Emma Knight’s debut novel, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, isn’t actually all about octopuses. It’s a coming-of-age story disguised as a heist: Pen, a hyper-aware teenage girl, quietly slipping out of one identity and into another, cataloguing everything along the way. In Knight’s world, friendships tilt into intimacy, and guilt hangs in the corners of dorm rooms.

Set across castles in the curated chaos of adolescence, Knight builds a world where privilege is paper-thin and performance is second nature. It’s sharp, stylish, and surprisingly tender. Already confirmed for the screen (Variety has the receipts), the novel doesn’t reach for spectacle because it lingers in tension, subtext, and the rooms where feelings go unnamed. It’s not a debut that resolves. It’s one that quietly alters your emotional temperature.

I spoke to Knight from Lisbon, across the ocean from the city we both grew up in, about artistic permission, the power of female friendship, and why writing this novel meant returning not just to the story, but to herself.

Sinead McInerney: You capture such a familiar and specific East Coast texture — soft ambition stitched over chaos, like everyone’s playing at elegance while hiding the crime scene. How much of Pen’s emotional wiring comes from your own experience of growing up in that world?

Emma Knight: Ha! I love the way you put that. There is a certain amount of withholding and obscuring in my wiring. It occurred to me while writing this that repression is such an important ingredient in literature. If everyone were always able to communicate their feelings and desires clearly to one another, would there be novels? What would happen in them? Particularly English novels… I like exploring how manners, social conditioning, propriety, and concern for what people will think get in the way of honesty and real human connection. I think a lot of my favourite novels are at least in part about that.

S: The friendships—especially between Pen and Alice—feel conspiratorial, like a stylish escape plot. I know you went to the University of Edinburgh, where the book was based – was there someone in your life there who felt like your partner-in-crime?

E: Yes: Monica Ainley de La Villardière. She’s a fashion journalist based in Paris, and we’ve been best friends since we were tiny. We went to Edinburgh together and didn’t live apart until grad school. She’s not Alice—much to our professors’ disappointment—but our friendship helped me write the emotional precision of that bond.

S: You capture a kind of friendship that is like a shared emotional metabolism. There’s a line that really stayed with me: “Alice was glad to be near Pen, glad that her friend—who had a gift for absorbing other people’s pain—had put an ocean between herself and Ted and Anna…” It reminded me of the kind of bond I have with my childhood best friend: someone who doesn’t just listen, but holds your history without having to name it.

E: Thank you. That line came from a very deep place of recognition. I think some friendships become a kind of emotional vault. Alice is Pen’s witness, and their friendship with me is the central love story of the book. There’s something sacred about that kind of bond, especially when the world keeps insisting the only love that matters is romantic. We’re taught, through films and novels, that the defining relationship in our lives should be a romantic one. But when I look at women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, it’s often their friendships that remain. Those bonds are complex, chosen, and non-linear. They aren’t always tidy. But they’re deep. Non-monogamous but still devotional. And they ask you to keep showing up.

Emma Knight with Monica + classmates at the University of Edinburgh

S: The aristocratic universe you build — castles, boarding schools, ancestral sadness — feels both seductive and ready to crumble. Were you writing it as an insider, an outsider, or something in between?

E: Something in between. Ancestral sadness is probably close to universal. Coming from a sprawling, not very populous, mostly friendly country that few people elsewhere know all that much about is useful. Joan Didion talked about how she used to dress in a specific neutral uniform when she was on a reporting job, to avoid seeming to belong to one camp or another, and to avoid drawing attention to herself. Maybe being Canadian abroad is a bit like that. I think it’s easiest to write clearly about something as an observer. But of course, a little bit of first-hand knowledge helps, especially with a novel of manners. I think of Edith Wharton as one of the best examples of the insider-outsider. She is born into a certain world, and she understands its idiosyncrasies and can render it in lush detail, but she has not drunk the Kool-Aid. Her observations are mordant and devastating.

S: I loved how Pen became a quiet student with Christina in particular. She’s almost cataloguing the kinds of lives women are allowed to choose. Was Christina written as a model for Pen, or a warning?

