The Bookish Life of Nina Hill meets Younger in a heartfelt debut following a young woman who discovers she’ll have to ditch the “dream job” and write her own story to find her happy ending.
We chat with debut author Shauna Robinson about her novel Must Love Books, along challenges, what’s next for her, and more! PLUS we have an excerpt from the first chapter to share with you at the end of the interview.
Congratulations on your debut, Must Love Books! Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Thank you! Must Love Books follows a young woman named Nora who realizes working in publishing isn’t the dream job she imagined. After five years as an editorial assistant, she’s jaded and struggling with depression. When her already low salary is reduced even further, she secretly takes a second job with a rival publisher to get by–but when she meets Andrew, a bestselling author her employers would be eager to sign, she’s forced to confront a lot of things she’s been in denial about: her depression, her career uncertainties, and what she’s willing (and not willing) to do for a job.
This story is somewhat personal, likely inspired by your own time in the publishing industry. Did you ever think, when you were working in the publishing industry yourself, you’d migrate over to the “author side”? How much of Must Love Books is based on your own experience as a young professional in publishing?
The thought of becoming an author was pure fantasy to me. It’s still funny to think I wrote the book from the perspective of a jaded editorial assistant who is fed up with authors and the work they cause her, and in the process I became an author (I do my best to not annoy editorial staff, but I’m probably still annoying regardless).
The general sense of feeling like you have no idea what to do with your life is very much based on my own experiences. In college, I’d pursued internships in publishing, and when I graduated and eventually got a job as an editorial assistant (after first spending a year as a receptionist, waiting for a job to open up), it was so exciting to feel like I was on the path to the publishing career I’d dreamed of. But many conferences and layoffs later, I realized this wasn’t the career for me. It left me feeling lost and wondering “Where do I go from here?” It may sound trivial (just get another job!), but when your job is tied to your identity, when the plan you had for your life disintegrates, when quitting feels like failure, and when you don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, that feeling can get overwhelming. My hope is that Must Love Books captures that feeling and sends a hopeful message to anyone who identifies with it.
Readers love books about loving books, and may pick this up, thinking it’s a funny, breezy read about a bookaholic, when in fact, it could be seen as a cautionary tale. What would you like readers to know about Must Love Books before they start reading?
Must Love Books shows a different side of publishing than what’s typically portrayed in media. Rather than glamor and glitz, this book shows it as soul-deadening (and full of buzzwords!). Similarly, Nora is not enamored with her job; she’s checked out, downtrodden, and depressed. It’s a bit of a darker take, and not something someone should read if they’re looking for something purely breezy. But I promise it’s ultimately hopeful (and has some lighter moments sprinkled in)!
While there is a romantic element, at the heart of the story is the personal and emotional growth story of Nora Hughes. You don’t shy away from heavier topics (anxiety, depression) – the unvarnished realities of finding oneself in the challenging world we live in. What spurred you to pursue such a deliberate, reflective tone for Nora’s story?
I wanted to write something that captured what I was feeling at the time. I felt like I was surrounded by people who knew what they were doing–both in real-life and in books, TV, and movies–and I wanted to read a book with a character who felt as lost as I did.
As we continue reading, the book rachets up our apprehension and unease levels, as Nora balances deceit upon ambiguity, trying to keep her two gigs with rival publishers separate. We can just feel that it’s all going to come crashing and crumbling down on her. How did writing these ratcheting levels of dread affect you?
Since I’ve fortunately never had to balance two secret jobs, writing about the apprehension and dread didn’t really impact me. In fact, the earlier drafts didn’t have enough dread and I got notes to ramp it up more, so I’m glad I ultimately got the right amount of dread in there!
This book unpacks the myth of the “dream job.” Do you think such a thing exists? Is the new, younger workforce pre-disposed to be more transitory in their professional goals and aspirations?
