“Daytime Moon,” coming May 2026
Popsugar: Why are books important to you? What role does reading play in your life?
Kerri Schlottman: Reading books calms my brain down. I love any kind of good storytelling, but books do something different than films or shows for me — I can sink into them in a different kind of way.
PS: Why is “Daytime Moon” perfect for this moment in history that we’re living through?
KS: I wrote “Daytime Moon” to explore this feeling about environmental collapse and climate change that I’ve had for a long time now kind of a combination of nostalgia and homesickness for earth. Lately, as I talk to more people about this, I hear similar sentiments. I think we’re all trying to navigate how to live in a place, our home, that’s falling apart around us. I also think we embody it without even knowing that we are and so it’s not just that we’re watching it happening, we’re feeling it on a level that we don’t yet have language to describe. I hope the book will help us find some unity in that and maybe a way of collectively articulating it.
PS: What’s something that surprised you during the writing process?
KS: So, I started writing the book in 2019 and I was actively seeking out news stories about ecological collapse, which I immediately realized are wholly underreported by mainstream media. That was my first surprise, just how prevalent these issues are and how much we are not hearing about them unless we go searching. More recently, once the book was acquired, I had a chance to do some revisions and I wanted to update the timeline some. Sadly (and perhaps not surprisingly), I found that every instance of ecological collapse or environmental damage that I cited from 2019 was repeating; for example, just the other day, I found an almost exact headline about record numbers of Pacific gray whales dying that had been reported in 2019.
PS: Are there any lessons about family, friendship, community, connection, and self-discovery that you hope readers of “Daytime Moon” take away?
KS: I hope “Daytime Moon” inspires a sense of unity and connection and the feeling that we’re in this together — whatever this means to you. And we’re in it with the environment around us, with the birds and the whales and the trees and the ocean and the mountains and all of it. We are one family and it may be a huge, dysfunctional one, but if we could find a way to care for each other and for earth like we would anything else we love (our friends, our parents, our siblings, our kids, our pets), we could really heal so much.
Book blurb: “A novel about a young woman, Isa, whose powerful visions of the sister she lost long ago and the mother she never got to meet, send her on a road trip up and down the California coast to piece together the family she never knew she had. […] Ultimately, it asks: how can women heal, when the world around us is in collapse?”
Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she’s covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.
