Q&A with Emily Smith, author of the new book Nothing Serious

We talk career ambitions, dating, female friendships, women in tech, male approval, and more

I’m thrilled that I had the chance to sit down with my good friend

Emily J. Smith

, whose first novel “Nothing Serious” came out last month. Emily and I met when we were both working at Etsy more than 10 years ago, and we bonded over feminism, working in tech, and writing. Though neither of us are still at Etsy, we’ve remained friends, and she’s one of my favorite people to have real conversations with over dinner.

Emily has worked in nonprofits and tech, and she was the founder of Chorus, a community-minded dating app. She’s written powerful essays about dating, relationships, career ambition, and the decision of whether to have children.

“Nothing Serious” is, as Emily puts it, an adult coming-of-age story about 35-year-old Edie, a woman living in San Francisco and working in tech. The book follows her friendship with Peter and her new obsession with a woman in Peter’s romantic life who turns up dead. While the mysterious death keeps the reader turning pages, the real suspense is how Edie’s going to deal with Peter and his actions. I loved this book!

I feel like Emily and I could have talked forever about the themes in her book, but here’s our Q&A that we eventually had to end. (Edited for clarity and space.)

So tell me about where this book came from. What inspired you to write this particular story?

As you know, I spent about five years writing this highly autobiographical story about a woman who discovers her creativity and femininity after meeting an older woman writer. It's kind of a coming-of-age story about a 35-year-old woman in tech whose life isn't going wasn't going as planned. It's very autobiographical about my shift in my 30s from this kind of ladder climbing corporate life to a more exploratory creative life. I tried to get an agent for that book for years, and any agent who was interested in the subject matter said it didn't have enough plot.

So then, before I gave up writing entirely, which I was really on the verge of doing, I gave myself a challenge to write a book with a plot. I thought about it for a while. There's a scene in the book [in “Nothing Serious”] where Edie’s freezing her eggs, and her friend has to come over and give her the trigger shot. It's her best friend – and the guy she's in love with, Peter – who jumps at the chance to help her and give her her trigger shot. She’s been watching these instructional videos for days on how to do the shots during egg freezing. She takes it so seriously because it costs a lot of money, it's so painful, all this stuff. She wants him to watch the videos, but he's just like, swiping Tinder instead. He's like, I don't need to watch the videos, it's fine. It infuriates Edie, and it's this weird mix of “this man is happy to help me do whatever I need him to do. He's one of my closest friends. I love him. He's there for me, but he's so effing annoying and self righteous.”

That was a real scene in my life with this one guy who the main character is very much based on, and it was the seed of the idea for the book where I was exploring this tension between all these men in my life who I really loved. They were really close to me, but as I became more confident myself and more aware of feminism, I could see more clearly how insufferable they were in a lot of other areas of their life. I wanted to explore how to navigate that tension. I let myself kind of exaggerate the concept a little, especially at the age of 35 where I was seeing so many of my women friends dissatisfied in their relationships with men, or their dating options, like finding quality dates that they really enjoyed. I was also becoming kind of disenchanted by capitalism and how hard it is in a society where you have to rely on capitalism to make money. Whereas so many of my male friends were flush with options of great women to date, had all the time to have kids, and were rising in their careers.

I just really wanted to explore if this friend of mine were put on trial, would part of me want to see him suffer? Would part of me want to take him down because he's so privileged in so many aspects of his life? So that was a core question in the book and prompted the idea for the book.

I think that question very much comes through in the book. You've talked about this book as an adult coming-of-age story. Can you say more about that?

Some people may think I sound insane when I say that, but for me, this is about a woman who has spent her whole life studying engineering and chasing men's approval from an early age. Professionally, that's what her success hinged on – male approval. Also her father issues and stuff like that, and the fact that we live in a patriarchal world. She’s learning to detach herself from male approval, and the catalyst of that is this woman she meets. She’s shifting her gaze from men and the need to impress men. That shift can really open up a lot inside of a person – inside of a woman to embrace her own femininity and not rely on the approval of these men.

That's the big aha that this character has, this kind of coming of age. You think of coming of age as the teenage years, 20s, early 20s, but at least for myself, I was very heads down in my 20s, just trying to succeed in a very typical way. I didn't really lift my head up and have huge revelations about the self until my 30s. That's what I wanted to explore.

You're lucky. You got to do it in your 30s. I don't think I did it until my 40s.

