We chat with author Erin Van Der Meer about The Scoop, which is a piercing satire about a journalist working the night shift at a tabloid and the explosive consequences of her “harmless” clickbait.
Hi, Erin! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I’m a writer and former journalist based in New York City. My writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Elle and elsewhere. I was born in Sydney, Australia, but for the last decade I’ve called Brooklyn home. My debut novel THE SCOOP – a piercing satire about a journalist working the night shift at a tabloid and the explosive consequences of her “harmless” clickbait– is out April 21.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
This is a little dark, but it was probably at six or seven years old, when I wrote a story about the family dog that ran away years earlier … or that’s what I’d been told. My story had a happy ending – the dog came home. I showed it to my mother, who I guess felt obligated to tell me what really happened: the dog had been hit by a car and died. Through the act of writing, I’d uncovered truth. I was hooked.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Every school holidays, my mother would take me to this one used bookstore – it was called Nine Lives. I can still remember the woman who was always at the counter, the blue carpet, the musty smell of the crammed aisles as we filled our arms with $2 paperbacks. I got a lot of Goosebumps and Babysitters Club. I averaged one a day.
- The one that made you want to become an author: It wasn’t a book that sparked my desire to become an author. I was in my twenties, living in New York City, working as a journalist, and I was boiling inside with all these things I wanted to say but felt I couldn’t – about the insane circumstances the industry and my journalist peers faced. So I wrote them down instead.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman. It’s hard to explain why it’s so good without spoiling the twist, but it’s a speculative/dystopian tale by a First Nations author, initially set in colonial Australia – but wait until you see where Coleman takes it.
Your debut novel, The Scoop, is out April 21st! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Savage, urgent, devastating, darkly funny (is it cheating to use words others have used to describe it?).
What can readers expect?
THE SCOOP is for readers who love a juicy behind-the-scenes peek into an industry, like Yellowface or Sweetbitter, fans of darkly funny workplace novels like I Hope This Finds You Well and The Other Black Girl, or a darker, grittier The Devil Wears Prada. The protagonist, Frankie, is a spiky, savvy, complicated narrator, who at times makes you want to shake sense into her, but who you also can’t help rooting for.
Where did the inspiration for The Scoop come from?
I really don’t know where I got the idea to write a novel about a journalist in New York City!
No, I did draw on my personal experiences as a journalist (I worked in the media for almost fifteen years) to build a vivid, true-to-life fictional world in which to explore the challenges and contradictions of the industry, and a nuanced portrayal of the lives of the people who work in it. While the events of THE SCOOP are fictional, the emotional experiences of Frankie, and her friends and colleagues are absolutely born of that period of my life, as I grappled with complicated feelings, and felt pulled between my love of the media, and my frustrations and fears about the direction it was headed.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
The tension between Frankie and Amanda – the celebrity who Frankie targets with relentless stories and intrusions into her private life – grows throughout the story until it escalates to a dangerous place. While “enjoy” might not be the right word, it was certainly … interesting, or satisfying, to allow my imagination to explore fears I’d had as a journalist: what if a story I wrote led to terrible consequences for someone else? What would I do if faced with the pressure to ruin someone else’s life, in order to save my own?
It was a lot of fun to write the banter in the newsroom scenes, which often veers into the silly and ridiculous. I can’t wait for people to meet the oddball colleagues Frankie spends her nights with.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Many. So many! To pick just one: patience. The writing gods – or the muse, or the universe, or however you imagine the creative energy an artist connects with to make something – will see your timelines and schedules, the dates marked on your calendar, your “I want to be a published author by 30” declaration or whatever other idea your ego has dreamed up, laugh in your face, and send you back to your desk to keep working. THE SCOOP took me so much longer to write than I’d anticipated when I began (nearly seven years). There were some dark, frustrating years, where I felt despair at my inability to bring my vision to life. At some point, I surrendered to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen on my timeline, but that it would unfold how it wanted to. Eventually, after years of feeling like I was paddling upstream, it began to feel more like surfing a wave. I wouldn’t change it now; I learned a lot in those dark, frustrating years, and I think the book is better for it. The muse knows best.
This is your debut novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
There’s so much advice out there on how to get published, and yet I think most authors have to forge their own strange, winding path to get there. For me, the longest, hardest part was the writing of the book itself. Once I knew I’d taken the manuscript as far as I could on my own, I began querying literary agents. I got a lot of rejections (50 or more) over the space of about eight months, until my manuscript found a home with Hayley Steed at Janklow & Nesbit UK, who had a vision for how to position the book in the market, something other agents said they couldn’t see. From there, I did a few rounds of revisions with Hayley, which took six months. Once we went out on submission, things moved quickly from there.
What’s next for you?
I’ve been focused on publishing THE SCOOP for so long now, I haven’t given a ton of thought to life after April 21. I’m hoping to get back to my novel-in-progress, in between pinching myself that this is real.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
There are so many, I worry about how I’ll get the time to read them all. To name a few:
- The Maidenheads by Benny B. Peterson, a debut novel about queer indie musicians and unrequited love, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a deeply moving and undeniably sexy take on self-discovery.”
- Harmless by Miranda Shulman, a dark and funny story of sisterhood, friendship, and obsession set in Brooklyn, which has been described as a mix of Mary McCarthy’s The Group meets Girls.
- Murder Bites by Mimi Montgomery, which is getting buzz as a hilarious comic novel about a city transplant in a dog-obsessed small town who becomes the prime suspect when the local dog walker is murdered.
- American Men by Jordan Ritter Conn, a non-fiction book that examines modern masculinity through the lens of the lives of four very different men in the United States, based on five years of reporting by Ritter Conn, a journalist, that’s been described as a male counterpart to Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women.
- All Them Dogs by debut Irish novelist Djamel White, a literary thriller about a queer gangster set in West Dublin’s drug world that’s already been getting a huge amount of buzz in Ireland.
