Of vengeance, Emily Brontë wrote of its “after-flavour, metallic and corroding,“ but also that it can feel like “aromatic wine”—“warm and racy.” There’s a reason revenge plots feel delicious to women, especially in an era in which we continue to witness women punished and destroyed for being human, while men evade accountability for the worst offenses. It’s why I have written here many times in recent years about feminist revenge narratives, which reclaim the madwoman from madness, and restore her to her rightful place as Cassandra, as truth-teller, as the only rational person in the room.
Emily Lynn Paulson’s new novel The Revenge Party is a juicy and thrilling story of a woman seeking revenge against a predator, her husband, who is protected from accountability by his polished public persona. It has all the features of my favorite revenge narratives, from the tensions that arise when women come together against shitty men, to deeper explorations of that desire for cosmic justice against such men. Emily is also the author of the nonfiction title Hey Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing.
What is something you are mad about right now?
Everything? But specifically, the dismantling of public health in this country, and the wellness-to-fascism pipeline it’s supercharged, which runs on the exact same mechanics as an MLM: distrust the experts, trust the pretty lady with the supplement. I’m angry at how many people are falling for it.
What “feelings rules” did you learn growing up? What did those lessons teach you about gender, relationships, and the world?
The rules were: 1. My mother’s feelings ruled everything, and mine were inconvenient, so they needed to be stuffed down. 2. A woman’s life is a countdown to marriage and children.
I have a lot of empathy now for how I grew up believing those things. My mother married my father when she was 17, and he was 22. She had my brother at 18 and me at 20, if that paints a picture. My parents were loving, but my mother was extremely immature — essentially a child raising children. My father worked multiple jobs while she stayed home with us. She’d immigrated from England and came from a broken home, so she had very low self-esteem, and while she was loving and kept us fed and clothed, I remember feeling untethered even as a small child. She’d load her problems onto me.
I knew about the money troubles at a very young age, and she asked me more than once whether she should divorce my dad after they’d fight. I was probably seven when I first remember her asking. So I grew up knowing, albeit subconsciously, that I didn’t have parents I could count on emotionally.
This left me with a very low sense of self. I absorbed other friends’ likes and dislikes, made up tall tales to feel more important, and eventually that bled into my teen years as eating disorders, sex I’m not sure I consented to so much as agreed to, drinking, drugs, and other risky behavior. And when I did eventually get engaged and get pregnant before my wedding, my not-remotely-religious parents were ADAMANT we rush the wedding so as not to have a “bastard” child, which tells you everything about how they viewed the proper sequence of things.
It took many years of therapy and sobriety to unravel the fact that I grew up believing something was wrong with me, and now everything I write interrogates that.
What is your relationship now to feeling/emotion? What feelings scare you most? Which emotions do you find most powerful? Do you like feeling things?
I allow all feelings, big, small, good, bad, indifferent, and I talk about them, often. I make space for my kids to talk about theirs too. After years of numbing, I like feeling things. Joy is the most powerful.
It took a few years after I got sober to realize I could finally feel undoctored joy, without substances. I hadn’t felt that since I was a kid. The feeling that scares me the most is being at a crossroads and not knowing which way to go or how things will pan out. It’s unsettling.
Do you think of your creative process as related to a state of madness? Emotional expression? Some other way?
Yes. My writing has been the way I’ve processed everything. I didn’t set out to be a writer. I gave up my career (chemist, then a chemistry teacher) to be home with my kids, and the only “job” I had during that time was my time in the MLM.
When I got sober and worked the steps, I started writing everything down: how I got there, where things started, who I was, what color I liked. The most basic things. Eventually, that became Highlight Real, my memoir, in 2019. And by the time I was leaving the MLM, I was using the same process to write about the structures and systems that made me susceptible in the first place, which became Hey, Hun.
My debut novel, The Revenge Party, was me processing 2024-2026 the only legal way I could think of, because I wanted to watch powerful men get what’s coming to them.
What is your relationship to diagnosis?
Every diagnosis has led me to treatment, so I’m a fan—with the caveat that self-diagnosis can be dangerous. I’m all about researching, but I’m also about science. Psychiatrists, medical doctors, rather than internet armchair psychologists. And because I’ve modeled this for my kids, there’s been no stigma with any of their diagnoses either.
If you had to diagnose yourself with something, what would it be?
Substance use disorder (sober almost 10 years!)
Anxiety (zoloft for 18 years, baby!)
Post menopausal (it’s better on the other side, ladies! Yay estrogen patches)
Aries/ Enneagram 8-ness (I have a long fuse, but when you piss me off, you’d better watch the fuck out.)
Have you ever felt normal, healthy, or healed? Why or why not?
I hate the word normal. What is normal? Healthy is a word that’s been so bastardized I can’t remember the last time I used it or believed it when it was plastered on a food or an Instagram reel. Healed? Eh. I like the concept of FINDING HEALING, but if I believed I was fully healed, I’d stop working on myself, and I wouldn’t want that.
We’re sold this idea that improvement is always the goal. And yes, I’m proud that I’m free of an eating disorder and substance use, but sometimes healing is just doing the next right thing or being okay with how things are.
How do art and culture make you feel? What do you hope people feel when they engage with your work?
I love the escape of books and art and nature, and also how they somehow make me feel closer to myself, or my kids, or my own writing. It takes me away from myself and brings me home, simultaneously.
I especially love smart books, movies, and shows that tap into what I’m feeling, or what society’s feeling, even when they seem out there. I’ll watch and reread those over and over. Currently rewatching The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, and re-reading Yesteryear, if that gives you any indication.
When people read my work, I hope they feel heard, seen, entertained, and maybe a little angrier at the right people.
What is the relationship between politics and art for you, and in your work?
It’s inextricably sewn in. Art and writing are political, whether people choose to believe it or not. So are motherhood, addiction, and wellness. Money, marriage, gender, ambition, all of it. I’m interested in the systems underneath our individual choices: who has power, and who benefits from keeping us exhausted or ashamed.
If someone doesn’t like my political views, they probably won’t like my books. I’m fine with that.
Is there a question you are often asked in interviews that makes you angry or uncomfortable? What do you wish people would ask you instead?
There are different versions of the same question, but it’s always some allusion to you’re too smart to fall for that — the pyramid scheme, the alcoholism, blah blah blah. Fuck off.
The question I want is: how do smart, empathetic people end up in systems like these? Because then I get to point out the fact that we have no paid parental leave, no subsidized childcare, no safety nets of any kind. When there’s nothing holding people up, harmful things like MLMs and a bottle of wine every night come in looking like solutions.
What is something keeping you sane right now?
My kids. They are fucking awesome.
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