Interview with Erin Somers

I picked (sporadic) Tuesdays as the update day for this newsletter because—I don’t honestly remember the exact why. Some variety of reasons, including that Monday is too hectic and everyone’s brain is too fried to read by Friday, but midweek treats can be nice. I think that was my reasoning?

But subconsciously, I think it’s because I have for a long time associated Tuesdays with books. Most traditionally published books come out on Tuesdays, so the day has a very literary air to it. Very elite. And that is never truer than in the fall, when some of the most delicious prestige releases hit the shelves. Speaking of which, last Tuesday, Amber Sparks’s Happy People Don’t Live Here came out! If you’re in the DC area, come see me in conversation with Amber on Friday, 10/24, at the Politics & Prose location at the Wharf: Register here for free.

This week—today, as you’re reading this—we’re getting another book I’ve been excited about for years. Get a load of these saucy hands:

A little background. In early 2021, when many of us were taking comfort in whatever tried-and-true pleasures we could find, I dove headfirst into one of mine: short stories. Erin Somers’s “Ten Year Affair,” which went viral around that time, caught my attention because it covered ground I found all too familiar—not the titular affair(!), but many of the vexations of early parenthood and of clawing through the weird wilds of one’s thirties. The story follows Cora, a working mom living with her family in a class-obsessed Hudson River suburb, as she explores (but also rejects) a romantic affair with Sam, a dad she meets at baby group. The story puts a cool twist on its domestic subject matter, setting the infidelity in question on a certain plane of the multi-verse (while the protagonist continues to live her real life on another).

I loved the story and recommended it to all my reader friends—and then, a few years later, I was thrilled to learn that Somers would be publishing a similarly titled novel, The Ten Year Affair. I got my hands on a copy as soon as possible and was delighted to find that, as I’d hoped, the novel is an expansion of the 2021 story. Cora and Sam are fully realized here as star-crossed lovers whose awkward dance spans a decade. Along the way, they deal with so many secondary characters who only exist within a particular class of this generation of parents: the mom so crunchy she forces other parents to play spectator to her infant’s elimination-communication failures, the dad who can’t stop talking about his own vas deferens. The novel also tackles the COVID pandemic head-on; unlike other writing from the same period, it doesn’t ignore the enormous changes of the era, but embraces them as catalysts for plot. As a novel, the story is even more immersive and rewarding than the short story, allowing the reader to experience Cora’s and Sam’s attraction, growth, stagnation, and frustrations more fully as they unfurl over ten years.

Somers and I have a lot in common: We’re married moms, squarely Millennial, raising pre-adolescent children, working day jobs and writing books. I couldn’t wait to ask her about her process, including the role our own stints in baby groups have played in our creative process. When I asked her if she’d answer a few questions about this book and her process, I did so knowing she’d have great insights to share with anyone who has ever tried to write while parenting, or who has ever tried to achieve something ambitious with form, or even who has had a certain type of very frustrating workshop experience.

In true busy writer-mom fashion, we conducted our interview through emails spanning several days (reminding me of the way Cora’s affair must fit into found pockets of time, between kiddy birthday parties and job interviews!). She was super generous and I’m excited to share our conversation here:

Shannon Sanders: Expanding a successful short story into a novel was so ambitious, and it took such vision to see how it would work. How did the expansion idea come to you? Was it present while you were drafting the short story, or was it a realization that snuck up on you later?

Erin Somers: It’s funny, but I first started to expand the story out of perceived failure. It took a long time for a publication to buy it, so long that I pretty much gave up. I really loved it, though, and thought it worked, and when I was trying to figure out why it hadn’t sold (besides the usual “this shit is impossible”), I thought maybe it was because it was meant to be a novel. So I started a draft and in the meantime, the story did sell and had this nice little life where a lot of people read it and appeared in Best American Short Stories and so on. By that time the novel was well underway, and my main concern became: how to finish this thing without disappointing the people who love the short story.

SS: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in workshop and heard the words “I really liked this! You should keep going and turn it into a novel.” It often seems like misguidance, though of course sometimes it must work out (as it did here). Your short story eventually sold, but your instinct to dive deeper into the story was also so smart. What advice do you have for writers who are unsure what length best suits their work?

ES: Not every short story premise works at novel length. Stuff that’s kooky or out there can wear thin. I would say that the author’s instinct about whether the work feels final and whether they have more to add should guide the choice. Like most choices in writing, it’s intuition-based and totally nebulous. My advice would be just to try it and see. Even if extending a story doesn’t work, you’ll learn something in the process.

SS: In the short story, Cora’s world is laid out with such perfect economy; it’s so much richer in the novel, which introduces us to new characters, settings, and recurring themes. In writing the novel, what needed the most generative attention? Where did you get to use your imagination most?

