Podcast Transcription: Emma Copley Eisenberg

Jun 5

Jun 5 Podcast Transcription: Emma Copley Eisenberg

This episode, Marketing Director Aatia interviewed Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of Housemates, a novel that tells the story of queer people forging community in a changing neighborhood in Philadelphia. Bernie, the photographer and Leah, the writer, form an intense bond and embark on a road trip in pursuit of their art, capturing America on film and on the page.

The two discuss roommate dynamics, community building, and HGTV original shows.

Aatia

Today I'm joined by Emma Copley Eisenberg. Emma is the author of the The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, and she is turning to fiction with her novel Housemates. Emma, welcome to the pod.

Emma

Thank you so much for having me. A delight to be here. I love Books Are Magic.

Aatia

Thank you and we love you as well.

So tell us about Housemates. How did this story come to be?

Emma

For sure. Housemates is a story of two queer young people, Bernie and Leah, who meet as housemates in a chaotic, sprawling, queer group house in West Philly. And it came to be, actually, it had a historical inspiration inspired by two real queer women in history, Berenice Abbott, who maybe photo nerds have heard of, and her partner Elizabeth McCausland, who is an art critic and journalist. They lived in the middle of the 20th century. They were most sort of active in the 1930s and 1940s. And I just got really intrigued by a biography that I read of Berenice Abbott and this idea that you could be sort of like standing at this very important moment of change in America and documenting the country as it looked then. And also they went on this road trip in 1935, the two of them, and they left both feeling very separate and single and sad and confused about what to do in their artistic lives and came back very together, romantically, artistically, with a lot of clarity about the art that they wanted to make in the world. So I was feeling a lot of those things in 2017, 2018, like, “how should a person be? What kind of art do I want to make? How can I find a girlfriend? How can I live with and be together with someone?” [...] We didn't know in 2017 or 18 just how much worse the world was going to get. But it was this moment of profound change. And I just got excited about that idea of what could happen on a road trip between two people who had a lot of love and intensity and sort of a juicy force field between them, what might they make and what might happen together on the road.

Aatia

Yeah, I love a story that comes out like – a seed in real life is planted and your imagination just goes wild with it. What was the name of Berenice's biography? So listeners know.

Emma

It's called, yes, it's called Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography by Julia Van Haften. There's other biographies of Berenice Abbott too, but this one is a little more human. It's a little more focused on Berenice Abbott as a whole person, including her queerness, which was kind of excised from earlier biographies or only vaguely alluded to. Yeah, she's kind of having a Renaissance. It's cool to see. She's definitely a queer ancestor that not as many people know about as they should. And Elizabeth McCausland too, both of them.

Aatia

Yeah. Yeah, love shining light on both of them.

How did you come to know about Berenie Abbott’s work?

Emma

It was kind of like by accident as so many like fortuitous things in life are. I think I saw an exhibit of Berenice Abbott's photography about New York City in the 30s. That's what she's sort of most famous for with Elizabeth McCausland. They worked on that project together, Changing New York. It started, you know, at the kind of beginning of the Great Depression and then documents New York as a change through depression and then afterwards. And I think I saw that exhibit just like bopping around visiting a friend in Paris actually, and there was a quote, I believe it was a quote from something that Berenice Abbott wrote, and it said, “I'm not a nice girl, I'm a photographer, I go anywhere,” in response to some guy being like, “what's a nice girl like you doing in this place, right?” So I got really inspired by that line, this idea of a “nice girl” being opposed with “artist” or “adventure.” And I just kind of wondered in and looked around and was pretty blown away by how modern these photographs were. And I'm from New York City. I'm like a native New Yorker kid of the 90s. And I was just like, “wow,” like, “this is not the New York I know or recognize.” It felt so intimate. It felt almost like a small town or something. And then, yeah, the biography really blew my mind open in terms of – I didn't know she was living this fabulous lesbian life in Paris with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Aatia

Yeah, in good company.

Emma

Yeah, in good company. Berenice Abbott dated a hot butch lesbian princess in the 30s. It was this world before the Great Depression and the political transformation of the 50s clamped down on queerness in America. I was just like, “wow, this is fun!”

Aatia

Yeah. I'm so glad that the book gets to offer some sort of glimpse into that early queer life in America too. We need more of that also, I would say.

Emma

Yeah, I feel like there's this kind of misconception that as the years have gone on [that] it gets better or all things sort of have improved for queer people. Things are just getting more free and more chill. And it's like, actually, no. Things were twisty and complex and there were pockets of great liberation and many different time periods and places. And yeah, we've seen that sort of progress narrative get debunked in other spaces too. So I just was like, “wow, in some ways they were having a better time being artists and a better time being queer people then.” And I'm like, “how can we channel some of that sort of joy and thriving and like refusal of the law?”

