Would You Time Travel Back to Your Sweet 16?

By the time I meet Emma Straub outside the American Museum of Natural History, it’s a few minutes past 10 a.m. and the author and bookstore owner has already traveled to her youth and back.

“I just had the weirdest experience!” she says immediately, looking slightly dazed. I expect her to describe an unnerving sidewalk encounter. I do not expect her to say she’s spent the past two hours sobbing in various rooms of her childhood home. Those two hours before our scheduled rendezvous on the museum steps had been reserved for the photo shoot that would accompany this profile. The idea was she’d meet the photographer, Sara Messinger, on the stoop of 53 West 85th Street because This Time Tomorrow — Straub’s new novel, out May 17, which we’re here to discuss — takes place almost entirely around her teenage stomping grounds. A few snaps into the shoot, Straub breathlessly explains, a black Escalade slid up to the house, and a man dressed in head-to-toe white emerged from the car. He asked if Straub was there to see the house — he was a real-estate broker, and this was his listing. She wasn’t, but could she go inside anyway, at least until the would-be buyer arrived? The broker unlocked the front door, and Straub “immediately burst into tears,” she says. She wandered through the tastefully staged rooms, all beige, turning the lights on and recounting to the patient photographer how much the house had changed since her parents moved out in November 2015. Later, in her Substack, she’d describe the experience as “time travel in one easy step.”

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