How to Fall in Love Over Text
It’s a coincidence that Penny, the heroine of Mary H.K. Choi’s young-adult novel Emergency Contact, happens to be passing by as Sam, her local barista, is having his first panic attack. She gives him a ride, and her number, and tells him to text her when he gets home. He jokes that she’s his “emergency contact.”
Even though their relationship starts with an actual emergency, as the book progresses, being emergency contacts starts to mean that they are each other’s default sounding board for the random stream-of-consciousness thoughts that cry out to be shared, even though they don’t need to be. Sam texts Penny asking for fashion advice; Penny texts Sam about how much she hates maraschino cherries. For the bulk of the book, Penny and Sam are not physically present with each other, but their relationship is built with the bricks of life’s minutiae, constructed line by line within the confines of their phones.
Emergency Contact is a book about how relationships that begin as a collection of pixels can become capital-R Real—in the Velveteen Rabbit sense. It’s also about the vague and slippery rules of communication in the digital age that both help and hurt those relationships. I spoke with Choi—a journalist who’s written for a variety of outlets (including The Atlantic)—about what those rules are, how we pretend to know them when we really don’t, and how she managed to write texts for a pair of young adults without sounding like an out-of-touch old person.
reminded me of the article you did in 2016 where you around the country to learn