It tends to happen at the age, for me, where you realize, oh, I'm not going to have kids, my life is not going to end up working out like that. So who am I and what am I going to do instead? I think, for women who have kids, it happens a little later sometimes. But it certainly doesn't happen in your 20s.

It felt to me that throughout much of the book Edie was willing to take whatever crumbs are thrown her way in relationships, in work, and I think many of us are, or at least have been at certain points in our life, willing to take those crumbs. I certainly used to be. Edie is constantly seeking male approval, which you mentioned. Why does she do that? Why do we collectively do that?

It's awesome to hear people talk about the book, because it was written so personally, from my own self. It wasn't abstract. It's just like how I was, and like you said, I think how a lot of us are. I think it's like when you haven't embraced the self, when your life is organized around chasing the expectations of other people. It's hard to demand what you want because you don't know what you want, so you're just grasping for little bits of approval and what you can get. It's a very kind of needy, desperate way to be.

Especially women, we are not given the space to really know who we are and what we want. We live in this very capitalist, still pretty male-dominated culture where to understand who you are and what you want comes at a cost, sometimes even a monetary cost. For example, with Edie and with myself, it was monetarily and professionally to her and my benefit to seek male approval. This shows up at the end of the book, where she’s finding herself, and what she ends up dreaming about is not being like a successful CEO. I think it takes a lot of courage for women to want more and expect more and not take scraps, because you have to figure out what you want. And that often runs in the face of what society is telling you you should want. I don't know. I'd be curious what you think about that too.

I don't know. I think about all of that all the time. Just recently, I had this conversation with my son where he was telling me about the “teacher’s pet” in his sixth-grade class. I asked him if the teacher’s pet was a girl, and he said yes, which wasn’t surprising to me. I told him that I was the teacher’s pet throughout grade school, and he was like “oh that’s so annoying!” I explained to him that I got praise from the teachers, I got praise from my parents. It felt really good to get that approval, so I would keep doing the things to get that approval and follow the rules. And, you know, it felt really good to get that kind of praise, especially in a world where you're already absorbing that, like, it's not a world that's built for you.

It’s really interesting to think about how girls versus boys at that early age internalize this idea of I'm not enough, I don't trust my own wants and desires, I want to do what others expect so I can be patted on. That feeling carries into adulthood in a big way.

I think it goes through work, I think it goes through dating, through finding a partner so you can have all the things you think you're supposed to have or we've been told that we want.

And physically, too. I mean, girls are told to look like this. Boys are becoming like that too, sadly, because of what a visual culture we've become. But growing up, yeah, it was always the girl magazines and how to lose this many pounds, and it's so visual. You get your whole self different.

Something I noticed in the book that I really appreciated, that I thought was very realistic and felt really true, is how Edie is constantly in her mind policing everything she eats, she has these kinds of rules around eating and drinking, and she talks about running as a socially acceptable way to stay thin. All of that felt really true to me about how so many women live in and navigate this world. Can you tell me more about that and what this tells us about Edie?

Well, she has an eating disorder. I played around with how deep to go into the eating disorder. I have a history of eating disorder, and I decided to go pretty light, not like any woman who's reading this can’t see that she has an eating disorder. Maybe some more unaware readers might not get that because I didn't bang it over the head. But yes, her relationship with food is fraught. It is very calculated. I wanted to weave that in as just how her brain works. There's a part where she reads Anaya [the woman Edie meets and becomes obsessed with, and who turns up dead] writing about eating disorders more directly, and she's almost wanting to trick herself into not thinking she has an eating disorder. But then she's like, Oh, but that's how I am. Because thinness and now wellness culture – and before diet culture, whatever the phrase is at any given decade – is so pervasive for women, we can tell ourselves we don't have eating disorders because we live in an eating disordered world. But it's disordered how most people think about food and exercise, and we're almost encouraged to do that.

I had all these themes in my head about the book, like the ways in which women are rewarded in work, for example, for being very perfectionist or very calculating or very analytical. All these intense characteristics. It benefits Edie at work, but personally, it wreaks havoc on a person to apply those same standards to the self, which a lot of women do. It's painful, it's intense, and it's another representation of her not being able to define her own wants and needs. She’s just hitting the marks of different things, like, okay, I have to have my Nutri-Grain bar for breakfast, and this is the five miles I run every night. That was my own experience for a while, and it was important for me to include.