I don’t want to rule out all dream jobs–maybe someone out there has one!–but dream jobs certainly don’t exist for me. I’ve learned to stop connecting my identity with my job. With student loans, the high cost of rent, and stagnant wages, I think a lot of people are questioning their relationship to their jobs and looking for meaning elsewhere. The pandemic seems to have furthered that line of thinking as well, given the record-breaking numbers of people who quit their jobs in the last year (and not just younger workers either). Many people across the board are reassessing their priorities and their careers–and as someone who wrote an entire book about choosing happiness over your job, I’m all for it.
What was the biggest challenge you faced while writing Must Love Books?
Writing it at all! I truly didn’t plan for this to become a book. I just started writing it because I got the idea and it was something I wanted to read, and I can’t read what hasn’t been written yet! Since I had no real plans for this wispy idea, I’d go months at a time without touching it (which is why it took three years to finish writing it).
What’s next for Shauna Robinson?
I’ve got a second novel in the works, though I’m not sure of the publication date yet. It’s completely unrelated to Must Love Books, but people who love bookish books should get a kick out of it–it’s set in a small-town bookstore, featuring a protagonist who doesn’t even like reading. It’s lighter in tone than Must Love Books, but it still has a healthy dose of of quarter-life crisis because I’m not done exploring that topic just yet!
EXCERPT
Chapter One
Would you recommend this job to a friend?
The question echoed in Nora’s mind as the silence ticked by. She glanced from the twenty-two-year-old girl across from her to the resume on the table. Large, bold letters spelled out Kelly Brown at the top of the page. Nora folded and unfolded a corner of the paper as she tried to think of a response.
Recommend was a strong word. There were a lot of people Nora would recommend the job to. She thought about the man on her commute that morning, dozing with his legs spread wide enough to occupy two seats while Nora clutched a pole and practiced her resentful stare. She’d recommend the job to him any day. She’d recommend it like a curse.
But friend, that was the kicker. Nora lifted her eyes. Kelly’s lips were curved in a trusting smile. She held her pen poised over her legal pad, ready to write down whatever tumbled out of Nora’s mouth.
It was nonsense, frankly, that Nora was interviewing someone. This girl was interviewing for the same job title as Nora: Editorial Assistant of MBB. Meaningless Business Bullshit. Not the official title, but at this point Nora couldn’t be bothered to remember the exact jargon. Either way, as a mere publishing peasant Nora had no standing to interview a potential peer.
Nora did have seniority, she supposed, looking down at the resume and seeing that Kelly graduated from college just this month, five years after Nora. That made five years of wisdom Nora had over Kelly, in theory. Except Nora spent all five of those years here, as an editorial assistant, with no promotion in sight. There was nothing wise about that. Nothing to recommend there. Not without lying—and she wasn’t sure she was okay with that.
Nora darted another glance Kelly’s way. Kelly, by this point, was now politely looking around the room, taking interest in the blank walls, as if there was a greater chance of the beige paint answering her question before Nora did.
“Yes,” Nora said slowly, stretching out the word as though it would precede a speech full of encouragement and experience. But now she’d kept her waiting, and it would be weird to end on her very long yes, so speech time it was.
“As long as you know what you’re getting yourself into,” Nora continued. “I mean, I’ve been here almost five years and I love it”—huh, so she was okay with lying, apparently—“but you have to be willing to adapt. Your responsibilities might change, or your title, or your boss. If you’re okay with things changing on you, you should be fine. People are so friendly here,” she added, wanting to end on a positive note.
Kelly nodded and wrote something down. Nora peered at the paper, imagining what the notes might say. Took five minutes to answer one question; shady as hell.
When Kelly had no further questions to fluster Nora with, Nora escorted her to the next interviewer to continue the charade. On the walk to her desk she replayed the interview in her head. Whenever Nora mentioned anything to do with publishing—manuscripts, books, working with authors—there was a faraway look in Kelly’s eyes, like she was on the verge of swooning.
And Nora didn’t blame her. With an English degree and a love of books, she was just like Nora had been—just like everyone who came to work at Parsons Press. Even in Nora’s interview five years ago, she remembered only half-listening to her interviewer as her mind played a montage of what it would be like to get paid to publish books.
