To the actress, to the martyr, to the adventurer; The Retro Report, vol. 31

Yes, yes…. YES: My debut novel Retro comes out in four days! All my friends and loved ones have been asking how I am feeling, kind inquiries to which I’ve responded with inadequate words like “really excited” or “it’s so surreal.” But the TRUEST answer is: I feel like this part of Alyssa Liu’s gold medal routine, after she’d finished all the jumps she needed to medal, when the music and her body just clicked together. Treat yourself to watching it again—it’s an immediate good-for-you dopamine hit—and you can tell that she can tell it’s all happening:

So it is with that exhilarated-ponytail-flip spirit that I say I am having a real full circle week over here at Retro HQ.

After many years of contributing to Washingtonian magazine as a reporter, I was interviewed BY the magazine for a feature on DC Debuts! You can read the story about how Retro is “a modern twist on time travel” online and in the June issue, on newsstands/at dentists’ and doctors’ offices now!

Also: When I was in college, I was a founding contributor to a brand-new site called HerCampus. Now, all these years later, HerCampus is a massive, national operation — and I had the honor of being featured in their “Dream Jobs” column! Very cool and emotional moment for me when I was asked in this interview what my dream job always was and I got to say “actually, literally this.” !!!!!!

We talked about how I got my start in culture reporting as an intern at Seventeen magazine1 (during the height of Twilight mania!) and my best advice for anyone thinking about taking that big creative swing, whether it’s to write a novel, record your album, make your independent film, whatever!

If you haven’t yet, you better believe you can still preorder your copy of Retro (even a SIGNED copy which WILL come with a sticker); RSVP to my book tour (get the full itinerary and event details in TRR vol. 30); enter the Goodreads giveaway to get a FREE copy of Retro; and explore the official Retro agency website.

Because I wrote a novel about time travel, people are inclined to think that my most fertile sources of inspiration were other stories about time travel. A perfectly rational thing to think. But creativity is not rational and that’s one of the best things about it!

The truth is, save for a due-diligence brushing-up on the classics I’d read/watched and review of the ones I hadn’t, I did not spend much time with time travel books or movies or shows at ALL. I didn’t even really think of what I was doing as writing about time travel. I thought more of time travel as a way to tell the story I wanted to tell. Like how I don’t think about my vacations as being “about” airplanes. It’s just a way to get where I’m going.

This is one of my favorite things about creativity—it is NONLINEAR. It will resist all your efforts to make it add up in some no-duh straightforward way. You know when you read a classic or go to a museum because you feel like you’re supposed to, and you stare at a famous piece of art or some perfect page of literature waiting for something to happen to you… but then nothing does? If you’re trying too hard to “be inspired” your brain will show you nothing but the psychedelic stripes of a TV test pattern.

BUT: if you follow whatever ignites your innate curiosity, you will find something in whatever you’re reading/watching/listening to/etc. that maybe, in that particular instance, nobody else would see, because no one else is looking the way you’re looking, from your specific vantage point at this one-and-only moment in time.

This is why I believe there is no such thing as wasted time in creative life, as long as you are being thoughtful about whatever it is you’re doing, and why it can be so hard to explain to people who are trapped in the mind-prison of literal, linear thought that (for instance) it IS important to go to the movies by yourself in the middle of the day if life presents the opportunity for you to do so!! To them this way of being does not make sense. That’s because unlike TRR readers they don’t understand that the only sense that matters is SONIC SENSE.

Leave logic behind and make SONIC SENSE: The Retro Report, vol. 11

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Jan 9

Happy New Year to my longtime Retro Report readers and welcome to all you new subscribers who found your way here through my Emily in Paris recaps and beyond! If you want to know the vision/manifesto/etc. of the letter—it is only rarely about Emily—you can find it in

So this week I wanted to share some of the things that DID really inspire Retro even though (especially because?!) they have nothing to do with time travel.

One of my favorite stories I’ve done as a journalist is this feature for Washingtonian about how the CIA recruits millennial and Gen Z spies. You might be wondering: Does it matter that everyone is on social media? Do young people today even want to join the CIA? How do you maintain a cover In These Times? I wondered this, too, and had a blast finding out.

It was one of the most fun and most annoying2 reporting experiences of my life. Every real spy and/or CIA pro I interviewed told me that pop culture representations of spy life aren’t accurate, but it was also quite evident that they loved being perceived the way those depictions presented them, not least because when I went to Langley to meet with the associate director for CIA talent, our interview took place in the Office of Public Affairs conference room, a space whose walls had zero windows but MANY framed posters of spy movies and TV shows.3

Much like my tight-lipped sources at CIA, I LOVE stories about spies. I love their hyper-competence and their murky morality and their twisted-up relationships with their own identities. And longtime TRR readers already know how I feel about the workplace (there’s no place weirder!) so naturally I am very into the John le Carré school of spycraft, which is less glitzy than your typical Bond outing and more aligned with how it feels to be a person at work: the drudgery behind the excitement, having to do things you don’t want to do—things you actively thing are inane or worse—because your boss says you have to, even though what does your boss know? They’re way up there and you’re down on the ground where the action is!!

The Little Drummer Girl is about a young British theater actress named Charlie who is tricked, seduced, coerced, and, ultimately, recruited into working as a spy for Israeli intelligence. Kurtz, an Israeli spy, plays on Charlie’s leftist sympathies to convince her she’s on the right side of the cause, and her eventual case officer, Joseph, appears at first as a love interest but then as, alas, a boss/middle manager.