Shifting gears a little – you and I first met and know each other from working in tech together, specifically at Etsy. You were the founder of a dating app company. So much of what you wrote about working in tech really rings true to me. The conference room names, managers constantly canceling 1:1s, the male condescension, the female competition, the whole “we're gonna save the world with this silly app” attitude. How did your experiences as a woman in tech inform this book?

I had so much fun writing about tech. There's so much comedy in tech. It's just such an insane world. I was trying to think recently why it’s so funny, and what came to me first was that it's just full of hypocrisy. In the book, there’s this one scene where everyone's at standing desks, but then like, scooting from meeting to meeting on their scooters. It's all so hypocritical and silly. Saying we're changing the world, but also being ruthlessly capitalist. So much of it was pulled from real life. Like how big a kick people get out of the conference rooms names, which is cute, but also like, we're a company. Tech is so self-satisfied, but also so funny.

It was very fun to play with that. How childish it all is! These kids, these mostly men, who get paid so much money and get so much taken care of for them through these tech companies. And everything's like wacky and childish and cute, but there's something off about it too.

I wanted to talk about Edie not liking her job, and specifically this tension of why there aren't more women in tech. There’s this idea that women don’t really like tech, but I was an engineer. I loved coding. I think coding is so much like writing. I love spreadsheets. I can sit in spreadsheets forever. It's not about women not liking tech, but about the way in which tech operates and the value system behind a lot of these tech companies that inherently becomes less interesting to women. That was something I really wanted to explore, and how that kind of sucks, because then it’s these men who just like solving problems, but don't actually care that much about things like domestic abuse or nonprofit issues that don't make money. They're the ones who end up becoming very successful and very rich. I wish I didn't care about anything other than solving hard problems, I'd be a fucking multi-millionaire. You know, that would be great. But a lot of women aren't like that, and it's at their own financial disservice. I was really interested in getting into that.

The book takes place in 2017. I started working at Etsy, which was my first job in tech, in 2013. Obviously it's now 2025, and I feel like the idea of working in tech has evolved in the last 12 years since I started. I'm curious if you were to write this story taking place in 2025 instead of 2017, would there be any differences?

I think now it's much more known that tech is full of itself, and it's not fun and shiny and up and coming. I specifically set it in the spring of 2017, before #MeToo and right after the Trump election, which was when people started to really sour on tech. You had all the Russian bots and the big tech giants testifying. It was the start of a real turning point. Certainly now, certainly in the last few years, you don't have as much of this self-satisfied, pervasive tech vibe. There's a little more shame around it, which is also interesting to explore.

I love this line in the book: “To not love your job was the greatest millennial offense.” Throughout our friendship, you and I have talked a lot about work and ambition and careers. Where are you at these days with that?

Great question, needing to get one! I’ve gone through a transition to where I’m at now, which is my job is not my identity. My job is a thing I do for money that I take pride in, and I'll do well. But I used to be very career focused, and my title and who I worked for and all these things were like badges of honor that built up my self identity and who I was. I’m really on the other side of that shift where I found this other thing I love, I found writing. That's what I want to spend my time on. My job is something I do to fund that pursuit. I always feel the need to caveat that that doesn't mean I don't take my work seriously. When I'm working, I care about it. I'm good at what I do, I've been doing this for a long time. But I think it's silly and dishonest to pretend that the job is everything.

It's also funny because these tech companies say they want diverse employees with multi-dimensional interests and all these things. And it's like, okay, if they really want that, it shouldn't be offensive to say I actually don't like reading, like, product management books on the weekend.

In the book, Edie used to work at a nonprofit, and she points out that most of her colleagues there were women. Throughout the book, she hints at or talks about how women are the ones doing the bulk of the work on social issues and changing the world,. I think this is true in my experience as well. I remember last year during the presidential campaign, people in my circle who I knew who were signing up to go canvas in swing states it was women, and they're the ones volunteering at their kids’ schools or at the food bank in their neighborhood, on top of full-time jobs. Or they're the ones leading nonprofits or working at a nonprofit instead of going to work for a tech company. This is not to say that men don't also do those things, but I do feel like women are doing them more. Why do you think that is?