It was a dream come true, wasn’t it? Her childhood spent smuggling books and cracking hardcovers everywhere she went—at the dinner table, in the lunch line, occasionally in the shower—felt like practice for a career in books. And when she spotted the listing for a publishing internship her sophomore year of college, it was like a beacon pointing the way to her future. She’d clicked on it immediately, hopes rising in her chest as she read the job responsibilities referencing authors and manuscripts. And the final line under the desired skills and qualifications section sealed her fate, three little words that curled around Nora’s heart and told her she belonged in publishing: Must love books.
Three words was all it took for Nora to start spinning fantasies of her life in publishing. She imagined talking to the authors she’d admired as a kid, shyly asking Judy Blume to sign her tattered copy of Just as Long as We’re Together. Talking through the changes Judy needed to make to her latest manuscript. Shaping books readers might cling to the way Nora clutched her own books like a lifeline. When it felt sometimes, growing up, that books were her only friends, the thought of being an editor and connecting books to those lonely and quiet readers like herself made Nora feel like she could be part of something magnificent.
Magnificent was another strong word. She didn’t realize, then, how misguided her fantasies were. Not only was Nora laughably far from being an editor, but all her division published were business books that made her eyes glaze over.
Nora tried making it clear in the interview that Kelly could expect to work on only business books, but Kelly was too dazzled by the publishing fantasy to let the words sink in. And Nora, tired and drained and utterly dazzle-free against Kelly’s faraway eyes, was once again reminded of two certainties: One, Parsons Press was no dream job. Two, she needed to get out.
Nora checked the time. Five minutes until Beth’s goodbye party and she hadn’t started setting up yet. She hurried to the office kitchenette and got to work, opening the cabinet, grabbing wine bottles by their necks and hauling them to the board room. She noticed, rummaging through the cabinets, that they were out of plastic cups. Nora opened the first cabinet again, looked behind the stacks of shrink-wrapped paper plates and napkins. No cups.
Well, they could drink from the bottle.
She kept an eye on the board room’s glass walls while wrestling the lid off the cheese platter. She spotted Beth—or, specifically, Beth’s forehead and a hint of ruffled brown hair as someone leaned down to hug her. Beth was five feet tall, and Nora knew she hated hugs from tall people. Beth smoothed down her hair and got swept into another hug a few seconds later. It was no surprise she was so surrounded. People had been surrounding Beth for the last two weeks. Offering congratulations. Sharing memories. Wishing her well.
Nora swallowed her jealousy and carried the platter to the board room. She edged closer to the conversation Beth was having with their IT administrator.
“Oh, I don’t know anyone there,” Beth said. “I haven’t started yet.”
“Well, if you run into a Bill Davis, tell him I said hi.”
“Will do!”
Maybe that was why Beth got out and Nora didn’t. Beth was so kind. And happy. People liked happy people. More importantly, people hired happy people. But Nora couldn’t stop herself from thinking how silly it sounded, that Beth would run into Bill Davis at her new job one day and take the time to deliver a meaningless message on behalf of someone she’d likely never see again. She’d probably do it, too. Nora would have deleted the mental message immediately.
By this time Joe and Beth finished talking, giving Nora a chance to sidle up to her before anyone else could treat her like a carrier pigeon.
“I thought he hated me,” Beth murmured once he was out of earshot.
Nora watched him cross the room to the wine table. “Maybe he forgot.”
“That I got a computer virus from torrenting Seinfeld at work?”
Nora laughed. Beth grinned back at her, brown eyes crinkling, but Nora remembered when Beth came to her desk, wide-eyed and frantic. She remembered how they stood in Beth’s cubicle watching the pop-ups flash on her screen. It was almost cute how they worried, then, that she might get in trouble. They spent two hours deliberating the pros and cons of telling IT, but in the end, Joe just sighed and told Beth to drop off her laptop and pick up a loaner. That was their first inkling that maybe no one gave a shit.
That feeling only grew when executives at the Parsons Press headquarters in New York started dropping ominous hints about a restructuring plan “coming down the pipeline.” During that hazy six-month period before the plan was revealed, everyone let loose a little. Nora took a later train to work, coming in at 9:14 instead of 8:54. Beth moved on to torrenting Arrested Development. They both started job hunting.
