“See what happens if you say yes”: A Conversation with Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett

“I think that that’s more interesting than saying no.”

Eight years ago, Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett moved into the same apartment building. The two bonded quickly and along the way thought that maybe they could write a book together. And they did. Their novel The Very Nice Box is a dazzling and hilarious debut seeped in the ills of corporate culture and male entitlement. But The Very Nice Box also paints a picture of grief, queerness, and friendship. The novel centers around a woman named Ava, who works at an IKEA-esque furniture company called STÄDA. The Very Nice Box offers a little bit for everyone—blending rom-com, satire, and thriller.

Eve and Laura’s writing is witty and sharp. They interrogate questions of privilege and toxic masculinity through the medium of fiction and humor. We spoke about Laura and Eve’s interest in “small crimes,” the process of co-authoring a book, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Allisen Lichtenstein: What did your individual journeys to becoming writers look like, and when did you realize you wanted to work on something together?

Laura Blackett: I’ve been working in the tech industry for eight years doing various customer service jobs. And my day job is a writing gig, but I do technical writing. But I think that the story really starts when Eve and I moved into the same apartment building, eight years ago.

Eve Gleichman: I had come to Brooklyn to get my MFA. And we moved into the same apartment building in the same month, and we became friends pretty quickly. And we talked a lot about our observations of everyday life and people. The common topic of conversation would be something that we came to refer to as small crimes, which were things people got away with doing that could have crossed a socially acceptable boundary.

LB: Somebody so focused on their own self-interest that they blunder past mundane social boundaries—nothing huge. But once you start seeing the patterns in people, you realize that they’re doing this with everyone and that that’s why they’re moving through life so easily. And we would text all the time about things that happened to us out in the world, or things that we saw that just felt kind of quietly infuriating or mysterious.

EG: Like why would somebody arrange their refrigerator that way? Or why would somebody take my food from the refrigerator in that way?

LB: Our connection over this small-crime thing wasn’t so much about hating the person who did it, but more being really curious about how they came to be that way.

EG: Yeah, and at a certain point, I bet we could bring a book together. And so we did.

AL: I would love to hear about that process of writing—what did coauthoring and coediting look like?

EG: We didn’t plot out the whole book in advance. We had to trust each other, and we had to be really flexible as whatever we planned almost invariably would change. We would plot maybe three chapters at a time over dinner. And we would alternate writing the chapters. I would receive a chapter from Laura, which would be the highlight of my day, week, month—especially when Laura’s chapter sort of veered off from the plan. And then I would revise it and then rewrite the next chapter and send it to Laura.

LB: I felt the same way about receiving your chapters. It’s fun to read Eve’s writing, but it was also really fun to see what the characters were getting up to without my supervision. It was like they had their own world inside Eve’s head.

EG: The other thing about the collaboration—you know, people ask about this, as though writers aren’t collaborating constantly. When you think about writers, workshops, or even just the author-editor relationship, it surprises me now that more people aren’t doing this sort of putting two names on a book. Because I think it’s happening more than many writers want to acknowledge.

AL: That feels incredibly true to the craft of writing. Collaboration is very much at its core at so many stages. I’m curious if there was an initial spark of the book for both of you.

LB: When I look back and try to find the tiniest seed of the story, I think we started with Ava. We knew what type of person we wanted her to be. We knew about her quirks—you know, the fact that she measures her time in units and that she’s reserved and restrained. From there, we were really curious about why she is that way, what had happened to her to make her have these coping mechanisms? And from there, we started to fill in some of her backstory. And knowing what would bother her helped us create Mat, who we thought would be kind of the perfect person to get her attention in a not-so-great way at first. I guess that’s a long way of saying that we really started with the characters.

AL: The book also offers a critique of corporate culture and white male privilege. And it illustrates the ways the two not only parallel each other but also intertwine. Yet the critique is balanced with a picture of grief, love, and friendship. I’m curious to know if you view humor and fiction as a realm to sort of critique, and how do you balance that with some of these other themes?

EG: That’s a really good question. We didn’t—I don’t think—set out to write a critique of anything, or we didn’t even really set out to write a satire. We didn’t set out to write a funny book. We set out to write about Ava. But once we had her figured out, the world sort of grew around her. So it became a question of okay, where can we put Ava? What kind of world would really rub up against her and create some drama on the page?

