Emma Knight always wanted to write for a living, "but I didn't think that was a viable option," she says.
The 36-year-old Toronto native spent her 20s getting a bachelor's in languages in Scotland and a master's in international affairs and journalism in France. Throughout both she contributed to publications like the International Herald Tribune and co-wrote screenplays with her then-boyfriend, now husband, Anthony Green.
In 2014, Knight and her husband co-founded a cold-pressed juice company, Greenhouse, with a number of their friends in Toronto. The company's products were immediately a hit and Greenhouse has continued to grow over the years, with Knight's husband ultimately taking on the CEO role and Knight filling various roles, including director of brand and marketing.
Even while at Greenhouse, Knight found pathways to her passion, like co-writing and publishing two cookbooks, one in 2017 and one in 2021. She quit the company when she got a book deal for her first novel, "The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus," in 2023, she says. The book was released in January 2025 and has since become a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club pick on NBC's "TODAY." It's also in development to become a TV series, according to a recent report by Variety.
Here's how Knight built her writerly career.
Knight: We had zero money and zero marketing team to speak of, but we did have really interesting people in our stores who were selling the juice alongside me, some of them nutritionists. And so we created a blog, which, at the time, was called Terrarium, and we filled it with plant-based recipes. And someone from Penguin Canada, Andrea Magyar, noticed the blog. She was a customer and she said, "Hey, have you ever thought about a book?" And I said, "Well, now I am."
After our first daughter was born, [co-author Christine Flynn and] I came up with another cookbook idea for how you eat with one hand. [She is] a chef who was at the time a single mother of twins. We would just be texting back and forth late at night about how hungry we were with these little people and how hard it was to feed ourselves properly during this very peculiar time.
And so "How to Eat with One Hand" was a collection of essays that were meant to be a very raw and candid and not yummy-mummy Instagram version of what motherhood really was, so that someone might read them and feel less alone, while also giving useful, easy recipes for the different stages of early parenthood.
I've always written just for me and on the side, just at night and whenever I have time.
In the summer of 2019, I started hearing these characters talk, and I would write down this dialogue. And then I started writing letters to and from this mysterious person called Lord Elliot Lennox, [a character in the book]. That was just his name and I didn't know that much about him. I was curious about what was going on in my own brain, so I just kind of wrote it.
[When our second daughter, Frida,] was born in September 2020 there was a spike of Covid happening. I had some postpartum complications that landed me in an isolation room in the hospital for a number of days without her. And it was scary. I started writing this long journalistic piece about maternal health.
I think that experience jolted me and made me realize that writing was what I needed to do and is who I am, and that in order to properly show these two little people that they can do whatever they want eventually, that I would need to be a little bit braver in terms of embracing what it was that I wanted to do.
I was able to have conversations with Anthony and to kind of scale back my time. First it was one day a week of not doing Greenhouse and writing [beginning in 2021]. And then it moved to 50/50, and then I moved to just one day a week of Greenhouse. When I had publishers and I was in the editing process, then I fully stepped back from Greenhouse in June 2023.
Cutting myself off from gainful employment with two small children was terrifying.
I was very scared to jump into the abyss and I have been lucky so far that it has not been ruinous. And that doesn't mean that it won't be in the future. But I think, one, it's worth it. I love it enough. And two, I'm just really lucky that we can pull it off.
The Canadian maternity and parental leave system is generous in terms of the amount of time you can spend on leave, but you do take a pay cut.
It had already happened a couple of times, and I had already been through the kind of stop-going-to-coffee-shops-and-don't-go-out-for-lunch and recognizing the ways in which you can't waste your resources when you're not earning. I understand those are very tiny sacrifices overall, we are in a very privileged position.
Oh my goodness, no!
[During the first lockdown, my daughter] asked me what kind of job she should have when she grows up. It took me a while to figure out how to answer her. The answer I finally gave was that she should do something that makes her feel like herself and that she will always want to get better at. This is what writing is for me. It was not long after telling her that that I committed (in my own mind) to finishing a novel.
I will always know that there is room to get better, and so I do not imagine that I will ever think I've made it. I'm happy about this. I think it means I've found the right work.
Just keeping at it, sitting in the chair and doing it every day, even if some days you know that it's bad. Because it's an endurance game.
Taking time in life that otherwise goes to things like drinking wine with dinner so that you can't work after dinner or watching lots of Netflix [is also important] … I basically didn't have a social life, I'd say for, like, five years. I sort of gave up on all the bits of life that are extra and spent that time writing.
And if you're really serious and you really want it, then if you can find those margins of your life — and I know it feels like they don't exist, especially with small children … finding those pockets of time that you didn't know you had and identifying them and committing to using them for this is one method.
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