Good Material

On My Debut Novel, NO ONE YOU KNOW

My husband Rob likes to joke that he has to read my fiction if he wants to find out the things he does that annoy me. While it’s true that there is much of him in the character Ethan in my new novel, No One You Know (out tomorrow!), there is also some of him in the main character Kate, and the complicated grief she experiences after the loss of her mother. There’s even some of him in Ethan and Kate’s daughter, Indie. And there’s a lot of fiction in all three of them, too. Mostly it was fun to imagine how a different wife–or a different family–might respond to some of my husband’s “quirks.” Exhibit A:

Ethan’s nightstand light is already off and his body is turned away from me, sleep mask on. He takes a rigorously scientific approach to a good night’s sleep, snapping off bright overhead lights after nine p.m. like they’re radioactive. “What are you, a gremlin?” Indie said once, flipping her overhead light back on.

On a deeper level, however, much of what I know about grief is from watching Rob lose both his parents, and almost everything I know about marriage is from being his wife. (The rest I learned from being a sex and relationships writer for almost two decades, as one half of the advice duo Em & Lo. We published eight nonfiction books on the topic.)

Zibby Owens read the following excerpt from No One You Know when she interviewed me last week for her podcast, Totally Booked, and I thought I’d share it here, too. I didn’t read this poem to Rob the morning after our wedding, but I wish I had. Pretty much everything else in this excerpt I stole from our life. I’ll let you decide which of us used to leave toothpaste splatter, and which of us used to leave Post-it notes about it. Fortunately both of those things are in the distant past. Twenty years in, we’re pretty good at giving each other a little grace.

The morning after our wedding, I woke to the oddly pleasant sensation of being hungover in the most comfortable hotel bed in the history of down. I read Robert Browning’s poem “Now” to my brand new husband, because I finally understood it, how you make perfect the present. How ideal love cannot exist in everyday life, but it can exist in a moment that feels perfect. I’d never read this poem out loud before, and as I spoke, and felt the rhythm of each line, I understood it even more:

Thought and feeling and soul and sense –

Merged in a moment which gives me at last

You around me for once, you beneath me, above me –

Me – sure that despite of time future, time past, –

This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me!

That morning in our hotel bed, I thought that marriage was defined by such moments, and that a successful marriage meant learning to bide your time between them. Eventually, though, I discovered it was the in-between that was truly ours—the secret downtime of a marriage. The long car rides bingeing true crime podcasts. Ethan chopping onions for a breakfast scramble while I read out clues from the Sunday crossword. Assembling IKEA furniture together while we listened to albums from our vinyl collection (Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors for me and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds for him).

We all become ordinary to each other in the end, but this doesn’t have to destroy a marriage. A stable marriage depends on ordinariness, in fact, and even if it feels like a grind sometimes, it’s your grind. You are two human beings who leave toothpaste splatter on the bathroom mirror (or leave passive-aggressive Post-It notes about the toothpaste splatter). You tell each other the same stories over and over again, and, on a good day, you pretend you’ve never heard this one before, or that it gets better with each telling. The ordinariness is the reward you earned when you chose each other: When you chose a lifetime of being rooted in place by habit and time, by the imprints your bodies made in your own side of the mattress. Tell me there’s not something beautiful in that.

No One You Know is out Tuesday, January 20th, 2026, from She Writes Press. It’s available wherever books are sold. You can order signed copies from my local independent bookstore, Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY.