Trust and Safety by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
Writing duo Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman — whose hilarious rom-com and office satire, The Very Nice Box, debuted to rave reviews — have returned with a provocative sophomore novel that exceeds all expectations. Trust and Safety is a read-in-one-sitting exploration of contemporary life, technology and social media, queerness, belonging and conformity.
Chasing Dreams of Analog Life
Rosie is tired of her life in NYC, canvassing for a gay rights organization while longing for the kind of authentic, natural, off-the-grid life advertised to her online — a life she can’t just click to purchase. Or can she?
Her new husband, Jordan, is a tech bro whose company launched the Family Friend, a home assistant AI, like Siri or Alexa. The smart tech interrupts conversations to build grocery lists and make suggestions, overhearing, cataloging and understanding a household’s most intimate moments.
In an interview with BookTrib, the co-authors talked about the way technology, particularly the Family Friend, plays a role in the novel, and what inspired it.
Years ago, Laura Blackett — who currently works in tech — and Eve Gleichman, along with Eve’s partner, “rented an Airbnb upstate for a weekend…This was a house that wanted to be talked to: you would say Turn off the lights and the lights would go off. You could tell the fireplace to turn on or off, the shades to lower. All of this seemed more complicated — and creepier — than flipping a light switch.
“Then one night, the water supply cut out. We saw no evidence of the hosts but in the morning, several aesthetically pleasing jugs of water suddenly appeared on the doorstep, as if delivered by a drone. We found the whole experience offputting and funny — and I think at that point we knew we wanted to write a novel that included sinister smart-tech,” recalls Eve.
Cast of Handy, Queer Creatives
When tech-obsessed Jordan loses his job — over a lawsuit involving the Family Friend overhearing and repeating words it probably shouldn’t be saying — he and Rosie have no choice but to dive headfirst into life off the grid. After all, they’ve poured their savings into a massive bidding war to purchase a historic farmhouse upstate.
Forced to rent out the outbuilding of their dilapidated new home for some extra cash, they are relieved to learn their renters, a handy queer couple named Dylan and Lark, are eager to chip in with the repairs.
“I lived in an old house full of queer people who were creative in different ways,” shares Laura Blackett. “There was a seamstress, a textile designer, and a mycologist who was passionate about land stewardship. I would look out the window and see them tapping Maple trees to make their own syrup, and they would often come home with baskets of foraged mushrooms. Each of us ended up in the house because we had matched with the homeowner on Tinder.
“I was fascinated by them; it felt good to be around them and to feel like I was participating in their lifestyle, even though I wasn’t fully. I was writing, so in a way I fit with the creative bunch, but I was also working a remote tech job and had brought the city upstate with me. I felt like I straddled two worlds, and that tension and the longing to leave it all behind but not knowing how, is definitely written into the novel.”
This inspired the group of queer creatives in Trust and Safety, who lead similar hands-on lives. Naturally, readers won’t be able to escape this book without a crush on at least one of the characters — and odds are, it’ll be Dylan.
“Laura had turned me on to a woodworker on Instagram whose furniture — and life, honestly — enraptured me. He and his wife seemed to live a perfectly analog life; hand-built furniture, a timber-framed chicken coop, a hand-painted house, carved spoons, no plastic anywhere to be seen. I was very seduced by this lifestyle and I loved the idea of a romantic lead in the book having all these qualities. So that is partly how Dylan came to be. We also made her a mushroom expert with construction expertise,” says Eve.
“We wanted her to be slow-moving and creative. We also had to make her a little elusive, because all crushes to some degree are just figments of the imagination,” adds Laura.
Dylan is good-looking, charming, charismatic, and she catches Rosie’s eye immediately — stirring a crush that leads Rosie to look at her marriage with Jordan with new eyes, while Jordan grows suspicious and jealous of her infatuation with their neighbor.
Belonging, Self-Discovery and Conformity
Out in the country, Rosie steals moments away from Jordan to immerse herself in these new friendships, and she gets to be someone else: herself. It’s a glimpse of a life that could have been, something she almost had once, during a summer farming with a woman in the Italian Alps.
Rosie struggles to fit in among the group of confident queer people, making it clear how much of an outsider she is. She tries to figure herself out, now that she’s had a chance to step away from her dull city life.
“…Getting to sidestep the rules of the dominant culture, even in small ways, can make room for personal growth. [It] makes me think about that expression ‘wherever you go, there you are.’ Rosie is able to connect with her queerness in upstate New York, but she’s not able to escape the parts of her personality that hold her back, mainly her ambivalence,” says Laura.
Her husband Jordan often serves as a device for poking fun at contemporary fear of the “gay agenda”. Are the queer neighbors seducing his wife into becoming one of them?
“Jordan is a guy for whom American life is designed. He’s commercially attractive, straight, white, relatively wealthy, and he wants a ‘traditional’ family. The patriarchal structure works out well for him. And he never really hides those desires,” Eve notes.
Rosie herself shares similarities with Jordan, and part of her challenge is learning to break free from the life she’s been conditioned into. Laura explains: “Rosie sometimes thinks the thing that Jordan says out loud and then punishes him for having said it. It was fun to give these characters a shared perspective but different levels of honesty with themselves about some things — like confusion about some of the queer people’s relationships or appearances.”
Must-Read New Release for Pride Month
What starts with Schitt’s Creek-level humor as wealthy city people struggle to fit in with farmers and foragers, soon becomes a touching story of Rosie’s self-discovery, before turning into an altogether frightening reminder of how dangerous patriarchy and heteronormativity can be to those of us trying to break free from conformity — and what we’re required to compromise to live comfortably.
The ending felt perfect and inevitable, though Eve says they “came to understand the ending only while writing the book, maybe midway through.”
“I think our ideas about the ending changed in big and small ways up until the very last minute. I felt like we were taking a risk with it, which was exciting,” says Laura.
Trust and Safety might not have been any easier to write than the duo’s first novel, but has proven to be worth the revisions and rewrites it took to get to this final version. I trust that whatever Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman have next in store will be just as touching, satirical, humorous and effortlessly, fantastically queer.
Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett are writing partners in Brooklyn. They met ten years ago as neighbors in the same apartment building, and soon after began collaborating on their debut novel, The Very Nice Box, which became a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an Apple Book of the Month.
Trust & Safety (Dutton, May 2024) is their new novel. Their debut novel, The Very Nice Box (Mariner, 2021), is available here.
(Photo Credit: Bowen Fernie)