ES: I had to build out Cora’s work life a lot. What she does for a living isn’t addressed in the story outside of the detail that she eats granola bars in the afternoon. Not really enough for a novel! So I had to make all these decisions about her job and her relationship to work.

But the biggest thing was figuring out how to push the premise. Basically something had to happen with the bifurcated timelines two third of the way through. I knew it had to be mechanical, but also move the plot forward. It took months and months to figure out what that should look like. Sometimes people ask me if the book is autofiction because it’s set where I live and I’m like…it is the furthest thing from autofiction. It took me six months to invent a single technical element.

SS: This book plays with the idea of a multi-verse, in which Cora is allowed to explore roads not traveled alongside her real-life choices. What inspired you on that front?

ES: I didn’t know it was going to have a multi-verse structure until I typed the word “multi-verse” into the story draft. I didn’t start out with the conceit in mind. So it happened organically, and then I put it to use. It’s still mysterious to me where it came from. Kind of nowhere! Just a language choice. But then practice helps you convert those random word choices into plot.

More broadly, I live this stable, controlled life with a day job and a family. Very ordinary stuff. But I do sometimes wonder, as most people do, I suspect, who else I could have been. There’s a line from my first novel: Everywhere I caught glimpses of the person I could be if only I was a completely different person. Maybe the multi-verse conceit is that thought made literal.

SS: You and I are the same age and have kids who are similar in age. Understanding that this book isn’t autofiction, it’s clear that you know this phase really well—I found SO much in this book to relate to about the decade (approximately) that people spend immersed in the world of raising small kids. What do you think makes it such a compelling and (lol) fertile life stage for writers?

ES: We’re often told that kids ruin things for writers—and they do in the sense of eroding your time and slowing you down. That’s just a fact. The time thing is hard, especially if you also work a day job. But on the other hand early parenthood is so visceral, interesting, and joyful. It is a time of life when you are full of love! When you care desperately! It puts you right in the soup with other people. All that is great for writing. The experience is different for everyone, but it opened me up creatively.

SS: How often do things happen in your daily dealings with kids and other parents that you WISH you as a writer could have dreamed up? (Or is that just me?)

ES: I find myself observing things and stowing them away all the time. I love the little over-reaches and passive aggressive texts, and I find myself noting them for future use. Something this mom or that dad said. I love, for instance, when I see a snub happening in real time between two parents. These small parenting aggressions come from a place of misdirected caring and there is always a class element to them, which makes them perfect for send-up.

SS: The story opens on an extended encounter between Cora, Sam, and a character then known as Broccoli Mom, who perfectly represents sanctimonious Millennials more committed to their parenting ideology than to actual results. It’s perfect. How did you decide on this entry point for the story?

ES: The framing of the baby group was where I started with the short story. With my first baby, I briefly joined this group in Brooklyn where it seemed like everyone had a Parenting Philosophy. And this was pre-TikTok—I gather things are even weirder now. The parents were extremely well-meaning but doing sooo much. In the book, Broccoli Mom travels around with a potty so she can whip it out and potty train her baby at any moment. That is a real technique that I witnessed at this group. I’m like you’re carrying a small toilet around Brooklyn, NY.

This was a fleeting moment in my life—I didn’t stay friends with any of those people. But it just felt so rich to me. So fraught. I didn’t know how to write about it for a long time, so I put it in my pocket and waited for it to synthesize.

SS: You say you didn’t predict the multi-verse structure until it actually appeared in the story. Will you share a little about your writing process? Where do you fall on the plotter/pantser spectrum?

ES: I don’t plot in advance. It’s tedious and I find it doesn’t work. Every time I try it the story takes on a life of its own and immediately diverges from whatever I’d planned. Instead I sit down with a loose idea or premise in mind and hope to catch the voice. Particularly when I’m writing a short story, I let the language lead. Word choice helps me figure out the direction of the story. With a novel, at some point you do have to plot though. It becomes unwieldy if you don’t know where you’re headed. I lean on structure for this more than an outlined plot. “The structure is the outline” is something I say to new writers a lot.

SS: What is your favorite part of writing—specifically of writing a novel?

ES: I love world building. I love having a whole roster of minor characters to bring back. In this book there is a guy the main couples know who is obsessed with talking about his vasectomy and I delighted in finding ways to bring him back. I love when I have some problem I’m chewing on with a scene and I’ll walk away and go about my life and the fix will just arrive while I’m buying groceries or driving somewhere. What is that? The mind is so mysterious. I love thinking: today I will write one good paragraph and then doing it. I love when I feel a particular sentence right on the other side of the veil and I’ll go for a walk to find it. I love language so much. I’m completely in earnest about loving language.

Get the book here!