenty, of course, and because I learned how to drive in New York City, there are always stoplights, so you never go very fast, so I feel very comfortable driving in the city, but I really don't like highways because I'm scared to go fast. The only time I have ever gotten pulled over by the police was for driving too slowly. Isn't that pathetic? It was in New Jersey. I burst into tears.

Your dad is also a writer, but he does horror mainly. Do you feel like writing was in the bloodline? Yeah, absolutely! It used to be sort of the norm, where if your parents ran a haberdashery, then you might be a haberdasher. Or if your parents ran a vineyard, then you would learn how to work with grapes. And so I see it as sort of old-fashioned, what I've done; I've gone into the family business. I never once considered doing anything else.

You seem like you've found a comfortable place in the young Brooklyn literary movement. What is it like being part of that community? I get the impression, as an outsider, that it's a very supportive environment. I moved back to Brooklyn two years ago from Madison, Wisconsin, where I was doing my MFA. I started working at BookCourt very quickly after I moved back, and I felt automatically included in the literary universe working there. I adore working there. I started using Twitter around that same time, and I met so many writers through Twitter, an astonishing number of writers. And many of them live in Brooklyn, or in New York City. Then because of BookCourt, and because of going to other readings and events, I ended up meeting a lot of those people in real life, and it has sort of become this wildly supportive environment. I certainly did not invent the concept of a young writer living in Brooklyn.

Between Book Court and WORD and Greenlight, and these young Brooklyn authors that are coming out into the scene now, it seems like it's really developing into its own recognizable genre. I think that was true ten years ago but I also think it was true twenty years ago. I don't think it's new. I think that the internet is maybe providing even more exposure to that sort of phenomenon than before. Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Safran Foer and Colson Whitehead— the writers that are ten years older than I am, Myla Goldberg...we could make an enormous list! And then there’s people like Paul Auster, who are ten years older than Colson Whitehead...and then Paula Fox who's, you know, ninety years old and lives in Brooklyn. I'm happy to be on one of the newest rungs of this ladder.

Do you feel like you write about things that you draw from real life? Sometimes. I would say that I never copy an event down just as it happened. I do sometimes write essays about things that really happened in my life, but if I don't feel like I want to actually write something totally honestly, in non-fiction, then I don't borrow too closely. I don't stay too close to the actual story if I'm writing fiction. Although I do borrow aspects of people and situations all the time; I think all writers do that.

Your stories seem to touch upon issues that are relevant to your peers at this place in time. Even if they're not necessarily based on a true story, they ring very true. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know about other people, but for me, writing is very much the way that I understand the universe around me and the universe inside my head. So if I'm trying to force something out, I’ll do it in my fiction. Even if it's not a problem that I'm having or my relationship with this person or whatever it is that I'm thinking about, I like to think about it in fiction, and I find that it helps me understand what's going on and how I really feel about something. Honestly, it's sort of my own little therapy session sometimes, just sorting out things in the world on the page.

And then you're still working on projects with M + E? Oh yes, oh yes. I have many jobs. What's funny is that I thought that after I sold my novel, which happened about a month ago, I thought, ‘Okay, I'm going to buckle down, finish this book, and I'm going to cut everything out that I don't have to do.’ But that's not what's happening at all. I'm starting to teach a fiction writing class in a couple weeks for the Sackett Street Writer’s Workshop and we're doing all this extra traveling.

Congratulations on selling the novel—what’s it about? The novel is about a movie star, a woman who is born in Door County, Wisconsin, the 1920s, and it follows her to Hollywood, where she becomes a star in the studio system in the '30s, and the book follows her for most of her life. Things go bad. [Laughs] Things go bad! Most of the action takes place between the 1930s and the 1960s.

You weren't even alive in that time frame! What interests you about that period! No, I wasn't. [Laughs] Well, as we were just saying, the stories—even if the stories aren't about me, they are about people like me, in my age and stage, for the most part. I spent a few years writing those stories and others like them, and I found when I was done that I was really sick of it. Not sick of the books, which I'm very proud of, but I was tired of writing stories that felt like they were so close to me, and I wanted to be a little bit more ambitious and step outside my comfort zone. And I love the movies, I've always loved the movies, and I love the idea of glamour and Hollywood. It seemed as far away as I could get.

That's a good reason. And then, I was terrified to do research, because I've never been good at that—never, ever have I been good at that. But what I discovered is, it's actually fun to research something that you're interested in! No one ever told me that! I guess I was writing my college essays on the wrong subjects. So I wrote a whole draft without doing any research, just to sort of get the shape of the story and to figure out what I really needed to know about. Then I went out to California for a little while, and I spent some time at this fabulous, fabulous library that is run by the Academy of Motion Pictures that has everything: it has magazines, it has books, biographies, film strips, microfilms, it's got everything. I just ignored the sunshine and stayed in the library for a few days to get started. I'm just about done now with the draft that I'm going to send to my editor.

Do you have any idea when it's coming out? I think it's going to be fall of 2012. Roughly.

That's really exciting. It is really exciting, thank you! I continue to have many jobs, but now that I'm on sort of a strict deadline, I'm really focusing on the novel at the moment. It's going to be a busy year.