LB: Yeah, one of these contemporary corporate cultures that are abundant with perks, obsessed with team spirit. And I feel like where it really bumps up against Ava is that it’s constantly asking you to reveal your innermost self in an almost culty way. They want you to do personal and professional development and mandatory wellness. And Ava is just like, I’m here to do my job.

EG: Maybe that’s where some of the humor comes from—the tension between Ava and that kind of world. And the same with Mat, you know, the bro-ey entitlement is the perfect foil for someone like Ava. Mat, who moves through the world with great ease and is charismatic, has no clue how much work he’s creating for other people. He’s riding this wave of white male entitlement. It wasn’t a purposeful critique, but more of a character study.

The book also offers a critique of corporate culture and white male privilege. And it illustrates the ways the two not only parallel each other but also intertwine.

But we wanted to make sure that his character was fully realized too. And once we sort of saw the way that he moved through the world, we thought, what else would be true about him? And that’s how we came up with Good Guys, which is the sort of men’s self-help group that he’s a part of. And that was such a joy to write about this men’s group. And I think that’s maybe where some of the satire comes in. Like, what are these men doing together? What do they want? And why is he a part of it?

AL: I’m curious to know what it was like to inhabit that space and mind of a character as a writer. You have this figure of male entitlement versus Ava, this very particular person with her own quirks. What did that process look like to inhabit such different headspaces as you wrote?

LB: I mean, it was kind of fun to become Mat Putnam for a little while.

EG: You described Good Guys as . . . what did you call it? Something 2.0?

LB: Right, like toxic masculinity 2.0. If you think about toxic masculinity 1.0, it’s a man who has been discouraged from being emotional and who has it all bottled up and uses that in a violent sort of way. And then there’s Good Guys, which is a group of men who have recognized the need for introspection and the need to be self-reflective, but they use it also for kind of nefarious things. It was just really fun to think about what it would look like if a group of men used a self-help framework to actually make themselves worse people.

AL: I think that’s a big part of the humor and satire we see as well. The book pushes real-life situations further and further and interrogates these issues through the lens of fiction. I was intrigued by the genre-bending aspect of the book—it felt hard to categorize. It’s romance, thriller, and satire. Did you set out to write the book in a certain genre?

EG: We started off with a suspense in our minds with Ava. But as soon as we introduced Mat and STÄDA, it was really hard to keep it a straight suspense. And I think that’s where it just became too fun. When somebody is maybe halfway through the book, and they’re just like, “I kind of like Mat. I’m sorry to say it, but I really hope it works out between them. I love how he’s sort of softening her.” And I really like it when that happens. Because then I’m like, “Buckle up.” I hope that’s not a spoiler. But I think when that happens that it’s a success. I feel like we’ve done something right when people feel really invested in the romance part of this.

LB: There was a lot that we didn’t know about the story when we started writing. And so when we were writing the first part of the book, we really were in a world where we were showing an authentic kind of rom-com between two people. And then when we got to the second half of the book, that was when we kind of took it apart.

AL: I will admit, I was rooting for them at some point. And then you start noticing these sorts of small crimes, that you mentioned earlier, that start adding up. And you begin to think, Okay, something is not quite right here. And there are all these twists and turns as the plot unfolds, and we get to see more of these vibrant characters. And so I’m curious if you have a favorite character.

LB: My favorite character is Andie, Ava’s ex-girlfriend and fiancée, who died and who we see through flashbacks. And I know that she’s not really a full character. She’s like a nostalgic memory. But I would like to know her. And I like the part of Ava that she kind of pulls out and what she does for Ava in that way.

See what happens if you say yes. I think that that’s more interesting than saying no.

I was just kind of chuckling to myself, because I feel like Andie’s sort of the anti-Mat: She’s very legit. And I feel like maybe the reason that I say that she’s my favorite character now is because I need psychically to believe that. You know, it was really fun to write Mat, but I felt like I needed to decompress and write Andie for a little while too.

EG: I loved writing Andie too. But I think my favorite character is Jaime; he’s such a better friend to Ava than she is to him. I mean, she can be kind of infuriating sometimes. He is brilliant. He’s funny. And he’s a great friend to her even when she’s not a good friend to him. And he has good instincts. I also like that he’s a maximalist. I like that he sort of breaks out of that mold.

AL: One final question: Do you have any advice for writers who are thinking of maybe coauthoring a book?

EG: Make sure you like the person you’re coauthoring with. [Laughs.]

LB: Eve and I are good friends. And I also think that we have compatible egos. Maybe this is cheesy advice, but see what happens if you say yes. I think that that’s more interesting than saying no.