For this week’s episode, I got to sit down with author Margaux Eliot to talk about her nostalgic but dark debut novel, Honeymoon Stage.

Set against the early years of celebreality TV in the aughts, Honeymoon Stage is part romance, part chaos, and all sharp commentary on the way we consume women in the media.

Margaux shares why she wrote the novel under a pen name (you can also find her under her real name, Julia Fine), how her gothic speculative fiction helped shape this book, and what she learned about reality television and our need to observe the unobservable while researching for this. Together, we unpack isolation as an integral part of celebrity and reality television, the treatment of women like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson in the media, how those stories shaped a generation’s view of femininity and succ ...