The Stereo Speakers of Fandom: A Conversation with Emma Straub

The posters for N’Sync’s Lance Bass would usually come in Teen Beat magazine. His autograph might be in the corner, doused in baby pink, reprinted hundreds of thousands of times for loyal fans, like me, to pin up to their bedroom wall.Though parasocial relationships look differently today with the information available to us, the practice of fandom remains the same: there is a one-sided obsession, a projected fantasy onto another and limited access to their orbit.  

But what happens if you go on a five-day cruise and suddenly have direct access to the boy band of your youth? In Emma Straub’s American Fantasy, fifty-year old Annie is newly divorced, recently demoted and replaced by a Gen-Z colleague at work. An opportunity to take a cruise with Boy Talk, the boy band of her teenage years, presents itself. The band headlines every event on the seas. At first, she is reluctant about going. The desire to not only separate herself from her current circumstances, but to have fun, wins out. 

Utilizing three points of views including a fan, a quasi-cruise director/manager for Boy Talk, and a member of the band, Straub is able to showcase what she calls “the stereo speakers” of fandom: there is the nostalgia that excites the fans, but also traps the adult male band members in boyhood and there are the projected desires onto the band members which fans expect to have reflected back to them, especially in such close proximity. But amidst the obsession and underneath the layers of devotion and the worship, there is a joyfulness and a purity to this kind of love. It is a love that is greater than one self and a love that stays consistent throughout a lifetime. Straub is interested in not only the purity, but in how this devotion can ultimately be freeing. How it can offer a sense of reclamation—“a reclaiming of yourself for yourself.”

Straub and I chatted over video. We discussed the perils and rewards of meeting your heroes, the ways in which most of us are engaged in parasocial relationships and how we, as people, never truly change but rather shift directions to energize the parts of ourselves we may have lost along the way. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

The Rumpus: I want to begin with a technical question. This novel oscillates between three close third person perspectives–Annie, a fifty-year old woman who is on this cruise (begrudgingly at first), and Sarah, a thirty-year old millennial who works as a kind of cruise director for Boy Talk, and Keith who is a member of Boy Talk. Why utilize a three person POV here? Why did you feel that was necessary to tell this story? 

Emma Straub: I wanted to show this experience from as many points of view as possible. I didn’t want it to be a million points of view, but I wanted to get the three main ones which included: a fan, an employee, and a member of the band. 

For the fan, I needed someone who had chosen this. Annie may be a reluctant fan, but she’s one nonetheless. With Sarah, I wanted someone who was there for work, who had not chosen to be there and who could see it most critically. And then I wanted to see what it felt like from the inside. Getting a point of view from Keith is almost like getting the zoo animal’s perspective because the members of Boy Talk, the men, are really tucked away and protected for a lot of the novel–they’re not out roaming and having the full experience. 

Having all three felt like the right choice for this novel because I wanted the reader to see the whole scene as clearly as possible. I thought that if I only told it from Annie or Sarah’s point of view, you wouldn’t get the whole and true experience–I wanted the stereo speakers. 

Rumpus: Sarah is also a figure removed from the celebrity of Boy Talk, she’s not as easily enamored as the fans are. 

Straub: Totally! She is at work! She is fully at work and she is efficient. She also has to do this for all different kinds of musicians and these boy band members are old enough to be her parents. She’s just trying to keep the trains on the track.  

Rumpus: So much of this story is centered around parasocial relationships—these deep connections we have towards people who don’t know us. There is a strange sense of ownership over the celebrity from the mega-fan. What about the idea of parasocial relationships interested you? 

Straub: As research for this novel, I became part of quite a few fandom Facebook groups and I learned so much. It’s not only women in the groups, but I’ll say it’s mostly women, mostly my age or older, mid-forties. They have had these parasocial relationships for so long that for a lot of them, they have turned into at least some semblance of a real relationship. 

I don’t think this is unique to boy bands, maybe the level of intensity is different for boy bands, but I think what happens over time is that fandoms winnow. The group gets smaller. It’s not millions of anonymous people anymore—it may just be 1000, 5000, 10,000 people—but those people are going to come every time. They’re going to pay for the VIP concert or cruise experience too. These fans are going to meet these men over and over and over again, and I’m interested in that–what happens when you do have access to these people? What happens when these idols aren’t several layers removed anymore but have become more accessible with time and devotion? What does that look like? How does that feel? 

It is an interesting thing to think about, especially in this moment. All of us are in a million different kinds of parasocial relationships—whether it’s a girl you went to high school with or Taylor Swift. You suddenly find yourself having theories about Swift’s engagement and her wedding, but it’s because you have access to all of the information available. 

That is classic boy band fan stuff: Knowing all these facts about someone, knowing about their parents and siblings, their childhood dogs, because, as it turns out, we are all human beings. 

Rumpus: I was also reading about the conception of “Celebrity Worship Syndrome,” which is a form of psychological bonding where people choose their relationship with public figures over other elements of their lives. Maira is a good example—this cruise is the event she looks forward to every year; Boy Talk has power over her sense of self. Do you think this kind of devotion is empowering, escapist or corrosive? Could it be all three? 

Straub: Yes, I do think there is an element to all of it. Mostly what I think about fandoms is that it is empowering and positive and joyful. That’s my overwhelming feeling about fandoms. 

