'Emergency Contact' is a YA novel about falling in love in the age of texting

Writer Mary H.K. Choi has a theory about texting:

"The person who is allowed to text you at 1 a.m. in the morning without that 'you up' shit, that’s a fucking steamy situation. That’s somebody you care about. Similarly, your 'good morning' texting person — not your blanket 'Hey bitches, are you up' but your first 'good morning' person — that’s a special person."

It was with this in mind that Choi — who is a journalist with stories published in Vice, Wired, and more — wrote Emergency Contact, a YA novel about two people in crisis who are brought together and develop a relationship via text.

"Emergency Contact is about the anxiousness that is inherent in meat space interactions," explains Choi.

The book tells the story of Penny and Sam, two young adults who find themselves in periods of transition: Penny has just left home for the first time to start her freshman year of college and Sam's world is turned upside down when he learns that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant.

After helping Sam mid-panic attack, Penny and Sam swap phone numbers to become each other's emergency contact — the person each confides in when the world gets too overwhelming. But quickly, their texting habits move to something much deeper. It causes both to question what exactly is this digital relationship, and can it actually exist IRL.

"While it is a romance, I find the romance to be sort of secondary. First and foremost, they are each other's friend. And I think in this day and age, there’s too much blitheness with the term 'friend,' so I wanted to introduce a notion of solemnity to friendship and a sense of responsibility. If you are someone's emergency contact — you are their person and they are your person — there is work involved."

Critically, Choi says that she wanted to explore how texting and technology can strengthen a relationship rather than detract from it (contrasting the narrative that by staying plugged in to our phones, we're missing out on real life).

"I always get super confused by the way we look at technology. Because since when were all phone calls created equal?" asks Choi. "It’s not like every text is the same, or that all texts are human interactions that are compromised. I don't get how conduits somehow dictate sentiment. That’s so weird to me, even as a question."

We caught up with Choi to talk about friendships, technology, and Emergency Contact. Check out our interview below.

Texting is a tool, not a hinderance, in Mary K. Choi's 'Emergency Contact' Credit: Simon & Schuster

(Interview edited lightly for clarity and length)

Mashable: The book is so layered. There is a technology component, a mental health component, a deep storyline about parents, the friendship storyline. How did you conceptualize this novel?

Mary: I didn't know how to write a book. I knew I wanted to write YA, but versions of this book started off with science fiction elements and fantastic elements, and there were versions of this book that were a lot more speculative. And as I was sort of figuring out what the characters' voices were, and the way college is about a new routine, the story actually ended up getting smaller and smaller.

I did follow a YouTube link of how to outline a YA novel in three acts, in 27 chapters, and I kind of followed it to a tee, in the same way that some people sort of beat out their first scripts.

So that certainly became the framework, and any embellishments that came after that was just me sort of roving the universe and mining, in a cannibalistic way, any snippet that sort of felt true to this and adding it, and gilding the lily in repeated edits and rewrites.

What was it about YA that was calling to you?

Well I've actually wanted to talk to younger people my whole professional life, and the funny thing about getting older is that there are just so many people that are increasingly younger than you. And then I actually reported a (opens in a new tab)Wired(opens in a new tab) feature(opens in a new tab) about the texting habits of teens.

I've been really interested in teen culture for a really long time. And not to be this person that's like, "Oh I'm so worried about the state of kids today." That’s not how I feel at all. I'm definitely much more in keeping with the vision of teens that they're incredibly impassioned, they're activists, they're incredibly media trained, and they know the mechanics of the world.

There's no such thing as precociousness anymore because people are privy to the same information at the same time. The only thing that might be different is that younger people's coping mechanisms is not where someone who is 40 might have theirs. So I knew that the problems intrinsic in growing up were the same in terms of flavors of problems. But the way you're dealing with them, and the sheer volume of inputs and pressure put on kids is kind of nuanced.

