Stephanie Shaw

Stephanie Shaw is an old friend of Emma Morley who re-enters her life at two consequential moments: when Emma needs a route into publishing, and later, when their friendship has acquired the practical rhythms of adult domestic life. Her polished professional manner contrasts with the Goth student Emma remembers, while her willingness to help turns an old connection into a real, if imperfect, opportunity for Emma’s writing.

Identity and Introduction

Stephanie Shaw and Emma Morley once sat next to each other in university tutorials. By the time they meet again, Stephanie has changed markedly in appearance and bearing: she is smartly dressed in a crisp white blouse and a fitted black skirt, with a neat bob, and carries herself with professional confidence. Emma recalls the sullen Goth of their student days and is surprised to feel intimidated by the woman she now sees. The change is conveyed through Emma’s perspective, which makes Stephanie’s composure seem almost like a performance of office life: Emma privately feels as though the two of them are playing at being in an office.

Their reunion takes place in a lift and then in a modern publishing workplace on the thirtieth floor, whose smoked-glass windows look across the Thames and Lambeth. The setting helps mark the difference between their shared past and Stephanie’s present position. Emma had imagined publishers as old-fashioned houses and ageing secretaries; Stephanie instead leads her through a sleek, open-plan office, where stacks of books are the one detail that reassures the nervous visitor. Stephanie’s professional ease is not simply a matter of appearance: she has enough standing in the publishing world to put Emma’s work before someone who has agreed to see her.

Helping Emma Find a Publisher

Stephanie’s most important early action is to help Emma seek publication for a school story aimed at older children. The book is a romance set in a comprehensive school in Leeds, built around a school production of Oliver! and narrated by Julie Criscoll, a mouthy, irresponsible girl playing the Artful Dodger. Its illustrations, scratchy doodles, caricatures and sarcastic speech bubbles give the manuscript the look of a teenage diary. Stephanie has read enough to believe in the writing and tells Emma that she would not have passed on rubbish; she also makes clear that the publisher’s interest is not a guarantee that the whole manuscript has been read.

The introduction matters because Emma has already sent out the first twenty thousand words and accumulated a rejection from every publisher she approached. She regards the form letters as evidence that the manuscript may not even have been read closely, but she still believes this is the first of her abandoned projects she has not wanted to throw across the room. Although Emma has influential contacts from college, she has privately resisted asking them for favours, finding the prospect uncomfortably like asking a friend for money. After the rejections mount and her mother reminds her that time is passing, she breaks that self-imposed rule and calls Stephanie. They have not spoken for three years, but they still like one another; after catching up, Emma asks her to read chapters and an outline for the teenage book about a school musical. Stephanie’s help therefore begins with an old friendship, not a professional cold approach.

The Meeting and Its Disappointment

Stephanie prepares Emma for the publisher meeting by urging her not to be intimidated. Emma insists that she has no reason to be, but the long lift ride gives the lie to that confidence: beside Stephanie’s neat, assured manner, Emma feels out of place and suppresses an urge to giggle. Her anxiety is also physical and immediate. She has drunk too much coffee, feels shaky and sick, and has taken the day off from school by claiming gastric flu, despite a vital staff meeting before the holidays.

The visit ends with Emma walking towards the lifts hot-eyed and embarrassed, while Stephanie and Marsha follow behind her. Colleagues look up from their cubicles as the three pass. Marsha apologizes that someone was supposed to call and cancel, and Emma tells her it is not her fault. The precise failure is not explained, so the episode does not establish that Stephanie caused it; what it does show is that her introduction has not delivered the straightforward professional encounter Emma hoped for. Stephanie remains physically beside Emma as she leaves, but the scene’s procession through the office exposes how vulnerable Emma feels after bringing her ambitions into a public workplace.

Friendship in Adult Life

Stephanie appears again in Emma’s later domestic world. At Stephanie’s home in Whitechapel, Emma has expected a dinner party, but Stephanie and Adam are too exhausted to cook. Instead, they sit together watching Big Brother and talking while Stephanie uses a top-of-the-range Finnish breast pump beneath her T-shirt. Its whirring and chugging make the living room feel more like a milking shed than a party. The machinery is an unsentimental detail of parenthood, and its presence makes clear how far the friends’ lives have moved from their student days.

Emma is Stephanie’s child’s godmother, and the evening becomes, in Emma’s rueful formulation, another big night in the life of a godmother. Stephanie’s exhaustion and the abandoned dinner plans are not presented as a dramatic rupture; they are the conditions under which the friendship now takes place. Emma recognizes that conversations about babies have become a recurring feature of her social life. She can find them funny, touching and intriguing, and she takes joy in other people’s happiness, even as she no longer wants all the conversations that come with it. Through Stephanie, the book places Emma’s continuing affection for a friend beside the subtle distance created by differing stages of life. Stephanie remains present in both Emma’s creative hopes and her ordinary social world, though neither encounter turns friendship into an uncomplicated solution.