Though Emma Copley Eisenberg is known for her acclaimed true crime memoir, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns/Poe Faulkner fellow. Her new novel, Housemates, is a queering of the classic road trip story, exploring personal and political expression through art, the transformative potential of community, and the joy and pain that we experience through our bodies. Given the breadth of the author’s inspirations and considerations in writing Housemates, this interview was edited for length.
C-VILLE Weekly: What inspired Housemates, and when did you know that your protagonists would be re-imaginings of Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland?
Emma Copley Eisenberg: “Sort of by accident, I turned to reading this plump biography of American photographer Berenice Abbott. I knew she was a lesbian and had lived a glamorous queer life in Paris in the 1920s and had had an older man mentor who reshaped her life. I was stopped in my tracks by this section about her meeting her life partner, Elizabeth McCausland, a hot tall fat butch lesbian … Pretty quickly the two set out on a road trip across the southeastern U.S. with Abbott making large format photographs and McCausland writing about it. The two left single and creatively adrift and came back wholly together, romantically and creatively, with a clear sense of the project they wanted to make, which became their famous collaboration Changing New York. What happened on that road trip? I needed to know, yet knew I never would, as those intimate details are lost to history.
“It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t want to write a historical novel, but rather wanted to know about this duo of the past because of what they might be able to offer me about the present—halfway through Trump’s presidency, and in a moment where America was even more hostile to queer people and artists than ever. How to be a queer woman who was also trying to be an artist in America? How to both appreciate and get free of the old men artists who shaped you? How to be both a separate person and together with someone? These were the questions that kicked off Housemates.”
This is a very corporeal book. As someone who has written about fatphobia, describe why it’s important to you to show bodies, and ways of using bodies, that often remain uncelebrated.
“I always come back to one of my north star truths about writing: If it is part of the experience of being alive, it is worthy of examination in fiction. Having a body is at least fifty percent of being a human being, yet we forget about it in books. And more than fifty percent of Americans are now fat people. If you are writing fiction about America, you are writing about fat bodies, yet I recently ran the numbers about The New York Times’ annual lists of notable books in all categories, and less than one percent of their picks from the last five years have a fat person in them. One percent!
“I’ve noticed that when books, especially fiction, do have fat characters in them, the fat characters are almost always treated with derision or disgust, or their fatness is treated as the central problem the book is trying to ‘solve.’ This is not how my fat body exists for me—it is one important part of who I am, but I also struggle with many other things. So it was important and interesting to me to write a fat main character whose body is on her mind a lot but who is, fundamentally, struggling with other things, like what to do with her life. I wanted to show her in all her complexity—including how good she is at sex and how at home she feels in pleasure, something that is usually denied to fat people. I think both main characters are interested in having a body, so I wanted to show them talking and grappling with that … They talk aloud about picking their noses, which I have been waiting my whole life to do in fiction.”
Describe your research process.
“I did a lot of research for this book, which differed from what I did for The Third Rainbow Girl in that it focused on understanding emotional truths and putting my body in the places that appear in the novel. I did things like visiting the Flight 93 memorial in Stoystown, PA, eating at an Amish smorgasbord in Lancaster, driving up and down the Susquehanna River, and reading Galway Kinnell poems.”
Describe the responsibility you felt weaving together questions of morality, despair, and art’s life-saving potential.
“This book is as much about the costs and rewards of making art as it is about Bernie and Leah … [asking] the question of whether or not art can save your life. I went into the book with that question as an open inquiry, and I think all of the characters would have different answers to it … Yes, it can save your life in the sense that it can make a life more alive, more pleasurable and it can open up seams of love and connection that sustain people, especially marginalized people who have often had less access to material resources. But at the same time, in no way is art a substitute for money, jobs, or healthcare—if you are sick or poor or mentally ill or being discriminated against or harmed on a systemic level, art is not going to save your life … just as America fundamentally does not support healthcare in this country, America fundamentally does not support the arts. We have decided, apparently, that neither taking care of the body nor the soul is important to us as a country. That leaves every person out there on our own to muddle through and build the best, most alive life that we can.”
