Novelist Emma Tourtelot ’95 Explores Mothers, Daughters, and Grief

The book: Kate’s seemingly perfect Hudson Valley life is thrown off course when her daughter’s best friend dies. It throws the family into immense grief, as her daughter falls deeper into a hole of despair, and the family is struggling to support her. Told through the voices of Kate and daughter Indie, No One you Know (She Writes Press) offers observations on life, death, friendship, parenthood, and more to uncover the rawness of tragedy and the ways it breaks people wide open. 

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The author: Emma Tourtelot earned her undergraduate degree in Germanic languages and literature from Princeton. She was a sex advice columnist for nearly two decades with columns for Glamour and The Guardian, among other publications. She has coauthored eight nonfiction books and No One you Know is her first novel. 

Excerpt:

Prologue

I pull onto the Taconic State Parkway, past the poorly situated wrong way sign that I know is meant for drivers coming from the opposite direction, but that stops my heart every time nonetheless. This is how it begins, I think. This is what it looks like when a mother loses her teen daughter. Not the way you lose a toddler, in a supermarket or at the county fair or some other place where an intercom announcement brings her back to you, the damage no more than a stranger’s disapproving glance — and, seriously, fuck them for that, like they never misplaced an inquisitive child? — but lost in the world.

I hate this road. The undivided parkway curves like a speedway, and I feel my car drift out of its too-narrow lane, guided by centrifugal force and a retaining wall so close I could run my fingers along it. The Taconic is famously “scenic,” which means an abundance of trees and shrubbery — hickory, oak, ash, mountain laurel, even rhododendron — for state troopers and deer to hide behind. The frequent yellow and black deer crossing signs along the route once suggested to me a sight either majestic or sweet: a buck leaping after a doe in mating season; a family of deer in single file, Bambi in the rear. Crepuscular, I remember Ethan telling me when we first moved upstate. The word for animals that are active at dawn and dusk. It seemed so magical back then, a creature that favored twilight, but this was before I learned how deer could emerge from the woods without warning, and how, when this happens, I shouldn’t swerve, because I might hit humans instead. I am supposed to drive straight into the deer, the country living

experts say, as if this were a completely reasonable suggestion.

It is near dusk now, prime deer time, and I am flying down the left lane, a steady 82 — 20 miles faster than the country living experts recommend. They don’t know everything, though. They don’t know where my daughter is.

I can’t travel this route without remembering the mother who drove her minivan the wrong way on the Taconic for two miles before crashing head-on into an SUV. She killed her two-year-old daughter and her three nieces, and everyone in the other car, too — a news story that was surprising only to people who had never driven the Taconic before.

Indie was two when it happened. The woman was going 85, I remember, and that, more than anything — more than the broken Absolut bottle on the driver’s side or the lack of car seats in the back of the minivan — convinced me she was at fault. Eighty-five on the Taconic in any direction, I could tell you how that story ends. A bad mother, everyone said, although this seemed a bit of a leap to me, all those hours and days measured against two wrong miles.

When I drove along Main Street on my way out of town today, businesses were already hanging flyers: Indie’s eighth-grade yearbook photo and the plea, have you seen this girl? I press the gas pedal, nudge the car to 85. I tell myself I am closing the distance between us.

Chapter 1 - Indie

Six months earlier

Maddy and I officially met in second grade, the first time we had the same classroom teacher.

“India’s a country,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “On the map.”

“It can be a person, too,” I said.

“Okay,” Maddy said. “Can I call you Indie?”

And that was that. We traded snack items and compared blisters from the monkey bars. We agreed on everything. When the new boy shared during Morning Meeting that he was 7 and a half but had a “Lego age” of 16, I knew exactly what Maddy was thinking. “You’re not supposed to say things like that,” she whispered to me. I put a hand over my mouth and whispered back, “It’s called bragging.” Best friends, we said, until we die or get married, because both felt like endings, and we didn’t know any grown-ups who had a BFF. Indivisible, I thought, each morning that I recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

When we started middle school, I stopped saying the Pledge and took a knee instead, and so Maddy did too, although she didn’t want her name on the editorial I wrote about this for the school newspaper. I’d offered her a joint byline the same way I used to share my snack every morning. She said my parents would get it, and she was right: Dad’s a high school social studies teacher who hasn’t said the Pledge in years, and he turned our Sunday brunch that weekend into a First Amendment workshop. Mom, meanwhile, asked if she could share my article with the 50,000 strangers who subscribe to her online thing, If You Lived Here. (No thanks.) It was like they were trying to one-up each other with their support, actually, because that’s my parents’ style: competitive meets petty. Com-petty-tive, Maddy would have said. She loved word mashups.

Maddy knew her own parents would be “disappointed” in her — a consequence that doesn’t seem like a big deal when you’re a kid, but then one day they say it and you think, roasted. She also suspected they’d make her explain the protest to her grandfather (Navy), uncle (Marines), and cousin (Army). I think she didn’t want to break her patriot dad’s heart over my pet cause — that she was waiting for something she truly believed in. Who knows what that something would have been? There is too much about Maddy I’ll never know.

Excerpted from No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot. Published by She Writes Press, an imprint of The Stable Book Group. Copyright ©2026 Emma Tourtelot. Reprinted with permission of the author. 

Reviews:

“A heartbreaking, keenly observed novel about love and loss and all the territories in between.” — Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather

“A smart and lovely novel about love, death, family, friendship and, importantly, Mid-Hudson Valley real estate. Grab a flat white and be transported by Tourtelot’s prose.” — Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends