Can Fashion Writer Erika Veurink Become the Next Nancy Meyers?
“This feels like I’m in a ’90s rom-com,” says Erika Veurink as she stirs the ice in her to-go tea with one hand and adjusts her sunglasses with the other. It’s indeed a singularly cinematic August afternoon in Central Park: The canopy of trees have, apparently, conspired to dapple us in flattering light, and a breeze teases the autumnal When Harry Met Sally weather soon to arrive. Veurink has agreed to meet me near Columbus Circle ahead of her two remaining commitments for the day: a trip to Bergdorf Goodman (where she has an outstanding gift-card balance), then her first in-person session with her doula. “I hope she brings props,” Veurink says with a grin. “I wouldn’t mind a [PowerPoint] deck.” The writer and brand consultant, by her own admission, loves to have a strategy in play.
She’s 32 weeks pregnant with her and her husband’s first child when we meet, and the 29-year-old, Iowa-born-and-raised Veurink wears a cotton-silk-blend Merlette dress in black, draped comfortably around her expanding bump. The writer and brand consultant carries herself with a Midwest earnestness she can’t conceal—nor does she want to—and an East Coast sensibility. At 6’2”, she’s even taller than she appears on her Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Substack accounts, where Veurink’s built a small-but-loyal following comprising thousands of secondhand style aficionados and, more recently, romance readers.
As of September 16, Veurink—creator of the EV Salon event series and the fashion Substack Long Live—has become a romance novelist. She’s as surprised and delighted by this development as anyone. Two years ago, by her own admission, she’d “never even read a proper romance novel.” Now, she has enormous respect for the genre, and she considers writing romance not a mere bucket-list venture but an essential new branch in what she winkingly (but meaningfully) refers to as “Erika Veurink Enterprises.”
Her debut novel, Exit Lane, is a friends-to-lovers, missed-connections novella out with the buzzy publishing start-up 831 Stories. The book follows recent University of Iowa graduates Marin—“dark blond, terrifying, with a cigarette dangling from her lips and an Annie Hall outfit hanging off her frame”—and Teddy—“charmingly unkempt light-brown hair; miraculously clear skin, despite a frat-boy diet; and a ’90s rom-com always-gets-the-girl air”—as they embark on a 16-hour moving trip from Iowa City to New York City, only to realize their inconvenient attraction midway through the drive. They’re far from a perfect match: Marin never wants to see cornfields again, and Teddy can’t wait to finish law school at New York University and resettle in suburban Des Moines. But over the next eight years in Manhattan, their paths cross again and again, until they’re forced to confront a potential tragedy—and the magnetic pull that has always existed between them. It’s a premise Veurink eagerly admits was inspired by When Harry Met Sally, but with a narrative style and semi-autobiographical details that are all her.
Founded by best friends and Of a Kind co-founders Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur, 831 Stories bills itself as a “romantic fiction company,” devoted to building “universes” around its novels through events, products, TV and film projects, audio initiatives, fan fiction, and more. As Cerulo first pitched the company to Veurink in 2023, 831 wants to be “the A24 of romance.” The idea of building a cool-kid “universe” around a work of writing couldn’t have appealed more to Veurink, who, in Long Live, has frequently referenced her “portfolio career”: a resume made up not of individual job titles or one-off freelance gigs, but of connected “buckets” that “add up to a larger vision.”
“I’m a commercially minded person,” Veurink explains. “I like to say I’m in the business of Erika Veurink. Sometimes, from the outside, it’s like, ‘Okay, she’s a fashion writer, but also a romance writer…?’ And I think the thing that’s always been true is that writing and fashion are my lenses. I hope to become a screenwriter. I imagine those things being true in any screenplay I would ever write. As long as there’s a way to write and to talk about what people are wearing, it belongs in my universe.”
Veurink continues, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “It’s almost embarrassing to talk about it, but I want to be Nancy Meyers. I want to be a world-builder, the way that Nora Ephron’s stories all exist in the same ‘universe.’ That’s what I aspire to. I want to have a signature style, and then all these projects I bring to life live within that.”
Cerulo and Mazur couldn’t have predicted how ideally this aspiration would align with their own when they first stumbled upon Long Live, then read one of Veurink’s short fiction pieces in Cutleaf, featuring an early version of Marin. In November 2023, Cerulo emailed Veurink a pitch with the subject line, “Reaching out about something…romantic!” and soon convinced Veurink to, once again, try her hand at fiction.
By this point, Veurink had earned an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College after completing her undergraduate degree at FIT. But an unfortunate dressing-down in a fiction-writing class at the 92nd Street Y had temporarily steered her away from attempting a novel. Veurink doesn’t mince words: “I got my ass handed to me. Everyone [in the class] was like, ‘You’re a horrible fiction writer.’ After that, I was like, ‘I don’t know.’” But Cerulo and Mazur recognized a spark of talent—a talent for romance, even if Veurink didn’t see it yet—in the Cutleaf piece, and soon they were shepherding the writer through an unorthodox publication process.
