Seduction Theory: A Novel by Emily Adrian
Little Brown and Company
Published August 12, 2025
She had me at the force-fed kale: “At the creative writing department’s end-of-year party, Ethan’s secretary fed him kale with her fingers” reads the first line of Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian. Equal parts coming-of-age novel, writing manual, and a pointed skewering of campus politics and literary ambition, Adrian's witty and compelling sixth novel ultimately raises as many questions as it answers.
The book masquerades as the final MFA thesis of Creative Writing candidate Roberta (Robbie) Green, and opens at a university party where she watches Ethan, a mid-career, moderately successful writing professor, engaging in a flirtation with his department’s administrative assistant, Abigail. Ethan is married to Simone, a professor, accomplished scholar, and celebrated memoirist. Her beauty is the stuff of campus legend. From this jumping-off point, Seduction Theory veers into trysts both emotional and physical, eventually descending into revenge porn, all filtered through the perspective of someone young, impressionable, and untested.
Although Ethan is clearly enthralled by his brilliant wife, he begins an affair with Abigail. From the outset, Robbie’s glowing descriptions of Simone suggest she too has fallen under Simone’s spell, while poor Abigail is painted in cringe-worthy detail. Why Ethan would choose a lover described as having “knees like the wrinkled face of a newborn” or who “could have been beautiful if there had been someone there to let her nap every minute of her life” remains baffling...until he confesses to a loneliness so acute he simply hoped someone might notice it. Abigail, as it turns out, does.
It is not until the second chapter that we see how fully Robbie inserts herself into the story and how deeply infatuated she is with Simone. As she recounts a summer filled with intrigue and lust, it becomes clear she is not a reliable narrator. Robbie’s hero worship, vulnerability, and “pick me” energy drive the narrative forward. She takes every piece of writing advice Simone offers to the extreme. When told to anchor every party scene with a sound, a smell, and a song, Robbie hilariously applies this technique until it becomes an exhausting structural tic. Scenes become fantastical, then abruptly grounded and rewritten in a self-aware spiral of narrative recursion.
As Ethan and Abigail’s physical affair progresses, Simone and Robbie embark on an emotional one. Robbie, initially brimming with affection and hope, soon experiences the emotions of a lover scorned, or at least unrequited. Psychologically frayed and far too close to her subjects, she begins to dismantle them. Descriptions shift to match her impulsive turns of heart and youthful ambition. As these desires fragment the plot, the narrative becomes a slippery exercise in truth-telling, an emotional “choose your own adventure” as imagined by a deeply unreliable mind. Scenes are routinely interrupted and rewritten to better serve Robbie’s self-image.
At times, this forward-and-backward dance of character and event can be confusing and mildly irritating. So much is brought into question that readers are continually reminded they are supposedly reading the thesis of a young MFA student. Robbie assigns interior thoughts to her characters with no real insight and seems uninterested in maintaining any objectivity.
Seduction Theory cleverly probes the rigid hierarchies of academia and the often arbitrary power dynamics that shape these cloistered worlds. With Robbie placing her own emotional chaos at the center of the novel, readers are left to hold on tightly, lest they too be swept away by this highly original and darkly comic tale.
