Merve Emre

She is the author of nonfiction books Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017) and The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018), and has published essays and articles in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

[6] After graduating in 2007 from Harvard, where she concentrated in government, Emre worked for six months as an assistant marketing consultant at Bain & Company.

[7][8] Emre says that she was a "terrible consultant" and spent most of her time at Bain studying for the literature Graduate Record Examinations under her desk.

[3] Ferrante, a famously private author who uses an alias, agreed to field questions for Emre's essay on the HBO series, resulting in a two-month correspondence between the two.

[16] The Wall Street Journal called it a "riveting" book to which Emre brought "the skills of a detective, cultural critic, historian, scientist and biographer".