Elena Meets the Author

Alan Anderson is a visionary ad man. That is, up until the morning he isn’t.
He blows the biggest account of his career, comes apart, and moves out to live off the land, the land being his backyard in suburban Greenwich, Connecticut. He sets up in the children’s playhouse. He goes barefoot. He uses the woods as a bathroom.
His timing couldn’t be worse. His wife Vivian is in the middle of a campaign to join the Queen Anne’s, Greenwich’s most selective women’s social group. Their two daughters are similarly going off the rails. One prefers drama to sports, which is not done in Greenwich. The other has started talking to animals. And Alan is emerging unshowered from the playhouse just as Vivian’s trying to make the best possible impression.
Alan Opts Out is a comedy about what it costs to keep up, and what’s left of a man and a family when they stop trying. It’s a New York Times best book of the summer, blurbed by Elizabeth Gilbert and Carl Hiaasen, and currently in development as an HBO series.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Courtney talks about the luxury playhouse that sparked the whole idea, her frustration with overconsumption and the Stanley cup trend, and what it was like growing up around extreme wealth in Greenwich. We get into her past life as a brand strategist, how she developed compassion for Vivian over eleven drafts, and the unexpected joy of Alan’s lobster sidekick Lenny. She also talks about the Werner Herzog epigraph, taken from his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, and what she wanted it to signal about the book’s tone. And she mentions Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer as a book she returned to just before publication, and why Christopher McCandless was on her mind throughout the writing.
Courtney’s previous novel Touch also comes up in conversation. She describes it as the book she would have written next, except it’s already written, and thinks it will resonate just as much now as Alan Opts Out. She’s also the author of the publishing guidebook Before and After the Book Deal and runs writing classes and resources at courtneymaum.com.
Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. Find it at elenabowes.substack.com.


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Twenty-two rib eye steaks go missing from Aunt Orsa’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in a fictional Midwestern college town. They vanish on the same day that celebrity author John Grisham is due to dine there. Someone on the staff took them. But who?
That’s the whodunit. What Rebecca Kauffman’s sixth novel actually is, is something deeper and more complex than that. A who are they? The table of contents is renamed Menu, and each chapter, each course, dips into the life of one of the suspects. No one at Aunt Orsa’s is above suspicion. And as it turns out, no one’s life is boring.
Kauffman has a real talent for believable dialogue and for telling us just enough about a person that we feel like we know them and want to know more. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, Emma Straub named it one of the standout books of 2026, and it’s been described as a pitch-perfect mash-up of Clue and The Bear.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Rebecca talks about drawing on years of working in restaurants, how John Grisham ended up in the book, the menu-style chapter structure, and her approach to revision by subtraction. We also talk about leaving some mysteries unresolved, how motherhood changed her writing, and why noticing is at the core of everything she does.
Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. Find it at elenabowes.substack.com.
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John Lanchester, Booker Prize-nominated author and regular contributor to The New Yorker, is my latest guest on Elena Meets the Author, the literary podcast that goes behind the book and into the mind of the author.
His latest novel Look What You Made Me Do is full of twists and turns, so pay attention.
Two women, both Londoners from different generations. Kate, 57, recently widowed, quietly devastated. Phoebe, a millennial TV writer whose Netflix megahit Cheating has become the show everyone’s talking about. When Kate starts watching, she realises something that stops her cold. The show contains secrets, inside jokes, a private language from her marriage to architect husband Jack that only she and Jack should know.
Look What You Made Me Do is a novel about love, loss, calculating minds, family dysfunction, and revenge. It takes on popular culture’s intrusion into our personal lives, the private language of a long marriage, and generational warfare between boomers and millennials along the way. As one critic put it, it’s good, mean fun. And revenge here is less a dish best served cold than a whole buffet of chilled platters.
In this episode of the Elena Meets the Author podcast, John Lanchester tells me that the entire plot of Look What You Made Me Do arrived in two minutes while he was brushing his teeth. We talk about how he built the thriller mechanics from there, the art of surprise versus suspense, how he shifts reader sympathy between Kate and Phoebe, the real-life Soho Farmhouse scene that made it into the book, and the generational resentments simmering underneath it all.
If you enjoy Elena Meets the Author, Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. Find it at elenabowes.substack.com.


