‘Covid taught me that life is too short to delay joy’

Madeline Karp isn’t from the Big Apple but found her home in the city coding in the day and writing novels in her spare time, writes Holly Baxter

‘I’ll stay as long as it makes sense to stay,’ says Madeline (Madeline Karp)

Madeline Karp is your typical New Yorker, in that she isn’t from New York. She grew up in New Jersey then attended American University in Washington DC, before finishing up with graduate school at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Completing her tour of the eastern seaboard, she then landed her first job in Philadelphia, the city she considers her adoptive home.

Yet right now Madeline lives in Bed-Stuy, an up-and-coming neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York City, where she heads up a team of coders at a prestigious desk job and writes novels in her spare time. The novels are in the same genre, she says, as “the kind of movies that star Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, or, in 2021, Anna Kendrick and Rege-Jean Page”.

A Brit might recognise the genre in the Shopaholic series of books popular across the UK: “The Brits basically invented this genre,” Madeline reminds me during an informal Brooklyn writers’ group meeting. Staying true to New York “side hustle” form, Madeline has casually written two full-length, as-yet-unpublished novels in her spare time – and, despite having never picked up a single book in the genre she describes, I devoured one of them on a transatlantic flight. Her characters are extremely American – they go to wedding fairs, debate the best-quality coffee in their adopted cities, approach dating like a job interview process – and also unapologetically Jewish, getting annoyed at friends who flippantly wish them a merry Christmas instead of a happy Hanukkah, bonding with potential dates over what they got up to during their Birthright trips to Israel, and commenting that a potential suitor “still carries himself like he's an officer in the IDF”.