Aatia

Yeah, I wonder, yeah, refusal of the law, I think is maybe part of it, but also this sort of smoothing or homogenization of culture so that queer lives have to look like straight cis lives, I think is doing much for us and how we can create spaces for ourselves if the standard that we're holding ourselves to is not reflective of our experience or our identities.

Emma

Exactly, yeah.

Aatia

Yeah. So you mentioned that you are a native New Yorker. I didn't know that! As I was reading Housemates, I realized that I had actually never read a story set in Philadelphia. And so I'm curious, what's your relationship to the city?

Emma

Yes, I think I originally came to Books Are Magic because of Emma Straub's, like, where she's a little bit older than I am, but the native New Yorker sort of nostalgia appealed to me [...] that was where my early life was spent. And then I came to Philly for college, basically, and then sort of never left except for to live in West Virginia for a few years, which I loved and sort of documented in.

Aatia

Was that part of research for The [Third] Rainbow Girl?

Emma

Well, actually, I moved to West Virginia with no intent to write a book or anything. I was just living there. And then The Third Rainbow Girl kind of just came out of that time as life does.

Aatia

Cool!

Emma

But yes, Philadelphia, I think, is very underseen in American fiction. I mean, we're the sixth biggest city in America. We are a very visually exciting city. Philadelphia is really beautiful, it has so many murals, it's a really sort of diverse visual landscape too, which I think is just really exciting to see in scene and in plot, and we just don't see enough of Philadelphia in fiction. I hope – Bryan Washington is giving us Houston in his stories and novels, and I love that, and I hope to kind of participate in a tradition like that of Philadelphia. And there's other books that are doing that so beautifully by folks who are native to the city, including Joseph Earl Thomas and so many poets, Yolanda Wisher.

Aatia

Yeah, Joseph Earl Thomas: Sink, right? That was his memoir.

Emma

Sink, yes, absolutely. And he has a novel coming out this June, I think. June 11 [correction: June 18th], I think. And Michael Deagler with Astra House just published Early Sobrieties. And Liz Moore, A Long Bright River. Asali Solomon, The Days of Afrekete, like so many folks. But I think that, so we're starting to see more and more Philadelphia fiction, which I'm thrilled about. But I think that Philadelphia provided a really essential part of the novel, without Philadelphia and more specifically like without West Philly, this Housemates the novel would not exist.

I got really excited about thinking through and rendering in fiction this particular neighborhood, which is really strange. It's a starkly Black neighborhood that has been gentrified by a lot of white queer people. And I think there has become a sort of response to the sort of shame and guilt of gentrification, [it] becomes this very close and rigid sort of queer virtuousness that exists in West Philly and also a really beautiful kind of activist engagement and imagination of equality and justice and liberation up alongside really diverse West African and French and Francophone speaking immigrants. It's very rich, strange, and stratified. It includes a lot of sites of really important American moments, including the MOVE Bombing, including just recently, you know, with George Floyd, in 2020, we had a really, really over-aggressive and militarized police response in West Philly. So it's a really important place now. And I'm really interested in trying to sort of just put on the page what's going on in the neighborhood, too.

Aatia

Yeah, what's going on currently as well. Yeah, absolutely.

So you moved back after your time in West Virginia. So I guess how have you seen the city change in the whole span of it? Gentrification is a part of it, but I'm curious.

Emma

For sure. I'm – it's so interesting. I'm not a native Philadelphian and you can't really be considered from Philly until you've been here, like, 40 years or something.

Aatia

I think for New York, the threshold is 10. That's what I've been hearing. It's generous, I think.

Emma

I love that. Yeah. Are you at 10 yet? Are you from here?

Aatia

No, no, not at all. I'm from North Carolina originally.

Emma

Cool.

Aatia

Yeah. I've been here since 2020.

Emma

Okay, so, getting there! You’re more than halfway.

Aatia

Getting there!

