Cecelia Rabess previously worked as a data scientist at Google and as an associate at Goldman Sachs. Her nonfiction has been featured in McSweeneys, FiveThirtyEight, Fast Company and FlowingData, among other places. Everything’s Fine is her debut novel.
Katherine and Cecelia discuss:
- Early writing life
- Donald Trump is Destroying My Marriage (article in NY Magazine)
- Writing an ‘opposites attract’ love story – the challenge of the ‘attract’ part
- Working to humanise Josh
- Wringing out your prose, making it as clean as possible
- How she went about getting an agent
- Having your book be at the centre of a Tiktok controversy and her theories on why this happened
- Writing infographs for McSweeneys
Cecelia’s writing advice: It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you have to finish. No one has ever published an unpublished manuscript.
Debut book recommendation: Shark Heart by Emily Habeck
The First Time podcast 