The Author: Emily Smith
The Book: Nothing Serious (William Morrow, 2025)
The Elevator Pitch: A tech executive goes into an obsessive spiral when her best friend and long-time crush’s first online date is found dead, and he’s implicated in her murder.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Emily J. Smith: There’s a scene in Nothing Serious where Edie’s best friend and crush, Peter, is giving her a shot in her ass the last night of her egg freezing procedure, but when she plays him the instructional videos, he’s heads-down swiping Tinder, not paying attention. This happened to me in real life with one of my dearest friends, who also, like Peter, happens to be a handsome and wealthy tech bro, and it was when the idea for the book hit me. This friend was—is!—an incredibly supportive person in my life, but he can also be infuriatingly self-involved and over-confident. I was very interested in exploring this tension between caring for a man and also wanting to see him face consequences for his privileges.
Like Edie, the main character in Nothing Serious, I studied computer engineering, went to business school, and worked in tech, and so my life was full of this dissonance—men who had been very dear friends to me, had shaped me as a person, but who, also, the more I opened my eyes, were fairly insufferable and self-involved. As I inched closer to forty, I saw how the lives of my male friends had often gotten easier with age, whereas typical trajectories of “success”—staying motivated in a capitalist system, finding a committed partner, having children, accumulating wealth, garnering cultural respect—seemed more challenging for women with age, or at least more complex. I wanted to explore how all these small indignities pile up for women over time and what an attempt at revenge might look like.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Smith: I wrote the first draft of the book in a four-month fever dream. I had broken my foot and couldn’t leave my apartment, so I had a lot of free time. I’d had the idea for over a year, but I was burnt out on writing my first novel, which went nowhere—after querying close to 100 agents—and didn’t have it in me to write another book on spec. But when I was suddenly couch-ridden, it felt like a rare, time-boxed chance to get this story out of my system and see if the idea worked.
Shortly after I finished the draft, I landed venture capital to start my own dating app—what felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity—so I put the book away. I was honestly embarrassed that I’d written such a plot-heavy book and thought I’d never return to it. Three years later, I shut down my dating app and opened the book back up. Shockingly, I enjoyed what I read. It was suddenly clear how to make it better. I gave myself five months [of] living off savings to improve it and start querying before looking for a new full-time job.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Smith: No. I spent five years working on my first novel. I poured my soul into that book and tried so hard to make it work. I queried close to 100 agents, and the most common rejection was that it didn’t have enough plot. It was, like most first novels, an almost laughably autobiographical story. I was far more concerned with capturing truth than creating a page-turner, because those were the kinds of books I loved reading. But agents wanted a catchier, more propulsive plotline.
When I started writing Nothing Serious, I knew it had to have a big juicy plot. I’m so grateful for my first novel, the process of writing it essentially taught me how to write, but I wasn’t going to spend another five years of my life on a nonviable project. Part of the reason I was able to write Nothing Serious so quickly was because it essentially has the same protagonist and character arc as my first book, just with a mysterious death added in. So, all that thinking and world building was already established in the years I spent writing and rewriting that first book.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Smith: I got—checks spreadsheet—seventy agent rejections for my first book and forty-one agent rejections, including non-responses, from agents for Nothing Serious. Querying is so brutal. If your book is not overtly catering to a specific market it can be so hard to find an agent who connects with it enough to believe they can sell it, especially in this wildly challenging market.
But once I had an agent—about seven years after my first query letter—we got a yes from William Morrow/HarperCollins within a few weeks! That was incredibly exciting and validating.
Rumpus: Which authors/writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Smith: So many! I love writers that let us just sit in their brilliant mind, like Sheila Heti, whose book, Motherhood, is a sort of bible for me. Like so many others, I was obsessed with Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and still return to it regularly. Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, was one of the first books that made me want to write a novel. I love the way she portrays the drama of a single, middle-aged woman.
I hadn’t read many mysteries or thrillers, but since Nothing Serious has those elements, I began reading them exclusively to learn how to do it. I got very into Tana French, who is really fun and masterful at what she does. I fell in love with Patricia Highsmith, who so expertly weaves an eerie, suspenseful plot with brilliant prose and cutting truths. I also loved Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, another classic example of suspense mixed with literary excellence.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Smith: Like I mentioned, I took an unintentional three-year break from the book after writing the first draft, which, I mean, there is nothing more valuable to editing than that! When I came back to the manuscript, it was very clear that I’d written it in a kind of ferocious rage. So much of my own resentment and bitterness was packed into the pages. Which can be great in doses! But it needed a massive edit. Most of the revision process involved rounding out the characters and building in more self-awareness, much of which had come in those years being away from it. For example, it was originally called “Crazy Single,” because that’s what the main character and I felt like at the time—made insane from the dating apps. Working on the new draft years later, it was very clear that I needed a more distanced and humorous point of view, and then the new title fell into place.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Smith: One of the first literary essays I published—and one of my favorites—was in The Rumpus. I’ve also published essays with Catapult, Vice, The Washington Post, Slate, Romper, Curbed, and others. I’ve published short stories with Hobart and Vice and was in an anthology of short science fiction stories called Terraform.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Smith: A lot of agents told me when I was querying my first book that I needed more plot. For better or worse, it turns out they were right. If you want to sell your book to a traditional publisher, it’s incredibly helpful to have a compelling one-or-two-line pitch for your story, especially as a debut author who might otherwise have trouble breaking in. You can pack the actual book with deeper, nuanced themes and explorations, but don’t disregard plot.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Smith: I’m writing to single women who go through a sort of self-discovery and coming-of-age later, in their thirties. Women who maybe had a specific, somewhat typical, idea of what “success” looked like as an adult—good job, a husband and kids, owning a home—only to find that what they end up with, what brings them real joy in adulthood, might look very different.
Obviously, this comes from my own experience—I’m writing to my younger self. I think for women especially, we can find ourselves chasing external goals and expectations without asking ourselves who we really are and what we actually want. Because the answer to those questions often flies in the face of what society rewards and expects of us.
In my thirties, I began publishing essays about dating, singleness, and self-discovery, and [I] saw how much these themes resonated with other women who had been climbing a specific ladder of “success,” only to realize it wasn’t at all what made them happy. I also connected with this audience while running my dating app. There was a very large cohort of single, thirty-something women who were deeply frustrated by the heterosexual experience and thus in the process of redefining what family and adulthood looked like for them.
A core part of the book is that Edie’s self-discovery comes later, in her thirties, also because she was heads-down supporting her mother financially. She never had the luxury to ask herself who she was or what she wanted—she majored in engineering to pay for school, she took a tech job to support her family. This was my own experience as well, and only later into adulthood did I begin to ask myself what I wanted beyond financial stability.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Smith: Everything was surprising because I didn’t come from this world at all. But specifically, I was surprised at first by the etiquette and preciousness of the industry. I come from the tech world where things move very fast, often too fast. So even starting the query letters with “Dear” before an agent’s name felt a bit funny to me. But I did the research and followed the rules.
I was also surprised that most agents seemed to actually read my cold queries and express interest if they liked the pages. I had no bylines or writing experience when I started, so it did seem shockingly like a meritocracy in that way—if your story was good, they took it seriously. I think if you have a big platform and name recognition, it’s certainly easier to get published, but, at least in fiction, if you don’t have anything, you’ll still be considered. That was very motivating.
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Author photograph courtesy of Emily J. Smith
