Vacationers (Straub)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979-80
• Raised—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City


Emma Straub is an American author three novels and a short story collection. Raised on Manhattan's Upper West side, she now lives with her husband and two young sons in Brooklyn.

Emma comes by writing naturally: her father is Peter Straub, an award winning writer of horror fiction, a fact which makes even Emma admit to a belief in a writing gene. Here's what she told Michele Filgate of Book Slut:

I believe the writing gene is located just behind the gene for enjoying red wine and just in front of the gene for watching soap operas, both of which I also inherited from my father. What I do know for sure is that I watched my father write for a living my entire childhood, and I understood that it was a job like any other, that one had to do all day, every day. I think a lot of people have the fantasy that a writer sits around in coffee shops all day, waiting for the muse to appear.

So while genes may play a role, so does hard work and grit: determined to become a writer, she pushed on even after her first four books were turned down. As she told Alexandra Alter of the New York Times,

They all got rejected by every single person in publishing, in the world. It’s still true that I will go to a publishing party or event, and the first thing I will think of is, "I know who you are, you rejected novels 2 and 4."

It's nice to think that today Straub is having the last laugh.

Attending Oberlin College, Straub received her B.A. in 2002. She went on to earn her M.F.A. at the University of Wisconsin where she studied with author Lorrie Moore. Returning to New York, she worked for a number of years at the independent Book Court bookstore in Brooklyn.

Her novels include Modern Lovers (2016), The Vacationers (2014), and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures (2012). Her story collection is titled Other People We Married (2011). Straub's fiction and nonfiction have been published in Vogue, New York Magazine, Tin House, New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and Paris Review Daily. She is also a contributing writer to Rookie. (LitLovers.)