It's very early in the rocket ride that will apparently be Emily Layden's career as a novelist, but she's already got the wholeinterview thing figured out. She's decided on the optimally comfortable chair for talking on the phone with reporters, and if the conversation takes place before noon, she drinks hot tea. If it happens after lunch, she shifts to sports drinks.

As for any wine and cheese receptions she might be missing out on as she undertakes her first author tour virtually, that's not a big deal.

"I actually find the idea of parties in my honor a nightmare scenario," she laughs. "I understand those receptions fit a lot of author profiles, and I'd probably get used to them. Right now, though, doing book events this way means I don't have to conquer some of the social anxiety."

Based on the advance reception for Layden's debut novel, "All Girls," the author had best get used to the attention. The book, a coming-of-age ensemble story set at Atwater, a fictitious and prestigious female prep school in Connecticut, centers around reactions to a late-breaking accusation by a long-ago student that she was raped by an unidentified faculty member a man supposedly still teaching at the institution.

Layden will discuss "All Girls" Thursday on the February episode of our virtual "Read of the Day" Book Club sponsored by The Day in partnership with Bank Square Books. Day reporter Julia Bergman will interview Layden for the event.

The author, 32, is a graduate of Stanford and, over the past six years, taught at three different female boarding schools providing experience and context for "All Girls." Layden majored in American studies at Stanford, studied creative writing, and comes from a family of writers; her father, Joe Layden, is a successful ghostwriter of celebrity biographies.

Quick success

Emily Layden, speaking by phone last week from her home in upstate New York in anticipation of her "Read of The Day" appearance, says she's known for years she wanted to write fiction.

She also knew the long odds facing anyone who wants a career as a novelist, and was prepared for the typical rough journey of rejection and setbacks as she hoped to find, first, an agent and then possibly a publisher.

What Layden didn't count on was quick success. But she'd barely submitted "All Girls" originally titled "Legacy" to agents when she was offered representation by literary agent Lisa Grubka of Fletcher & Co.In turn, St. Martin's Press offered a six-figure advance for the book less than 24 hours after receiving the manuscript.

"Certainly, the manner in which my book was sold not just the advance but the rapidity of the deal is not something any writer dares hope for," says Layden, who can now focus exclusively on writing. "I am extremely grateful for St. Martin's investment in me and my work, but it did create a different set of expectations than I'd expected. I'm more than happy to have the chance to spend my life writing, but it's sudden and different."

Ensemble cast

While the rape allegation and the identity of the accused faculty member certainly provide a "mystery" element to "All Girls," the novel is not structured like a conventional thriller. Covering one year at Atwater, the novel features an ensemble cast with each chapter taking the point of view of a different student. Against beautifully and wistfully detailed campus milestones from initiation and fall festivals to commencement and graduation the young women each must navigate the school year's academics and social interactions through the prisms of their own anxieties and desires. These developments are then skewed by the rumors about the faculty rapist and the administration's efforts to placate students and parents against the increasing belief that some sort of cover up is taking place.

If "All Girls" seems custom-crafted for our times, particularly with the #MeToo movement, Layden says the issues are important but coincidental.

"I actually did not set out to write about #MeToo," she says, "but rather the institutional mindset at a boarding school and the matter of transparency ... about the capacity of girls to speak their minds in circumstances that don't welcome that sort of initiative. And the mystery that drives the book is a lens through which we can see how all this happens at a place like Atwater."

Layden does amasterful job of establishing a cast of individuals whose experiences and day-to-day vignettes establish a broad and representative range of student types against which the plot and narrative tension develop. There's distance-running freshwoman Macy, who has major anxiety issues; Olivia, the universally adored all-everything senior, and her girlfriend, swimming star Emma. Chloe is plenty popular but hides an embarrassingsecret. And Louisa, the editor of the school newspaper, can't explain to the Head of School why a forbidden issue of the paper suddenly appeared online and triggeredtumultuous results.

Smooth assurance

If it seems risky to allot just one chapter to each character, rest assured Layden writeswith smooth assuranceand has selected her protagonists in a way that allows each one's interactions with others to continue the threads of the plot. In fact, the ensemble cast was precisely what Layden wanted to explore.

"The book really isn't about solving a mystery or the legacy of the school," she explains. "What it IS about are the ripples that spread out through the story and how each individual girl is processing them within developments in her own life. I never lost sight of wanting to write something that was about the girls."

Layden is asked if, in that writerly fashion, any of the characters surprised her developmentally as she worked through the drafts of the manuscript.

"Over the course of the book, these girls became as real to me as family members. In that sense just as with real friends or family sometimes they surprised me," Layden says. "At the same time, they do so in a way that would be consistent with human behavior from someone you know really well."

In that sense, the flow of the plot was never threatened when a character naturally evolved in a way the author didn't originally anticipate. "Fortunately, I was able to write the book I wanted, with a chorus of voices rather than just one protagonist. I will say that my favorite of the characters changed over the course of the book, but I love them all."

Oh, and as for the "whodunnit" aspect of the alleged rapist, Layden laughs and says, "I did know how it would turn out, but I'm laughing because that's been a pretty rare experience for me. This is my first novel, but all the stuff I wrote as an undergraduate, I started without knowing where the story was going. I'd just take off and see what happened. Because of the structure of 'All Girls,' I needed to have a sense of story and signposts along the way. So it worked out. I think that's probably the best way to do it."

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Read of The Day author Emily Layden talks 'All Girls' Thursday - theday.com