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Annabel Monaghan is a return guest on Elena Meets the Author, and for good reason. The internet has crowned her the queen of the summer romance, and as one fan put it, it’s not summer until Annabel Monaghan has come out with a book.
Her latest, Dolly All the Time, is a number one New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America book club pick. It’s the story of Dolly Brick, a single mum, a champion caretaker, the person on everyone’s emergency contact list, who goes home to a fictional town next door to Newport, Rhode Island, and ends up fake dating the town’s handsome heir. It’s funny, it’s warm, the setting is dreamy, and it snuck up on me and broke my heart a little.
In this episode Annabel tells the real story behind the name Dolly, a smiling fan she met on tour who later reconnected through Good Morning America. She explains why she loves the fake-dating trope for its forced intimacy and emotional honesty, and how she draws from her own life in this charming tale. We also get into Annabel’s unplotted drafting process, how her editor helped shape the humour, and why she was determined to rewrite the rescue narrative so Dolly is never a damsel.
Annabel is one of my favourite guests. She’s smart, funny, and self-deprecating, and her characters mirror those traits. The dialogue, the sensual summer settings, the big life questions she weaves through every book. And by the way, Annabel’s first book came out when she was 50, which should give every aspiring writer a lot of hope. Dolly All the Time has spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer author. If you’d like to hear more from Annabel, she’s also in episodes four and 24.
Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. If you want more than the podcast, you can find it at elenabowes.substack.com.
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00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
02:08 The Real Dolly Story
04:20 Why Fake Dating Works
06:49 Writing From Personal Life
08:42 Research and Writing Process
12:34 Caretakers and Family Roles
17:14 Parenting and Letting Go
18:37 Building Whitfield and Newport Vibes
21:40 Romance Heroines and Age
23:05 Writing Older Heroines
24:11 Rewriting Rescue Tropes
25:42 Pretty Woman Escargot Rant
28:14 Specificity Makes Love Real
29:54 Banter and Finding Humor
33:03 Dream Casting the Movie
35:17 Queen of Summer Romance
36:28 PG Yet Evocative Intimacy
38:18 Editor Notes and Revisions
40:07 Letting Love In
41:21 Teasing the 2027 Novel
43:43 Wrap Up and Bestseller Buzz


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Ayelet Waldman’s latest novel is unlike anything else out there right now. A Perfect Hand is set in Victorian England and it’s a marriage plot with a twist. Alice Lockey, a lady’s maid, has fallen for Charlie Wells, a lord’s valet. The only way these two servants can be together is if Alice’s Lady Jemima falls for Charlie’s Lord Wynstowe. Which would be straightforward enough, except the lord and the lady despise each other.
The novel has been described as Jane Austen meets Nora Ephron, and that feels exactly right. It’s funny, original, and the voice is captivating from the very first page. Amidst the crinolines, fancy French hairstyles, chamber pots, and stolen kisses, Waldman weaves in some modern-day thinking and feminist ideology that gives the whole thing a sharp, contemporary edge.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Ayelet and I get into how the idea came from her daughter’s advice after years of abandoned drafts, the captivating direct-to-reader Victorian lady-novelist narrator voice she developed, and the obsessive research that went into getting the period right, from the reality of servant life to toxic Victorian cosmetics to hiring a Victorian scholar and British graduate students to catch every anachronism. We also talk about the title’s three meanings, the suffrage era threads woven through the story, and what drew her to escapism with a feminist conscience.
Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing craft insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. If you want more than the podcast, you can find it at elenabowes.substack.com.
00:00 Elena meets Ayelet
00:02 Welcome to the Podcast
00:17 Meet Ayelet and the Novel
01:21 Reading a Funny Excerpt
03:39 Finding the Narrator Voice
04:55 Daughter Inspired the Premise
06:19 Twists and Writing Timeline
08:24 Microdosing and Genre Swerves
10:42 Chasing Victorian Language
11:36 Why Shift to Suffrage Era
15:08 Servant Life Research Details
17:57 Bustles and Modern Beauty
19:37 Plastic Surgery and Hollywood
23:13 Meet the Main Characters
28:59 Meet Nigel Winstow
29:28 Calipers and Vanity Science
35:09 Experts Catch Anachronisms
37:14 Audiobook Accent Choices
38:01 Meaning of Perfect Hand
40:03 Stealing Victorian Voices
43:15 Escapism and Suffrage Echoes
47:13 Swiss Army Knife Career
49:08 Next Projects and WWI
51:25 Farewell and Wrap Up


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