Creative Reverberations

Creative Reverberations

CR 049: Janelle Brown on the Unabomber, AI, and Her Love for Dysfunctional Families

The former Wired journalist discusses her newest novel, “What Kind of Paradise.”

Sandra Ebejer's avatar
Sandra Ebejer
Jun 06, 2025
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A woman sits and smiles at the camera
Janelle Brown, photo by Michael Smiy

Janelle Brown began her career as a journalist for Wired during the height of the ’90s-era dot-com boom, and in the years since has written personal essays, book reviews, and articles for The New York Times, Vogue, and ELLE, among others. In 2008, her debut novel, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, became a New York Times bestseller and was named the Best Book of 2008 by Library Journal, which called it a “quintessential summer read.” She has since published five additional novels, each of them landing on many bestseller and “best of” lists.

But it’s her latest, What Kind of Paradise, that Brown says is her most personal. Taking place in the 1990s, the novel follows Jane, a teenager who lives a sheltered existence with her technology-averse father Saul in an isolated cabin in Montana. As the outside world adapts to the new digital age, Jane—who has consistently been warned by her father about the dangers of the internet—begins to pick up clues that w…

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