Emma Roberts Wants You to Join Her Book Club
Just as some of us might freak out if we saw Emma Roberts on the street, Roberts has her own starstruck moments. When the Scream Queens actress went to a bookstore event where writer Ariel Levy was talking about her recent memoir The Rules Do Not Apply, she and a friend were a little overcome. "We were like, 'Do you think she'd talk to us after?'" Roberts recounts over the phone. "And she said yes, and that was really nice. Oh my god, I love her."
If you haven't guessed already, Roberts loves books and the people who write them. (When she was reading Levy's book, by the way, she skipped drinks with her friends so she could finish it.) That's why she and her friend Karah Preiss started Belletrist, a book club any avid reader can sign up for at the website or keep tabs on via Instagram. We talked to Roberts about her love of books, how she scored an exclusive interview with legendary author Joan Didion, and whether she thinks of herself as a writer as well as an actress.
Why did you want to start a book club, and where did the name come from?
One of my best friends is named Karah Preiss. We met through mutual friends eight or nine years ago. As we all started hanging out more, the two of us would end up branching off and talking about books. We started recommending books to each other-her especially for me, she read more than I did. Every book she would recommend would become a new favorite book. Years and years ago we wanted to start a Tumblr but we never did.
It's just always been something that's been in the back of our minds because we love to read, and everybody loves to read more than people think. I started posting books on my Instagram and one day I was like, We should really do this for real. So Belletrist came to exist. It went through many different names. We went through about ten, and all of them were taken for different reasons. Belletrist we came up with because it's someone who writes love letters, and it's an old, old word with many meanings. We just loved the sound of it-it was feminine, but at the same time, I'd never heard it before.
The first book is Joan Didion's 'South and West.' How will you and Karah pick the books? Is it just books you love?
The most important thing for us is to keep it organic, and to always pick books that we love and believe people would want to read, instead of picking books based on what's going to be big or on-topic. Of course, we also want to pick those books. But it always has to be from a place of loving a book or loving an author. We're going to feature new authors as well, because there's so many people that write amazing books. So to us it's really about spotlighting people that excite us, and that could be someone as famous and prolific as Joan Didion or it could be someone who has never written a book before.
You wrote a beautiful essay for the website about Joan Didion. And you did an exclusive interview with her. How did that come about?
I got the call that she agreed to do the interview and I literally got onto my knees and kissed the road. And then of course the panic set in of, What am I gonna ask her? I kept joking, 'Now I don't even want it because I'm too scared.' [laughs] Obviously joking. So Karah and I went through the book and came up with the questions. Eventually we were like, we need to stop going back and changing little tiny words because we're nervous. So we sent them into the ether and anxiously awaited Joan's reply for about a week.
We were so grateful that she agreed to do it, because she didn't really give any other interviews for this book. When I asked them to get ahold of her for this, everybody was like, 'I don't know…maybe let's come up with a different book or a different writer. Joan seems kind of like a long shot.' We were all taken by surprise. I think that's the thing we love about Joan. She's so mysterious and you never really know what she's going to do.
In your interview with Joan, you talked about your own thoughts and fears about writing. Do you think of yourself as a writer? Is that something you want to do more of?
Joan Didion actually says that there are certain children that can't help but keep a notebook and obsessively write in it. And I was that child. So I'm constantly writing, and I would love to write a book of essays or short stories. I love Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion. And then Chloe Caldwell, I loved her essays. I think that would be really interesting to get to do. But I just want to make sure that I'm saying what I want to say. Being an actress, it's hard to publish things without people thinking everything is autobiographical. And so I want to decide what I want to share.
Books are an incredible way to live another life and see another world. That's something actors do in their work, too. Do books feed into your work that way?
Oh, definitely. I always pick out a bookshelf for every character I play. I get around three or five books to have with me while I'm playing a character, because you have so much downtime on set. I pick books based on what the mood is so that I can stay in that. When I was doing American Horror Story, I was reading a lot of Stephen King and became obsessed with The Shining. And then I also read Shutter Island. Books are a really fun way to get yourself in a certain mindset or mood as an actress. Also, the way people tell a story is so revealing and I think it's important as an actress to see all the different ways people can unravel a story, and introduce the characters and the way people speak.
So, how will Belletrist work? Will there be a new book every month?
Every month, we want it to be a surprise of what exactly the material is gonna be. Of course, we'll have the book and we'll have an interaction of sorts with the author. But sometimes that'll be a video, sometimes that'll be an interview, or something completely different. There's all these people that we want to collaborate with. We also want to have real conversations so there will be opportunities to meet up with us and really talk about the book in interesting settings. We want to keep every month exciting.
Okay, a couple of quick ones. What's your desert island book?
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. The stories in there on John Wayne and Joan Baez are two of my favorite stories. When I'm ever lonely in a new city working, I'll read those stories out loud in the bathtub to myself. [laughs]
What's the book you think you've read the most times?
Probably Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's so much more heartbreaking than the movie, and dark. It's darkly glamorous, which I absolutely love.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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