in conversation with emily habeck

author of Shark Heart, the novel i can't stop talking about

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I am so, so excited about today's issue. If you follow me on Instagram, or if you read my last book recap, then you'll know that back in August I read Shark Heart, a novel by Emily Habeck, and I simply could not shut up about it. The book took me by surprise, both because of the plot and how much I enjoyed it. I talked about it on stories, I told my friends about it, I journaled about it, and eventually — I reached out to the author herself about it, to ask if she would grant me an interview to chat about the book for the newsletter. To my delight, she agreed, and a couple of weeks ago we sat down to discuss in a lovely conversation beset by only the barest of technical difficulties. 

We talked in mostly broad strokes about the book, but there is one spoiler toward the middle which I'll signal boldly so you can skip it if you haven't yet read Shark Heart (you should!). We also spoke about motherhood, grief, loss, and the feeling of creating a home in oneself. Editing our conversation for today’s issue felt like a cozy autumn hug.

For those of you who might be less familiar with Emily's background, which I found so interesting — she received her BFA in Theater from SMU and then went to Vanderbilit's Peabody College of Education and Human Development and Divinity School. It is not a combination you often hear about, but she brings it all together to Shark Heart in such a cohesive and natural way. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Emily, I'm so excited to speak with you about Shark Heart and your journey to writing it. Do you want to tell our readers a little bit about your novel?

The path to writing this book has just been long and winding. I read this quote once, which says that people have been writing their first novels their entire lives. And I feel like that’s true for me because Shark Heart contains all these parts of my background and where I'm from. 

This is a love story with a very different angle. I would say it's a story about love rather than a traditional love story. And at the center of it is this husband and wife, Wren and Lewis, who are newly married. They're not the perfect couple, but they are in love. A few weeks after the wedding, Lewis starts to experience some really strange symptoms. And he goes to the doctor and learns that within a year, he will transform into a great white shark. Which really derails their plans for the future and their dreams, as well as bringing up a lot of trauma from Wren's past with her mother. 

The book is about Wren's relationships and how they've shaped her life. 

Beautiful summary, and I agree. So I started recommending the book to people as soon as I finished reading it and I struggled to summarize and explain what it was about without spoiling it and without being a little too prosaic about it. Were you aware of how difficult it would be to summarize or, or synthesize it into something pitchable as you were writing, or was it something that came together towards the end?

I don't think I was really thinking at all about how to pitch it while I was writing. The book became something that was a companion to me. Like I would have loved to have it published, of course, but I knew that I needed to write it to explore these ideas for myself. And so I think because it kind of had this personal intent and this exploration of myself, I was really writing it pretty disconnected from how it would present commercially. And I never thought it was weird when I was writing it or that anything was unusual. 

In terms of genre, I've heard it called all kinds of things: magical realism, speculative fiction, literary fiction, experimental fiction, science fiction, fantasy, etc. And I actually didn't even realize it was a love story until my film agent called it one. 

We discussed your background, and you really blend theater and drama a lot into the narrative, not just through Lewis and his job and his aspirations, but through the structure of the novel as well. I feel like you wrote with very much an audience in mind, with the way stage directions, for example, are sometimes woven in — as a reader, it felt a bit like a respite from the heavier parts of the book. Was this an intentional choice for you, the use of playwriting into your traditional prose?

I think it was a really intuitive decision. I'm glad it felt like a respite, because I certainly feel that way. Sometimes books can be so claustrophobic — I mean, I love reading, I really do, but there are times when I'm reading and I want to go somewhere. I want to be transported. I need to be in a spacious environment mentally. And that's why I love poetry and plays, because there is that space on the page where I feel like there's this readerly breathing room. As a writer, I think I was just wanting to read more things like that, so I kind of wrote what I wanted to read. 

To me, writing scripts is also just as natural, if not more so, than prose. I love the act structure in a play or musical where you have this big crescendo after act one and the curtain comes down, and the audience gets to exhale and get up and stretch and come back refreshed and you're like what's next? And often there's this tonal shift in the piece when it re-starts. I wanted to create that experience in a book.  

I love that. I also feel like it's so much easier to feel that freedom to write and structure your novel as creatively as you want to when it's your debut novel, because there are no expectations. It's like, well, this is what I have, so this is what I'm writing.

Absolutely. No one's asking for anything when you're writing your first book — no one was like, Emily, where's that shark book? We need it. I did an event with a really experienced writer and she gave me this advice, that once your first book is out, the door to your office can never fully close again. So I knew as I was writing Shark Heart that it was like a sacred experience because it just captured me.

The discussion within the divider below is one of my favorite parts of our talk, but it is spoiler-y! Skip to the question starting with “Definitely” if you haven’t read the book yet and don’t want any spoilers.

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Towards the end of the book, after she has let go of Lewis, Wren finds out she's pregnant, and makes the choice to have the child despite the many obstacles in her way. And as I've gotten older, I've been thinking more about motherhood and what it means to become, or not become, a mother. So when we find out Wren is pregnant, and we're reading about whether she'll have the child or not, I really thought it could go either way. It wasn't predictable to me. Did you go into this part of the story knowing what her choice would be? Was it kind of something that you had to think about?

I love this question, thank you. My original ending, when the book sold, was a little vague. I think I was afraid to choose for her, for whatever reason. And I think it had to do with where I stand on the issue. But my editor said, if we've taken readers on this journey and Wren has been really beat up in her life with loss, I think we need, maybe not a happily-ever-after, but just something concrete that tells us that she has a new life now. So I was like, all right, she's gotta have this child. 

And personally, with all of the reproductive rights stuff last summer, which was when I was working on this, I just felt so much rage around forced motherhood and a woman's right to choose. And I think that comes out in the Tiny Pregnant Woman, who feels cornered into this decision. With Wren, I think her relationship to motherhood is really different. 

If I were Wren, I don't think I would have had the child, which is where I feel I branch off from the character, because it was the right choice for Wren. We've seen her in every type of relationship, and this is the most vulnerable of all. It wasn't a political decision, it was about what was best for her. She's experienced a lot of love and loss and her eyes are wide open [going into motherhood]. In that sense, she's braver than me.

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Definitely. It felt like a very hopeful choice as you finish the book because you just realize how much she has to contend against in her history and her future. But speaking of loss, I read in another interview you did that Anthony Doerr is one of your favorite authors, which actually made a lot of sense to me, because I feel like you have a similar way of approaching tragic things, including grief and loss, not as this big dramatic concept, but as part of life, as innate to it as nature. Loss as transformation, almost, which we see literally with Lewis and more metaphorically with Angela's loss of childhood. 

Is this kind of a conscious thought that you have as you write the role of loss as a transformative part of life and nature? Has it changed as you’ve gotten older?

I think I'm someone who's really struggled with change — I just feel everything really deeply. It's this feeling of fall coming into the air, and did I live enough summer, did I do all the things, how many summers do I have left in my life of being young? (A/N: Highly relatable.) 

And so this kind of inherent grief of just existing is something that I thought about while writing Shark Heart. I was around 26 when I started working on this, and it was like that moment of realizing, oh wow, this is not how it's always going to be. Friendships are going to change, my identity is going to change — I'm not always going to be this person. And I think I've just learned that we are the steady piece. It's nothing in the outside world that can create steadiness. It's that feeling of being your own witness to your own life and realizing that people may come and go, but the anchor is within. I know that sounds a little corny, but it's something that helps me, like creating a sort of inherent friendship with yourself.

I love the idea of a friendship with yourself, and you can see it in Wren as it develops. Because she's not very friendly to herself at the beginning, and then as she grows older and begins to experience loss and grief and constant change in her life, she becomes more comfortable with her role in her own life. I’m around the same age as you, I think, and I feel similarly — with COVID and all of the other changes that have been going on over the last few years, it's been very easy to feel unmoored.

Yes — untethered. That's another reason for the play-like scenes in the book, too. I tried to select times when the characters were kind of disembodied from their lives, moments where the characters are kind of hovering above themselves. 