“You’ll have to top that one,” Beth said, evoking the future tense with impossible ease.
“Who will I tell?”
Beth blinked. “Me.”
“Will I?”
She gave Nora a gentle, patient stare. “We’ll still see each other. We’ll still text. You’re not getting rid of me.”
“You’re right,” Nora said, knowing they could debate this forever, Beth with her optimism and Nora with her everything. She shoved a grape in her mouth to keep from casting any more gloom on the occasion.
It wasn’t a big deal that Beth was leaving, she told herself. It wasn’t even the first time Beth set her sights on something new. Nora and Beth may have started out as editorial assistants together, but two years in Beth ditched the editorial dream and forged a new path for herself.
Like Nora, Beth grew tired of the administrative work that came with editorial. Being an editorial assistant wasn’t reading manuscripts and being captivated by prose like Nora imagined. It was repeatedly reminding authors of deadlines, wrestling with Microsoft Word to format manuscripts, and forwarding those formatted manuscripts to her bosses. The actual interesting parts—reading projects, making suggestions for improvement, working alongside authors—Nora and Beth never had a hand in.
While Nora gritted her teeth and continued on, willing to pay any price to become an editor, Beth applied for a marketing coordinator job on their team. It gave Beth a new challenge, something else to explore and master. And now Beth and her roving eye landed a sales job at an app development start-up.
Nora poured some of—whatever this was, from the bottle beside her—into her Parsons Press mug as Beth looked on.
“My mug is in my cubicle,” Beth said, a touch of longing in her voice.
“Oh, you thought there would be cups?” Nora handed Beth her mug. “At a party?” She frowned a little to sell it.
Beth laughed and brought the mug to her lips. “Stupid, I know. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Nora cracked a smile. “This way’s probably better. Gives us more opportunities to innovate.”
Beth made gagging noises at the buzzword and Nora laughed. Her smile faded as she surveyed the room. People stood in clusters holding plates and mugs, talking and laughing. All clusters she’d never been part of. Beth was her cluster.
“It’ll be weird being here without you,” Nora said.
“And with our anniversary coming up, too.”
Nora nodded, staring into the mug Beth handed back to her. She and Beth started on the same day, sharing embarrassed smiles about feeling overdressed that first morning, all blazers and dress pants in a sea of slouchy tops and jeans. Then Beth rolled her chair to Nora’s desk ten minutes after their debrief with HR, navy blazer flung over her chair like an afterthought, asking how many allowances to claim on her W-4.
On the anniversary of their first year at Parsons, they each got a generic card from HR. Beth had peeked her head over the wall of Nora’s cube and wished her a happy work friend-iversary. The tradition had continued each year. Nora tried not to think about her five-year anniversary a few months away. There would be no one to celebrate with this time around.
“You okay?” Beth asked, peering closer at Nora.
Nora blinked her thoughts away. “Yeah.” She forced a smile. “I’m excited for you.”
“I’m excited for you,” Beth insisted, making Nora’s heart swell with appreciation. Only Beth could spend her own goodbye party hyping up someone else. “You’ve got that BookTap interview next week, right?”
“Yeah.” Nora tried to mirror Beth’s hopeful tone. She’d been thrilled to see the marketing specialist job listing for BookTap a few weeks ago. Parsons Press may have jaded her view of publishing, but she couldn’t find it in herself to completely give up the chance to work with books. BookTap was another opportunity—and a good one. Nora actually enjoyed using BookTap’s app to rate and review books and see what others were reading. Beth, for instance, gave Red Velvet Revenge five stars yesterday (but Beth gave everything five stars).
Nora had made it through the phone screen and past the assessment assignment that she still thought of with pride. In it she managed to make steampunk sound interesting, which made her both brilliant and generous. Now all she had to do was make a good impression at the in-person interview next week.
But with Beth leaving, everything felt more urgent. Parsons was only bearable because of Beth. If she left—and if Nora didn’t get the job at BookTap—Nora didn’t want to think about where that would leave her.
