Emma Brodie is the first Vineyard author, to the best of my knowledge, to get the endorsements of both Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club and Jenna Bush Hager. Her new page-turner of a novel, “Into the Blue: A Love Story,” was published by Thousand Voices, the imprint Hager launched in 2025, and was chosen as Reese’s April Book Club Pick. In Vineyard parlance, this kind of endorsement is as thrilling as the SSA unexpectedly calling and saying, “You’re such a fabulous driver that we’ve decided you’ll be able to get ferry reservations on any ferry you’d like for the rest of your life.”
Actress Reese Witherspoon started her book club in 2017. It has a large fan base of enthusiastic readers, and each month it champions a book written by a woman. Today, in my inbox, for example, there was an email from Reese’s book club extolling, “We’re swooning over the romance of it all, thinking big thoughts about destiny versus choice, and loving the importance that author Emma Brodie gives to fandom (and shippers!) in the novel.” Not surprisingly, this kind of exuberant and high-profile recommendation has helped propel the book onto the New York Times bestseller list.
In a recent email exchange with Brodie, who has been living on the Vineyard year-round for the past five years, I asked her about getting word that “Into the Blue” was a Reese Book Club pick. “I found out in January, and was utterly stupefied,” she wrote. “My reaction was disbelief and absolute delight. It’s such a huge honor.”
“Into the Blue” is a story of young love and unexplained loss; it’s a story of passion, ambition, lust, stepping out of your comfort zone, and making and dealing with untenable decisions. The novel spans the years 2000 to 2015. It’s difficult to figure out how much to say about a book like “Into the Blue” without giving too much away, but in brief, AJ Graves, called “Age” by friends and family, is a high school student with dreams of becoming a comedy writer when she meets Noah Drew, the scion of a family of celebrated actors. Noah graduated from the same high school AJ attends, and left college to return home because his mother is ill. The two meet when he gets a job at a video store where AJ works.
The world of improv (improvisational acting) plays an important aspect of the novel, bringing the characters together as actors improvising scene work while working out the tensions, sexual and otherwise, in their relationship. Noah’s aunt Eudora is an actress who has garnered “multiple Tony awards, an Emmy, and an Oscar nomination,” and according to her nephew, “never does anything that’s not in her own self-interest.” Eudora cajoles AJ and Noah into working on a project with her, and she schools them in the craft of improv, which we find out is much more than trying to come up with a clever retort to an unexpected situation. Eudora’s husband Ezell, who died before he finished writing what would have been his final play, had previously written a book titled “Laughter & Death: A Handbook for Improvisation,” which offers wise lessons for improv, and life. Lessons such as, “All people play games. They’re given to us by parents, teachers, and society at large, the scripts written long in advance. Here’s what they’ll never tell you; you don’t have to play.”
AJ and Noah appear to be falling for each other when Noah takes off without a word, leaving AJ feeling crushed, confused, and furious. The two reconnect seven years later when they are both hired to act in a reality show that is an intergalactic, improv-based TV series. That’s as much as I’m going to reveal about the plot of the novel because I don’t want to start issuing spoiler alerts.
I asked Brodie about her own experiences with improv. “I did improv at UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade, the improv and sketch comedy group whose members have included Amy Poehler and Kate McKinnon] between 2012 and 2015, and when I was trying to figure out the best way to dramatize AJ and Noah’s cosmic connection, I couldn’t think of a more appropriate medium for it,” she responded.
“Into the Blue” is Brodie’s second novel. Her debut was “Songs in Ursa Major,” which was published in 2022. She said she wrote the first draft of “Into the Blue” during the summer and fall of 2023, and worked on revisions for the following two years. It’s an impressive timeline, given how seamlessly the book’s various threads are woven together and how authentically she was able to capture the raw emotion of insistent young love, not to mention that she also has a day job, working as an editor for publisher Clarkson Potter.
Emma Brodie will be speaking with Jenna Bush Hager on June 29 at 7 pm at the Old Whaling Church. “Into the Blue” is available at Bunch of Grapes and Edgartown Books.