Yes, like looking at yourself in the third person. Speaking of unmoored, though — you're from Oklahoma, which I feel plays a big part in the novel. There's a passage at the very beginning where Wren is kind of cataloguing a bunch of things that she misses about living in Oklahoma — when I read it, I immediately took a picture of it and sent it to my friend who grew up in Oklahoma and later went to school in the Northeast, like Wren. Immediately she replied and was like, this is exactly right. How much do you think your origins, your first home, impact your storytelling?

It's interesting because I grew up in this tiny town in Oklahoma and I remember being like eight years old and having these thoughts of, I can't wait to live in New York City. I was so small to be having that thought, but I really identified as an urban person. And then as I've gotten older, there's just something about me — maybe it's my inner constitution — that just prefers big skies and trees. When I lived in Los Angeles, I lived in a pretty suburban part of L.A. and now I live in Boston in a place that's not in the thick of the city. I want to be close to the city, but I need to have access to the fringes and to be able to sit in a field somewhere. 

There's also this ease of living in Oklahoma that kind of shocks me when I go back to visit, honestly. People are really patient.

I'm in New York, but I grew up in the suburbs of Miami, so I feel similarly — when I go back, I'm just like, oh my God. 

Yeah, people take their time and that kind of breath in the place is something that I think I miss. Oklahoma has also been so good to me as a debut author and I am really moved by the way they come out for their own. I'm really proud to be from there.

You can tell — it comes through in the book. We spoke about Anthony Doerr but I'm curious about some of your other influences, literary or otherwise.

I think coming from a theater background and being a theater nerd, my earliest loves were musicals and just those dramatic peak ballad moments that rip your heart out. I think there are some moments like that in the book. I love that unabashed display of feeling. I think we really hide from that in our culture because people are so afraid of being sentimental. Our world needs more open-heartedness.

I grew up listening to musical soundtracks and reading plays and in college, I was really inspired by the playwright Sarah Ruhl, who just had a beautiful memoir out, so she's just as good in prose as well. 

I love the great friendship epic novels — Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, A Little Life. I also think one of my formative experiences was watching HBO's Angels in America as a DVD I checked out from the library. I was like 14 years old and had no idea what AIDS was, but I was fascinated by this world where you could talk about hard things, talk about real things, and then kind of play with the liminal space of dreams. And I just thought that was an incredible thing that stories could do — that it didn't have to be straight-forward and that sometimes it's easier to talk about really challenging things when you're not seeing them through the lens of reality. 

Like creating some distance from reality through fiction. 

Exactly. Currently I'm reading Whalefall by Daniel Kraus, and I have to plug it because it feels like a cousin to Shark Heart. It's a father-son story, also about grief and the mysteries of the ocean. I'm not done with it yet, but I'm really loving it. I hope we can do an event or something together. 

This summer I also read You Could Make This Place Beautiful, the memoir by Maggie Smith. It's about her divorce, but to me it wasn't about divorce — it was this almost coming of age, coming to self, and this rediscovery of identity and of womanhood. And of course, the writing is just so beautiful — another book where there's a lot of breathing room on the page.

I've added all of these to my reading list, thank you. Last question, and I kind of hate it when people ask you this because you're promoting a book you already wrote, so you shouldn't have to tell people about your next project. But — what's next for you after Shark Heart?

I've been working on another novel, although I can't say specifics because it's very tender and at a fragile stage. I heard it said once that every couple of years life presents a new mystery, and this project is about this season of life's mystery. If Shark Heart asks what we do with all the grief in this life, this next book asks how we can be productive with rage. I feel like as a woman I haven't really been taught, or I haven't seen examples, of how to productively use my anger about the injustices in the world and all these things I feel powerless against. So I'm interested to see what writing this next book teaches me.

I want to thank Emily for sharing a bit of her time to chat with me — I hope you all enjoyed our conversation as much as I did. Let me know if you read Shark Heart — it is an inventive and beautiful novel. As always, you can find me on twitter, instagram, and tiktok. This newsletter is my pride and joy, with issues on topics like Taylor Swift’s PR machine, the submersible debacle, influencers and strikes, and the Spanish Football Federation/FIFA/Rubiales crisis. It is updated twice a week, and includes one post a week for paid subscribers. If you enjoyed and would like to support my work, please consider becoming a subscriber. xx