Beth seemed to pick up on Nora’s uncertainty, maybe from the way Nora plunked her head on Beth’s shoulder. “It’ll go great,” she said.
Nora nodded, deciding not to disagree. Then someone else came to steal Beth, and Nora was left alone. She nibbled on a piece of not-sharp-enough cheddar and watched Beth laugh with someone from accounting.
Nora knew from her first day that Parsons Press wasn’t what it used to be. This whale of a company had been around since the 1800s, since Dickens and Brontë and Poe, not that Parsons ever published anything that interesting. Parsons did publish Mark Twain’s first novel, The Gilded Age, though no one Nora knew had ever read or heard of it. They hadn’t published his other works, certainly nothing as beloved as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Which seemed like a bit of an oversight on the part of that particular acquisitions editor, Nora thought.
But still, Parsons was around during that time. She hadn’t cared, at first, that Parsons only published nonfiction now, or that her division published business books teeming with snappy buzzwords: synergy, leverage, disruptor. Nora planned to use the position as a steppingstone to the San Francisco office’s more compelling divisions like cooking, travel, or current events.
But the New York execs saw fit to cut these divisions before Nora could defect. The restructuring plan followed, aptly named the Disrupt, Innovate, and Change plan, or DIC for short. While Nora and Beth cheerfully referred to this as the DIC(k) plan, joking that it was Parsons’s dickish alternative to a 401(k), the changes it wrought took a toll. Some employees were promoted into new roles, but others, like Nora’s bosses, lost their jobs. What remained of Nora’s team merged with another understaffed division, and they were expected to publish the same amount of business books with half the employees to maximize profits. Meanwhile, going away parties like Beth’s had become near-constant attractions in the Parsons boardroom.
After the party came to a close, Nora watched Beth empty her drawers in the eerie, empty office and wondered when it would be her turn to leave Parsons behind. She accepted the cardboard box Beth handed her, and they each carried a box of Beth’s belongings on their way to the elevator. As she walked, Nora peered into the box in her arms. She recognized the first Parsons book that mentioned Beth in the acknowledgments, and birthday cards Nora remembered signing, but it was the pink hedgehog pencil holder that brought a rush of nostalgic joy. Beth threw away a lot of office tchotchkes tonight, but this present Nora gave her two years ago, now dotted with ink from Beth and her careless pens, had made the cut.
They sat side by side on BART, discussing books as the train hummed along. She listened to Beth rant about how Shirley Jackson’s books didn’t get the attention they deserved. When Beth asked Nora what she was reading, she pulled Kindred out of her purse as if that answered the question. As Nora tucked the book into her bag, she caught the way Beth nodded a beat too long, knew Beth was too polite to ask why Nora had been stuck on the same book for over a month when she was used to Nora reading a book a week.
The dreaded moment came. The train sped away from 12th Street, giving them only seconds until Beth’s stop at 19th. Beth stood up and Nora followed suit, mind still buzzy with wine from the party as she tried to think of the perfect parting words. The well wishes she wrote in others’ goodbye cards sounded so superficial now.
Mind spinning, Nora gave a small half-smile and said, “I love you.”
She felt exposed, saying it. There was an implied distance in work friendships. But it was so plainly true that Nora couldn’t not say it.
Beth didn’t show any surprise, just said, “I love you, too.” Like it was fact. As the train slowed, Beth set her box down on their seat, Nora did the same, and Beth pulled her in for a hug.
Nora let her chin rest on Beth’s shoulder. They stepped back when the doors opened. Beth picked up the two stacked boxes, grinned at Nora, and stepped off the train.
Passengers elbowed their way past Nora on their way in. She moved aside. The seats she and Beth sat in less than a minute ago were already taken.
Nora braced herself against a pole, thinking of what tomorrow would bring. It was bad enough that an important author was coming to the office the next day. Worse that Nora would have to plaster a smile on her face to serve sandwiches at a meeting she wasn’t invited to. But getting through it alone, without a friend to commiserate with, might be the worst part. The train sped onward as Nora stared mindlessly ahead, already dreading work tomorrow.