It’s statistically true that women do that more! I think it all comes back to the idea of mother. Historically, women weren't enough. What they needed to do was bear a child, and that was their gift to society. Men had to work, but they were seen, even when born, as an asset to the family, not just a vehicle to birth more children. I think there are remnants of that feeling that we need to give to a greater degree, contribute to society at large beyond ourselves. Why do men not feel that? Why do men think that they are enough? I do think that's why women are drawn to giving more for whatever reason, I think it's mostly how we're raised. Some people might say it's biological. Who knows? Women are seen as more empathetic and compassionate, generally speaking, though not always. So then we’re more attuned to the issues and more affected by them. There’s an exchange in the book where Peter's talking about how he volunteers at an environmental nonprofit, and I included that because I do find that environmental issues are oddly and disproportionately male dominated. I find that very interesting. I guess because they can relate? Because that affects them, like, if the earth fucking goes to shit, that's one issue that actually affects them? So much else, they don't have to think about it, and so they don't.

Let's talk about dating apps! Edie, like many of us, seems to have a love-hate relationship with the apps. You, as I mentioned, were a founder of a dating app called Chorus. What do you think about dating apps?

They’re so bad! They're a torture chamber. But again, this took place in 2017, and so even the frequent Tinder references are kind of dated now. She hates the apps in the book, and they've only gotten worse. I don't think there's been any shred of improvement on the dating app front. I think they're bad for everyone generally. I think they foster a mindset that's very detrimental to long-term partnership and how we view each other. But they’re especially bad for women at that age where you’re realistically on a time frame if you want to have a child, and men your age aren't on that same time frame. The apps are a really hard place to be. I don't mean to be competitive in terms of how shitty it is, but it's really hard for women who are on a time frame and looking to settle down in a long-term partnership.

Edie and Peter are clearly good friends with a long history together, a long friendship. I've had many close male friends in my life, who I love and have valued deeply. But I feel like starting in my late 30s, 40s, a lot of those friendships started to fade. Now in my late 40s, I find myself much more interested in female friendships than I was in my 20s. Do you think men and women can be friends?

Well, it's funny, because I have had that same experience, and that’s also what Edie has. It’s kind of the end of this phase of this formative male friendship. I think men and women can be friends. But I do think as we age, the distance grows, and women become generally much more curious and self-reflective. They become more open and comfortable with themselves in a way that they hadn't been able to when they were younger. That creates really strong bonds with other women with age. Because of what society encourages in men versus women, you don't get that same thing with men. As men age, they're kind of floating a little more. They aren't doing that really gnarly self reflection. So inherently, these distances grow. I've certainly had that happen.

It feels like some of the other characters in the book see Peter more clearly than Edie does. Why is that?

I think her association with him for so long has been a form of pride. Thinking of my own experiences, like studying engineering in school where you're the only girl in the class, you want to feel like part of something. It’s almost like his success is your success. It's helpful to be aligned in this way in a world where you feel like you don't fit in. Her self worth is intimately tied up with him, and their friendship is a core part of her self worth. To see him for who he is is to implicate herself. And that's hard to do.

As a woman in tech, aligning yourself with these men is almost like a survival mechanism. Your identity becomes very tied up in them. To me, it's very real. But I’ve heard from some women readers who don’t work in male-dominated fields that they don’t necessarily connect with that.

It goes back to everything we were talking about, like getting that approval and feeling that praise and feeling like you belong here, even though you look around and you're like, wait, it doesn't look like I should belong here, but I can make myself fit in here.

Exactly.

I just want to say I loved this one section of the book where Edie is telling Peter about how she prefers to connect with people through talking, as opposed to, like, playing board games or going to the movies or some other activity. I so relate to that! All I want to do with other people is just, like, talk. Like, yeah, we can go to dinner, but so that we can talk because that's like what I want to do. I want to TALK with you. II just love that, because I really relate to it.

That was a real debate that my friend and I had! We're always debating this!

What are you reading right now?

I'm finally reading “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney. I heard Sheila Heti say in a conversation that she thought it was brilliant, like, genius. And I love Sheila Heti. So I was like, I want to read what she thinks is genius. I'm really enjoying it. The way Sally Rooney is able to do these complex male-female relationships is really next level.

What’s next for you as a writer?

I'm working on my next book. I almost have a first draft, and I'm going to try and get that in a good place to send my agent. It's very much pulled from my life, but I'm at a different stage in my life now. It's about navigating partnership with a divorced man who has a child and his ex-wife and that whole complication.

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Thanks to Emily for doing this Q&A with me! “Nothing Serious” is out now, go get yourself a copy!