Emma Straub's American Fantasy follows a 50-year-old divorced woman who takes a boy-band cruise alone after her sister's injury. Surrounded by enthusiastic fans, she rediscovers pleasure she'd suppressed for decades, learning that middle-aged desire flourishes when you stop caring about being cool.
Tell me about your book. All right, well, what I was thinking about on the way here was like, how, like, what do these two books have in common? And I think the answer is they give into and delight in pleasure. So American Fantasy is about a 50-year-old woman, recently divorced, who goes on a cruise. She's supposed to go with her sister, but then her sister breaks her leg and can't go. And the cruise is a fantasy cruise. Cruise for the sister's favorite boy band. You know, she goes in, and she sees all these other women with enormous suitcases and all kinds of bibs and bobs. And they're all wearing clothing that is, you know, for this boy band. And they look sort of ridiculous to her, all these women. And then, you know, over the course of the cruise, she relaxes into it, I would say. And she rediscovers, this part of herself that has been dormant for some decades. And it's really about pleasure in middle age, which I think is a glorious part of middle age as I see it. You know, that when you don't, when you're not as worried about being cool or what's hip or whatever, and you can actually truly devote yourself to the things that you love, you love, whether it's building yourself your dream library or going on a boy band cruise full of 3,000 screaming women. You know, it's about truly letting yourself, letting the soft body of your animal love what it loves.