You've written articles, you've written for comics, etc. How did you find this writing experience in comparison to some of those other projects that you've worked on?

I was stunned by the sheer volume of work and care. This isn't a short book, and people were like, "oh my god," this is a tome. My sweet spot as a writer, and especially as an essayist is sub-1500 words. Everybody knows to come to me for that.

But this was so many days and afternoons strung together and I lived with it so long. The stamina for that kind of work is grueling. While I had a vague and distant respect for authors, I didn't know how much care you have to sustain and how diligent you have to be. And it's very lonely work. You have some days where you feel like you’re doing the running man in outer space and you have nothing to show for it other than the sunset and like strangely there's all this Dorito detritus around your desk, and that's how you know a day has passed.

Getting to the end of first draft all by yourself and then going right to the beginning of it and being like "OK, again," and just doing that so many times is weird.

I want to pan out a little bit and ask about the creation of the characters. How did you come up with Sam and Penny?

[Laughing] I'm a hack. I’ve never done this before so Penny started off not as a simulacrum, but certain aspects of Penny are me. And then other things very much aren't. And some days, because Penny was mined from my own ingredients, there were certain days where I couldn’t stand her. Like, she was boring and she was so fraught and timid. We’re strange in different ways. Her flavor of crazy is different from mine.

You know how when two people get together and the jigsaw pieces are like two heavy pieces of machinery that just lock into place? When two people's flavors of crazy lock, you’re just like whoa, that’s so weird. Sam and Penny go together in a way that Penny and I do not. I think it's really foolhardy to presume that one person’s crazy and one person's sane. And I don’t mean crazy in an ableist way, I just mean they’re really specific people.

I just wanted to give Penny as many character traits to fill out the constellation of her being-hood. And the same with Sam. I think a lot of that "who works with whom" equation starts not with taste, but with what your anxieties are, and where you’re broken, and what you're hiding, and what are the fundamental untruths about yourself that you believe that become personal folklore. And I think those are the things that really ground a character.

You said while explaining the book that you wanted to create this idea of solemnity to the idea of friendship?

I'm not saying it's so lucky to be in the friend-zone. Because the friend-zone sucks when it's like unrequited and you're like "Oh my god, I have to tamp down these feelings. I feel so stifled." That’s it's own thing.

But for this, there was real value in friendship.

I actually think this notion of romance has been so modified and so distilled to this one specific thing. And then it's vaunted, so you're questioning if a relationship that you've found or this person or this kindred spirit that you're experiencing fits the mold of that type of romance that you've seen. And that becomes this yardstick by which so much human interaction is measured.

So I wanted to do that romance story differently, and to show that it can be different and that it can take a different form and that it kind of sucks because it’s a lot of work.

I really wanted them to both to do start doing the emotional labor of what it is to "adult" ethically and sincerely and tenderly and lovingly because I think it’s the hippocratic oath, where, with social media, and the sheer number of times that we communicate with each other, and just how many of us there are, just from a humankind standpoint, I really want people to be a little more careful with each other. That's the story I wanted to tell: a story about people who take the time to be careful with each other in very small and tender ways.

When you set out to write this book, was the text and tech part of the book always a part of the story?

It was always there — I think it's really, really weird when I read books, and cellphones aren't a thing. That always throws me off. Or if your character doesn’t experience some kind of microaggression or aggression-aggression because of social media and the kind of pressure that applies on your life. Those things are just so real, so I think the wholesale omission of that from any sort of coming of age novel would feel strange to me.

So it was a no-brainer for me to include tech. In terms of how much of it makes it into the final piece. That has a lot to do with the fact that I was in a long-distance relationship at the time. Like multiple charger-depleting type conversations. As a story device that's a bit more tense, a bit more sustained, I don’t think anything beats texting.

As far as other tech, I think there was a version of it that had more Snapchat, but then I just killed that because I was like 'this is not a thing.'

Emergency Contact is out now from Simon & Schuster.