Here’s Kurtz on how he reeled Charlie in:

He had appealed to the actress in her, to the martyr, to the adventurer; he had flattered the daughter and excited the aspirant. He had granted her an early glimpse of the new family she might care to join, knowing that, deep down, like most rebels, she was only looking for a better conformity. And most of all, by heaping such benefits upon her, he had made her rich: which, as Charlie herself had long preached to anyone who would hear her, was the beginning of subservience.

Just one more minute for: “like most rebels, she was only looking for a better conformity.” GOD that’s good. Okay, moving on:

Joseph’s task is to impersonate Salim, whose older brother, Khalil, is a Palestinian operative; Joseph-as-Salim and Charlie-as-Charlie-but-not-quite-Charlie are to travel across Europe, pretending they’re in love, baiting Khalil into reaching out to Charlie so the Israelis can track him. So Charlie spends a lot of the novel literally with Joseph, playacting this relationship she’s not really in with a guy who isn’t really there—the actual Salim has already been abducted and killed—so she can convincingly portray the girlfriend of someone she’s never met and describe their jetsetting lovefest as if it truly happened.

I thought a lot about Charlie while I was imagining who Ash, the protagonist of Retro, would be. Both are intrigued by the chance to abandon the acting they’re doing (or, in Ash’s case, used to be doing) for the ultimate role in “the theatre of the real” (le Carré’s words that I think of constantly!). They both want to be part of something, but they don’t know what something to want, and are relieved when someone else arrives to make that decision for them. In the midst of the sort-of-kidnapping-turned-recruitment, Charlie is soothed, almost, by how badly she is desired by her captors, and what they can offer her:

They wanted her. They knew her through and through; they knew her fragility and her plurality. And they still wanted her. They had stolen her in order to rescue her. After all her drifting, their straight line… After all her words, their action… their true allegiance, to fill the emptiness that had yawned and screamed inside her like a bored demon ever since she could remember. She was a featherweight, caught in a swirling storm, but suddenly, to her amazed relief, theirs was the commanding wind.

As you’ll soon discover when you read Retro: That is VERY Ash!!

Also: both Charlie and Ash have A++ memories, which make them ideal agents (secret and time travel). And: Time Travel Agents live a lot like spies: They spend so much time outside of their real lives in the present, pretending to be other people—basically living their covers almost 24/7—that it’s easy for them to lose track of who they are, and what parts of their lives even count.

Once I sold Retro, a lot of people who’d read the manuscript told me they thought it had some Severance vibes: They’re both set at a high-concept office, where things are shiny and cool in many ways but also Something Is Not Right. The truth is I had not watched Severance yet and it had no effect on my novel. But I HAD watched, and been inspired by, a different (superior!) installment in the Adam Scott Work Sucks Television Universe: Party Down.

Party Down is about a bunch of struggling actors and writers who work at a catering company. Every episode revolves around a different event, and our lowly, pink-bow-tied employees are always barely rallying to keep it together in front of their better-heeled clientele. Adam Scott plays Henry, who was in a widely-seen and often-quoted-at-him beer commercial—“are we having fun yet?”—but has since quit show business, returning to Party Down with his hopes dashed and cynicism restored. Henry’s boss is Ron (Ken Marino, of Wet Hot American Summer and The Other Two fame), the hapless team leader who dreams of owning a preposterously-punctuated Soup R’ Crackers, an all-you-can-eat soup franchise; and his crush is Casey (Lizzy Caplan, YES) a comedian-actress-kind-of who is going through a divorce.

Every funny person was either in this or wishes they were: Martin Starr, Megan Mullally, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch. It’s SO good on how arbitrary and insane trying to make it in Hollywood can make a person, how success is sprinkled on the population seemingly at random but also somehow often lands on the most-obnoxious and least-deserving people.

The show aired for only two seasons before it was canceled (it was too good so nobody watched it… many such cases) but got a reboot in 2023 that was, (MIRACULOUSLY considering how I feel about reboots) actually excellent! The premise of the show—that no one working here actually wants to be working here—is only made funnier by the passage of time, how everyone has aged and is still, for various reasons, in need of the Party Down job.

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I thought a lot about Party Down and its structure as I writing: How every week they introduce guest stars and establish the world of a standalone party, but none of those one-offs run away with the series, since the real story arcs are happening with our cater-waiters. Very useful reference for a novel that is full of trips to the past taking one-time-use characters to one-time-only places!

This is a literally perfect album that I listened to every single day while writing the first draft of this book. At the end of that year the little surveillance-state-but-make-it-cute-year-in-review the streaming services give you just had the first five songs on this album as my top five songs of the year. After a while, it had this almost Pavlovian effect on me where once I’d hear the opening strings of the title track, I could feel my mind drifting back to Retro no matter what I’d been thinking about before.

So much of Retro is about romanticizing the past and then undercutting that romanticism, feeling the pull of wasn’t everything so simple before? and then the push of don’t kid yourself. This album4 GETS IT. Often writing with this playing in the background was about letting the mood of it just seep into my bones, but every now and then I’d tune back in for a lyric and let that work its magic on me, or a line would feel like it was written just for my characters, like “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have/But I have it.”