‘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 Staying true to New York “side hustle” form, Madeline has casually written two full-length, as-yet-unpublished novels in her spare time – and, despite having never picked up a single book in the genre she describes, I devoured one of them on a transatlantic flight.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”.

One of Madeline’s novels concerns a long-suffering thirtysomething whose sister is getting married and making a big deal about every minute detail. Is this art imitating life, I ask, considering Madeline’s own sister is currently planning a wedding? “Not exactly,” she says, “but my books definitely do have elements of truth to them.” How about the impossibly high standards the protagonist holds potential boyfriends to, I ask? She admits to phone-screening potential dates found on apps before committing to an entire coffee or beer: “I don’t like to waste my time.” If a man seems too unsuited to her personally but otherwise a good catch, she’s been known to refer them on to friends: “I told a guy last week, who was still living in California and only thinking of moving to New York, that he’d be better suited speaking to my friend who’s based in LA.”

We finish up an interview at Madeline’s kitchen table, where her two kittens – William and Westley, named after the male protagonist and the writer of one of her favourite movies, The Princess Bride – clamber over me to try and get to the matzo ball soup and latkes with sour cream and applesauce she’s put together for Hanukkah. A crayon-themed menorah burns multicoloured candles on the side (“My family says it’s juvenile, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t have fun with it.”) She’s wearing a sweater that features a cat wearing a kippah and the words “Happy Hanukkat!”

Does she see herself staying in New York long-term? She thinks for all of five seconds, then offers up a classically pragmatic answer: “I’ll stay as long as it makes sense to stay here. When it stops feeling fun or there’s another opportunity that makes more sense for me to grow personally or professionally, then I’ll go.”

“Covid taught me that life is too short to delay joy, or to stick to an arbitrary timeline,” she continues, and nods towards the cavorting cats. “That’s why I got those two, months before I had planned. Why deny myself the happiness?”