Brittany Luce

Emma, you wrote a novel based around the decision to be child-free.

Why did you want to explore this through your novel?

What are you seeing as far as people's fascination with this?

And what's the response been to your book?

So it's like, I mean, it's interesting what you describe.

It's, um...

I don't know.

I'm 38 years old.

I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm definitely... I consider myself a prime millennial.

And that's very much a part of our sort of cultural conversation.

I think it's very interesting that this is a conversation that is so...

I guess you could say fraught and weighty, that one of the motivations that you had for writing a book about this is wanting to connect with other women who had also made the same choice.

I want to touch on that a little bit more.

What cultural assumptions does our culture hold about adults who choose not to have kids, or child-free women specifically?

Yeah, I wonder, Emma, you touched on this a little bit where you've seen people respond to a character in your book.

What sort of cultural assumptions have you have you noticed our culture holds about adults or women specifically who choose not to have children?

You can't just have a regular life.

Exactly.

Yeah, something that I noticed come up when I was researching, preparing for this conversation is the idea of selfishness.

That was something that was very prevalent.