Check This Out: In "Retro," Jessica Goldstein creates a luxury time-travel agency

So when I was writing this novel, it's like the thick of the pandemic.

And it was a time when I was really struggling to feel hopeful about the future as much as I wanted to.

I found like everything looked very bleak.

Climate emergency escalating, democracy on the fritz.

Everything's a million dollars except our wages.

And at the same time, I watched like this wave of nostalgia take over every part of life, our pop culture.

Our fashion, our politics, this kind of weaponization of nostalgia by the far right to make people believe.

that the past in which many of us did not have civil rights was somehow superior to our flawed yet improved present.

And that tension between I want to like the future, that is where we're going, but I'm struggling to do that.

And I'm a nostalgic person.

I miss landlines.

I miss logging off.

I miss dial-up even.

With knowing that nostalgia at its most extreme is this actually quite insidious thing that can prevent us from believing that the future could be a place we actually want to go is what gave the novel that heft.

Yeah.

I mean, for me, your debut novel, the subtext really also had to do with, can I build a new life? Can I leave my mistakes behind? And even though in retro, we're talking about a time machine and going back, it was about going forward.

Can I create a future for myself that is simpler, right? And different.

Like, can I leave that back there? Like, was that also in your head as you were writing this?

What's funny is that as I was getting to know this main character, this is where writing sounds so like woo-woo spiritual.

It's, I was thinking a lot about like, what is it that makes this particular person different? believe in herself and believe in her life what has taken that from her and what would it take to restore it and I thought about how like we live in a society that teaches us to undervalue things that I personally value a lot like Creativity, like art, like platonic love and friendship, we're sort of taught that those things are actually quite insignificant in the grand scheme.

You know, marriage matters, but friendship doesn't.

Or being an engineer matters and being a poet doesn't.

And that's not to say that married engineers don't contribute.

I think they contribute so much.

But, like, that is not the only way to matter.