Austin Taylor: ‘I found it so fascinating and poignant how we portray women in the media, especially powerful women who make mistakes'

Irish Times

19 hours ago

Austin Taylor is speaking to me from her parents' attic in the farmhouse where she grew up in rural Maine. The 26-year-old is the picture of vibrant youth – glowing skin, a long mane of thick blonde hair and an easy-going demeanour. She is about to begin a law degree at
Stanford University
and has already completed a double degree in chemistry and English at
Harvard
– they call it a double concentrator. She has also just published her debut novel, Notes On Infinity
,
which she sold in the US for a seven-figure sum.
You could call her an over-achiever, but I'm not sure she'd agree. In fact, not too long ago, she felt like a failure. 'I certainly felt intense pressure at Harvard. You're surrounded by people doing incredible cutting-edge work, especially in the sciences. You're surrounded by the legacy of people who have come through the institution before you who have done incredible things. You're surrounded by professors who are doing amazing research and teaching, and your peers who have amazing ideas and are working on really cool stuff in addition to taking five classes a semester and doing really well. There's a sense that if you're not doing something absolutely incredible, you're falling short or failing. I certainly felt that way.'
It's something she wanted to explore in Notes On Infinity, particularly around the 'move fast and break things' culture that exists at the nexus of scientific research and venture capital-funded biotech start-ups. The book tells the story of Zoe and Jack, two brilliant Harvard students whose breakthrough scientific discoveries prompt them to drop out and set up a biotech company that claims to have found the cure for ageing. It's a classic Icarus tale of young idealism warped by greed and ambition.
'The dollar amounts are just unimaginable,' she says of biotech VC funding, 'especially for really young people. I think the incentive structures that that amount of money creates are often problematic and scary, especially in science, because science is fundamentally such a slow, iterative, uncertain process and business, especially in pitching a start-up, is all about positive spin. And that's a fundamental tension. And sometimes that creates awesome innovation and other times it creates fire and broken glass and damage.' You can probably guess which of these paths her book follows.
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The novel was somewhat inspired by the scandal surrounding
Elizabeth Holmes
and her blood-diagnostic start-up, Theranos. Holmes, a brilliant and beautiful scientist, was the face of the company but was eventually jailed for defrauding investors in a spectacular fall from grace. In Notes On Infinity, Taylor's protagonist Zoe is a beautiful, brilliant young woman who also becomes the face of her and Jack's start-up.
'One of the things I was interested in exploring was the obsession with women in [
Stem
] spaces and the tokenisation of women in these spaces. Elizabeth Holmes was lauded for her gender during Theranos's rise, then after its fall she was demonised for her gender. I heard a disturbing number of comments about how she must have used her sexuality to manipulate male funders. That fixation on gender and self-presentation and hair and clothes and make-up, I do think it's heightened by the fact that women are such a minority in science.
Former Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes leaving court in San Jose, California, in March 2023. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP/PA
'I did consume a lot of the reporting on the Holmes case because I found it so fascinating and poignant, particularly on issues of gender, how we portray women in the media, especially powerful women who make mistakes.'
Taylor's path from growing up as the only child of a dairy farmer in rural Maine to taking a double degree at Harvard to becoming a sought-after debut author about to embark on a legal career is remarkably grounded.
'I had a pretty idyllic, rural childhood. I rode horses and worked on the farm in the summers, milking cows. But I was also very invested in school and I played a lot of sports and I had access to lots of great opportunities.' Her decision to go to Harvard was motivated by the pursuit of academic excellence, but when she arrived on campus, she felt out of place.
'That transition was pretty jarring, which is something that comes out in the novel. I didn't realise the extent to which most people at Harvard would have already been embedded in that sort of community of people who will go to Harvard. There are lots of ways that you can be in that pipeline, so I'm not talking about legacy or family connections, but people had gone to the same summer camps, or done the same competitive academic things like debate or math olympiad, or they had played sports together, and I truly had no connection to the institution at all, so when I showed up on campus for the admitted students weekend it was like everyone else already had friends and they knew how to act and they knew where things were and what parties were going on, and I was like
how am I already not a part of this?
"
Her choice of degree – chemistry – reinforced that feeling of being an outsider. 'I was convinced I needed to do something practical with my college time. There were lots of people questioning my decision to even go to Harvard. I think this is really common in rural areas actually. You can go for free to your state university so people are like, why would you choose to go to this elite university that feels very other to our community, particularly when you're going to be paying an amount of money, that seems silly? That divide and that perception is only worse now, given all of the things that are going on in America. I think that and coming from a farming family gave me this fixation that I needed to do a hard science, be practical and have a skill.'
When she took some English classes, it reignited her childhood love of writing. 'If you had asked me when I was 10, 'what do you want to be when you grow up?', I would have said 'writer'…but I came to realise that was a not a particularly stable or likely career path. In fact, I think it seemed like a total pipe dream, so I turned away."
After college, she worked for a non-profit in New York for a year before returning to her family home to take a year out in an attempt to recover from debilitating migraines. 'I had some time and I thought, what I've actually always wanted to do was to be a writer, so let me try.'
But it wasn't all smooth sailing. She wrote a novel, and submitted it to publishers but couldn't find a home for it. 'Which was very upsetting,' she says. But even as that first novel was dying on submission, she had already moved on to Notes On Infinity
.
Where did she find the determination to push on with another book in the face of that early rejection?
'I think it was mostly that I was really compelled by the idea for Notes. And I was really convinced that it could be special. Then there was a degree of stubbornness, which is part of my personality for better or for worse, and also a degree of naivety, which was necessary for me to do the whole thing. I think if I had thought too hard about how likely any of this was to work out, I simply wouldn't have done it because the odds are so low.'
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The book deals – in addition to the American deal, the book has sold for six figures in the UK, and at auction in Germany – have changed her life, she says. They've given her the time and space to get better at writing, although she says she has not yet touched any of the money. 'I don't think I've ever had a phone call where there was a 'you-should-sit-down' moment. Even the first payments are more money than I've ever seen in one place, ever.'
She is planning on working as an attorney with an interest in the interface between AI and media and arts. 'I recognise we must make space for AI's vast potential but, as a firm believer in the power and importance of good storytelling, I am concerned that existing legal frameworks provide inadequate protection for writers and the publishing ecosystem.'
She has no plans to stop writing – a double concentrator in life too, it seems. In fact she has already finished a draft of her second novel, which will centre around a similar subculture of very powerful young male tech founders and a young woman's relationship with an older, more professionally powerful man. But she is very excited to be going to Stanford – to study law, and for the weather too, which is balmier than the northerly climes she is used to, but also for another reason …
'I've started drafting my third novel…" she says. 'And it's going to be set in Silicon Valley.'
Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor is published by Michael Joseph.