Emma

Yeah! I think Philly certainly just has this sense of, if you're not born and raised, you have to sort of commit for life before it will accept you. And I love that and I'm working my way towards being a lifelong Philadelphian. So there's many people who are probably writing about this with more deep perspective than I am. I think that what I've seen is, since I've been here, basically consistently since 2011, it does seem like the arts and writing landscape has shifted a lot. There just seems to be this kind of explosion and excitement around, from my perspective at least, around writing and the literary traditions in Philadelphia and making art here, even as our arts budget and funding has been cut enormously more than any other city. So that's been tough. It's tough to be a part of a city that's flourishing and making such beautiful things at the same time as we're struggling for material resources. I do think there's been a big sort of critical mass of prose writers, at least. Like when I moved here, the poets were flourishing, having a great time, super organized, so many amazing reading series. There's always been an incredible poetry tradition in Philadelphia. I mean, Sonia Sanchez, Yolanda Wisher, like so many people. Ursula Rucker's spoken word. But the prose writers were kind of weirdly lost and disjointed. And we were like, “where are the fiction writers? Where are the essayists? Like what's going on?” And so I was a part of starting a literary nonprofit called Blue Stoop where we just thought it could be really powerful to put up a flag and sort of say, “what if we connected as a community across like neighborhood, across genre?” No one organization can speak for [the] whole lit community of Philly, but it's been interesting to see how creating a little more public site of connection has been cool. And I just feel like so many writers are thriving here and making lives here that at least I didn't know about or have access to like, 10 years ago.

Aatia

Yeah, that's great.

Aatia

This is Aatia cutting in. I’m in the bookstore right now sitting down with supervisor Isabella to ask her a very important question:

Isabella, what is your worst roommate horror story?

Isabella

When I was in school, it was about, maybe week two. I had a randomly selected roommate. We weren’t really– we were getting along fine, we were both pretty anxious people. And I’m sitting on my bed, talking to my roommate, and she’s about to head into the shower and she’s standing at the corner of our room near the door in her robe. And I say something that made her laugh and she starts laughing really hard and she was like “don’t make me laugh. Stop making me laugh! Stop talking about what you’re talking about.” You know, for my own sake I won’t say what I was talking about.

Aatia

I really want to know what you were talking about.

Isabella

I can’t! I can’t say it.

Aatia

After!

Isabella

She just, you know, just sort of urinates all over the floor. There’s just a huge puddle of her pee and she’s just like “you did this to me! You didn’t stop, you made me laugh too hard!” And I was just f***ing appalled. Oh, sorry, I cursed. I was just appaled! And I was like, “well, okay. You’re in school, you want to make friends.”

Aatia

“Urine” school!

Isabella

I helped her clean it up.

Aatia

That’s disgusting!

Isabella

Yeah, yeah.

Aatia

That is disgusting!!! I don’t know if any of my stories involve bodily fluids in that kind of way, but it gets pretty wavy trying to live with other people. Especially at that age, my god.

Well, thank you so much for sharing. When we cut I’m going to make Isabella tell me what the story was. Maybe I can hold it in.

Aatia

I don't want to leave the Philly question without asking: what does your perfect day in the city look like?

Emma

That's so fun. It probably starts in Clark Park, just because I'm a West Philly girlie. There's incredible flour bouquets. I would like to be buying one and stuffing my face into it. Good coffee, good empanadas. I would like to be eating those at the farmer's market. Then I might do a sort of stroll into Center City or South and get some lunch. Maybe South Philly Barbacoa. This is an eating-focused day, clearly. I might do a little bit of a pop-in to some art galleries in Old City, see what's going on. I definitely would have to get ice cream. My favorite ice cream place is Milk John at the moment, in South Philly, although I'm open to any ice cream stores I may not know about. And yeah, maybe seeing a movie at the Ritz or the Bourse. Those are some of our nice independents. Maybe taking a stroll along, there's a dog park and a park that goes along the Schuylkill. Even though I don't have a dog, I like to go and just spy on other people's dogs.

Aatia

Woah. As somebody who doesn't have a dog, the dog park sounds like a terrifying, hostile place. And I've heard dog owners say the same thing, that it's the last place that they want to go. I'm so surprised to hear you say that!

Emma

Interesting. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I've been watching this show, Dog House UK on [HBO] Max, and it's so sweet and wholesome and changing my life. And I'm like, “maybe I do want a dog.” I just don't understand dogs since I wasn't raised with them. So I like to go dip a toe in, you know? Yeah.

Aatia

Absolutely. Okay. That sounds like a beautiful day!

Emma

Thank you.

Aatia

Sounds kind of solitary too, just like moving throughout the city at your own pace.

Emma

I like to wander. Friends are invited for any of those stops. I used to be a big bike person. Then I fell off my bike and now I like to be on with all feets on the ground. But people are welcome to walk with me as I mosey through these various eating destinations.

Aatia

Absolutely. On your tour of West Philadelphia, absolutely.