First, they assigned Veurink a romance-reading syllabus. She devoured Bolu Babalola’s Honey and Spice and Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, as well as Liz Tomforde’s Mile High and some of romance stalwarts Emily Henry and Tessa Bailey’s work. (She also picked up A Court of Thorns and Roses, if only to see what all the fuss was about.) Next, Cerulo, Mazur, and Veurink “held hands and walked our way through potential log lines and outlines,” Veurink says. She proposed a spin on When Harry Met Sally. Cerulo suggested, “When Harry Met Sally…but what if there was sex in the backseat of the car.” From there, they workshopped each draft together. “It was very collaborative,” Veurink says.
She found, in the romance genre, a freedom in control. Romance novels have rules; they have tropes; they have expectations. When Cerulo and Mazur sent her a 15-beat plot sheet to frame her novel around, Veurink felt as though she’d cracked some invisible code. “Within those tropes and those formulas, romance readers are like, ‘Take me wherever you want,’” Veurink says. “Give me a werewolf! Whatever!’ But there are these systems, these categories. And if you have a certain kind of brain, it feels so good to abide by the rules.”
Veurink has that kind of brain. When she was 15, growing up in Des Moines, her father died—a biographical detail Veurink passed along to her Exit Lane protagonist, Marin. The experience, of course, shaped the author in endless ways, but one which Veurink cites often is her responsive, all-consuming desire for control. “That’s probably my therapy of the last five years summed up in one sentence,” she tells me. “After what happened with my dad, I felt like, ‘Okay, if I can exercise control in any situation, I’m going to try to find a way to do that.’ And I think meeting romance writing with this natural inclination for control has been the perfect application of this trauma response that I do a lot of work around.”
It was from her father, who worked in finance, that Veurink also learned to talk (and write) openly about money. She argues that his influence is why she has no problem shamelessly declaring her goal to become Nancy Meyers—and to do it with a particular business-minded blueprint in mind. Veurink keeps a New York Times op-ed by novelist Jessica Knoll bookmarked on her computer, titled “I Want to Be Rich and I’m Not Sorry.” The piece is “literally like a sacred text to me,” Veurink says. “Writing is the thing I can’t shake. It’s like my daily meditation. It’s a constant truth in my life, and the fact that I can get paid to do it is still so special to me that I feel as though I deserve to take that seriously.”
Of course, she doesn’t expect to get rich off of Exit Lane, nor, necessarily, off of romance writing in general. But neither does she see her romance writing as a purely artful endeavor, siloed from the storytelling machine she wants to build. “I’m not the kind of person who could work on a novel for nine years and hope that it found an audience, and all that labor is unpaid,” Veurink says. “I think there are other writers who need that lack of commercial pressure in order to feel creative. I like knowing where something belongs, but that’s just how I operate. If someone felt compelled to write for the art alone, fabulous. I definitely did when I was 22, and now I’m pregnant and I live in New York, and I have a large vision for my future.” She concludes, “I think someone could accuse my book of not being artful, and I would be completely comfortable with that.”
To those who might dismiss her as just another grifter “influencer”-turned-novelist, she responds with generosity. “I honestly feel so lucky that I’ve brought a book into the world, and I know how hard people fight for that, coming from this background, and how many sacrifices people have to make to sell a book for a few thousand dollars,” she says. “I wasn’t an influencer two years ago. I was a writer two years ago. So, in some senses, I feel the writing will always predate the influencing. I’m sure I have former friends who have notes about how I’ve gone about publishing, but right now, I feel so gobsmacked that I don’t really care. Or I hope I don’t care.”
As a fellow Midwesterner, I recognize her practicality as born of a familiar Middle-America ethos. Some of Veurink’s most popular Long Live newsletters reflect this mentality, advertising titles like, “You’re a Dôen Girl on an Old Navy Budget,” “Here’s How To Feel Like $1M While Spending Less Than $100,” and “Here’s How I Went From $1,500/Year As A Freelance Writer To Six-figure Quarters.” Her readers love her approachable, stylish-but-realistic approach to fashion, commerce, and art. “I’m always thinking about people in the Midwest,” Veurink says. “If I can make content that appeals to them as much as it does to my friends who are editors-in-chief of fashion magazines, then I’m like, ‘I’ve done it.’” She thinks much the same way about Exit Lane—and about all the future romance novels she wants to write.
She’s already at work on her next romance: a “semi-sporty” saga set on a college campus. She hopes to end her remaining consulting work in 2026 and focus entirely on her self-owned enterprises: fiction, Long Live, social content, and EV Salon, the invite-only event series in which she matches guests one-on-one according to their interests. “Less working for other people, and more doing it all in my universe, would be my dream,” Veurink says.
For now, she’s celebrating the most recent expansion of her brand. She’s curated a specific wardrobe for her book-promotion events, which include some Marin-inspired Prada loafers and a Teddy-inspired rugby shirt that’s now for sale on the 831 Stories website. Tonight, at the New York launch party, she’ll forget all talk of sales numbers—at least, temporarily—while discussing the book with Cup of Jo and Big Salad writer Joanna Goddard, and she’ll honor Exit Lane’s central lovebirds (who share a fondness for karaoke) with an after-party at Baby Grand Flatiron.
“This is my first novel,” Veurink says. “This is my last one without kids. The way that people are going to respond to it is so out of my control.” So, she says, her path forward is clear. She only has one question to answer for tonight: “What am I going to sing at the karaoke after-party?”
elle