I do think there is also a layer of fans who are looking for anything, any way out so that they have something to look forward to. I’ve witnessed that a lot. These may be people whose home lives are really difficult–whether it’s through illness, circumstance, whatever reason. Their lives may be actively hard and they have found this external thing that they can focus and fixate on that gives them a feeling of escape. Is it healthy? I don’t know, maybe not. But does it also work? Yes! If someone is really struggling and if a boy band member is something they can hold on to to find solace, who am I to judge that? 

Rumpus: You write, “Talkers weren’t touching him; they were touching the idea of him that was somehow housed in the same flesh as the actual him.” The idea of projected fantasy is a constant presence throughout this novel—the Talkers project their fantasies onto Boy Talk, and Boy Talk reflects those fantasies back to them. Tell me more about this mirroring dynamic. 

Straub: I think that none of us are immune to these projections, and it’s hard to avoid. For this novel, I was put in touch with one of the members of New Kids On The Block. He’s a terrific, smart, wonderful man and it was hard at times to really clear away my expectations. I think that’s probably true for any famous person. You have to remind yourself of all of the layers that have been built between you and this person—whether it’s a magazine article you read about them or a film you watched that they’re in, whatever it is—you have to remember that all of those things are both real and totally imaginary. That can be really challenging. 

I think the good news is that people who are often in that position, they’re quite used to it. Thinking about fame so much while writing this book made me very happy to be a writer. There are very few writers who can’t go to the grocery store. 

In terms of a boy band, though, the word that comes to mind for me is beyond generous—it’s sacrificial, especially for people who have been famous since they were children. The trade-off is so extreme. The glory is enormous, but the things you’ve given up before you understood what you were actually giving up, are enormous. It’s all hard, but it’s very juicy material for a novel. 

Rumpus: Another constant presence is this idea of nostalgia. For many of the Talkers, it is the nostalgia, maybe, of their youth—nostalgic for a part of their life they’re no longer in, same for Boy Talk. Nostalgia can be nice but it can also be a kind of impediment to growth. How did you want this novel to explore the concept of nostalgia? 

Straub: I think that’s exactly it. I really wanted to look at the two halves of it. There are parts of nostalgia, emblems of it like a boy band, that can give thousands of women a truly needed escape and release, which is a beautiful gift for them. But simultaneously, the nostalgia is a prison that has trapped these men for their entire adult lives. With any group dynamic, I wanted to show that it’s different for each of them. There are some members who are really not struggling with it and others who are. 

I wanted to look at both sides of the nostalgia express train and explore what that feels like and what happens when you want out. Can you even get out? Is that even possible? 

Rumpus: In a similar vein, this novel made me think of a quote from Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Driving in the car with her mother, Lady Bird says, “I’m the same, I’m just the same in a different direction.” So much of this novel grapples with the idea of personal change—how living in the past may impede our future. Boy Talk is not meant to be frozen in boyhood and Annie must release past expectations of herself. In essence, American Fantasy is a story about reclamation. Do you think these characters are truly changing, or just redirecting who they’ve always been? 

Straub: That’s a lovely way to think about it. I know so many women who are my age and older who have changed their lives entirely in the last decade, in their forties, whether that’s been getting a divorce, having a child they didn’t expect to have, changing their careers or going back to school. So many friends of mine have gone through these enormous changes. Of course, none of these changes mean they’ve changed as a person, it just means that they are shifting their focus, their energy, their direction and maybe it’s to bolster parts of them that got lost somewhere along the way. 

Certainly, when I think about women going back to school or work after taking care of children, I know that is an enormous change. Are you exactly the same? No, you’re not! But going back to work or changing your career is also reclaiming yourself for yourself in a way that feels extraordinary. 

Even going on the cruise is that reclamation for some people. They’re saying: “I claim this. I claim this time for my own pleasure.” It is revolutionary. Going on the cruise is not a necessity, it is an indulgence. 

I’m an anxious person, and when I travel for work I get very caught up. I don’t think I have ever said to myself: “You know what I need? Fun. I’m going to take this five day trip because I want to.” Even right now, it would take so much for me to feel like I could do that. But so many women do that for the cruise. Thousands of them and it’s beautiful! 

Rumpus: I want to touch on formal constraints. I’ve noticed in your work you touch on transformation in unusual amounts of time—in your last novel [This Time Tomorrow (Riverhead Books, 2023)]  that literally involved time travel, but in American Fantasy, it’s five days on a cruise. What about time, as a constraint, as a motivator, as personal measurement is interesting to you? 

Straub: I love building myself a box. I love giving myself a tight space because my plots are, let’s say, quiet and internal. American Fantasy has a bit more of the razzle dazzle, but the plot itself is always personal transformation and usually someone has feelings. I find that the tighter you can make the space, the more power plots like that have.  

Rumpus: Have you been on a cruise? How was that experience? 

Straub: Yes! I went on a New Kids On The Block cruise, which I’m not sure they would do again. They may have done it thirteen or fourteen times already. After that, I went on two cruises with my family and those cruises were very different from a boy band cruise, let me tell you. There’s a lot of weird photo opportunities. Someone is always waiting to take your picture next to a rescue buoy.