E: Christina is a woman who knows who she is. She made her choices consciously and with conviction. She’s not trying to prove anything. She isn’t bitter. She’s not Pen’s inevitable future, but she’s a vision of what’s possible when a woman prioritises intimacy over performance, love over narrative. That kind of calm, that wholeness, draws Pen in. She senses that Christina is not apologizing for who she turned out to be.

S: Pen is torn between curating the perfect version of herself and setting a match to the whole thing. Did you ever imagine the novel as a kind of secret manual for girls who don’t want to pick a side?

E: I love this interpretation. I hope that’s what it is! At the start of the story, Pen is deeply concerned with what everyone else thinks of her, as so many girls are trained to be. Over the course of her first year away, she starts to trust herself a little more, and to give a bit less weight to the expectations and judgements of others and a bit more to what she herself thinks, feels, and desires.

S: All of these women carry the role of “mother” in completely different registers. You let them wear that word differently. How did becoming a mother yourself change the way you related to creativity, and your sense of permission to make a creative project of your own?

E: It changed everything. My second pregnancy was complicated, and it cracked something open in me. I had a toddler at home asking what kind of work I did, and then found myself alone in a hospital during COVID. That kind of stillness forces a certain honesty. It gave me urgency, clarity, and a kind of courage I hadn’t accessed before. I stopped waiting for the right moment or the perfect conditions. I gave myself permission to write the novel I had spent years convincing myself I was not ready to begin. When I began that process, it started to feel possible.

S: I am so glad you did! What did your writing process look like while juggling all of these other jobs, like Greenhouse Juice and motherhood? How did these fantastical places and characters come to you?

E: A mix of structure and surrender. Fergus came to me first. I would hear a name and jot it down instantly wherever I could. I wrote the draft longhand in a notebook because I knew I’d over-polish it if I typed it. I also spent time at a cabin in Algonquin Park with no electricity, so there was nothing to do but write, read, and be with my family.

S: Was it hard to finally share?

E: Terrifying. I didn’t show it to anyone for almost three years. I sent the first few chapters to Monica, and she read them live with me on the phone. That was so supportive. These characters felt real. I needed to protect them until I knew they were ready. 

S: They felt very real  – I want to talk about how you envision their personal style because you dreamt them up. If Pen, Alice, Fergus, Hugo, Charlie, and Jo were fashion houses, who would they be?

E:

Pen: Prada, Jil Sander, The Row. Maybe vintage Hermès, though that might be more Christina.
Alice: Early 2000s Dior, The Row, Celine, and chaotic, specific thrift finds.
Fergus: Vivienne Westwood.
Sasha: 2006 Burberry menswear campaigns.
Charlie: Paul Smith for now; sharply tailored once he’s successful.
Hugo: Barbour. All nautical.

Jo: Dries Van Noten meets McQueen. Floral but steely.

S: And if this story had a runway show or soundtrack?

E: Prada SS25. Patent loafers, jodhpurs, metallic skirts, vivid collars. The eerie, swelling music. That sense of youth, brave but blurred. Dressed up but not yet able to see what’s ahead.

S: The series has been confirmed – Who would your dream cast be right now?

E: I’m not great at casting! But my sister Molly Knight is a casting director, and she suggested Sadie Sink for Pen, which feels perfect. She has that combination of interiority and edge. Felix Mallard as Sasha makes sense. I also love Saoirse Ronan in everything. I don’t even know who she’d play.

S: Are you working on something new?

E: I am. It’s different in setting, but emotionally related. The characters are in their thirties now, and the story takes place mostly in Brooklyn. It moves between their youth and present lives. One woman has just experienced a very public “want explosion.” The other has buried her desires for years and begins to question everything through her sister-in-law’s unraveling. It’s about friendship, desire, and what happens when you stop naming what you want.

S: Last thing you Googled in a panic?

E: Melissa Clark’s lemon olive oil ricotta pancake recipe—for my daughter’s school breakfast. Allergen form included.

S: First album you ever cried to?

E: Not the first, but most tears? White Ladder by David Gray.

S: Best city to disappear into and reinvent yourself?

E: Paris. Always Paris.

S: Animal you’d reincarnate as (besides an octopus)?

E: A red-breasted robin. My daughter’s obsessed with them right now.

S: Fictional character you secretly think you could outsmart?

E: Emma Woodhouse. Easily.

You can follow Emma Knight and find the book officially online and out across UK stores.