So coming back to community, Housemates feels, to me as a reader, timely as our culture and our generation is talking about a loneliness epidemic and people are settling into domestic life, whatever shape that's taken in our history, later. Adult life looks a lot different than it did, say 20 or 30 years ago even. So I am just so curious about what were your intentions as far as how you represented this community of this house in your neighborhood and the queer people moving in and out of it at any given time.

Emma

Totally. Yeah, I'm really fascinated by sights of people living in close proximity who are really different. So places where you end up living or really intimate with people who are not your romantic partner or your family or even quite your friends. Housemates and roommates are in this interesting other category that I think is really fascinating because you see them in the hallway, you see them in the bathroom, you see their toothpaste and splatters on their toothbrushes, you hear them crying…

Aatia

Yeah, hear them having sex and crying and making weird meals at 2am.

Emma

Having sex, yes, exactly. Smelling their smells, talking to their mom on the phone. Whatever it may be, but you may not have sort of like official access to that intimacy in your relationship. So it's a very interesting space and I also feel like housemate or roommate or group living novels are sort of underrepresented in American fiction, too. There's a few that I like. I like Nel Zinck's Nicotine a lot and, weirdly, Sophie’s Choice. Everyone thinks it's a Holocaust novel, and it is, but it's really also a novel about a boarding house in Brooklyn, mostly Jews in the 1940s, which is chef's kiss.

I think I really wanted to think about the ways that when you live with a bunch of people, there is a loneliness to it. There is a sense of everyone's in their own room with the door closed and at the same time.

Aatia

Yeah, I love that phrase that you used, “official access.” It's like, “it's not verbally granted that I'm allowing you into this space in this way, but it's kind of assumed that you'll hear, see, something.”

Emma

Totally. Yeah, like I'm not supposed to know that you and your mom are in a fight, but like now I do because I heard it, or whatever. I just think that stuff's interesting. Yeah, so I think there is a loneliness and I think there's also a togetherness and that sort of like, “are we lonely? Are we together?” Is a big question I have in the novel. Bernie and Leah are housemates and then they become sort of obsessively interested in each other and then they go on this road trip and they have a, kind of, almost housemate relationship on the road because they're like sharing hotel rooms but it's not sexual, at least not at the beginning, and they're sharing the confined space of a car which is also a really interesting intimacy. I think things get said on road trips in that confined car that wouldn't get said anywhere else so I was kind of interested in that, too.

Aatia

Yeah, it's about being in the car. It's also interesting, at least for me, as a woman, we talk a lot about how we relate to each other face to face and to be riding driver's seat, passenger seat, there is a level of distancing because we're not facing each other.

Emma

Ooh, true.

Aatia

And it's the same thing where like me and my mom would get in these big blowout fights sitting side-by-side in the front row of the car because there was something loose -lipped about the fact that we weren't connecting eye to eye. Have you ever experienced that?

Emma

Yeah, yeah, that's such a good point. I don't really think about that. That it's not just the confined space of the car. It's how you're physically positioned, not at each other. I think that's a really good point. I didn't think of that. And I think there is something that sort of relaxes the brain about looking out at the world as the car is moving. But you're having these intense discussions. I agree. I've gotten into so many fights in the car. I've made love confessions, I've gossiped, you know, you just kind of get into this zone where you're like, “we're the only two people in the world, and I'm kind of hearing from myself also.”

Aatia

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

You've been so great about plugging other people's work and I feel like I have so much to add to my to-be-read list. But I wanna know as we close out, is there anything that you want to share, plug? What are you working on? What are you reading?

Emma

Yay! I am also really excited to be working on a short story collection called Fat Swim that like sold together with Housemates, so I'm working on getting the stories as polished and sharp as possible. I'm also having a lot of fun writing a couple of new short stories, so short fiction. I got my MFA in fiction. Short stories are kind of my home turf, if you will. I love short story collections. I just feel the most happy and relaxed there.

Aatia

Yeah, and people need to be reading more of them for sure.

Emma

Agreed. I don't know where this narrative comes from that people don't read them because so many people I talk to who aren't necessarily even writers or even in the literary community are like, “no, I like them because it's short, I can read before bedtime,” whatever. So yeah, I just took myself on a little pre-book-publication retreat to Lancaster PA, which shows up in the book as well. Shout out to Dutch Cooking and Smorgasbords. Full fat.

Aatia

Shout out to the Amish!

Emma

Yeah, shout out to the Amish and their devotion to butter really, and chocolate milk. But yeah, I reread Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You, her short story collection, and Morgan Talty's short story collection, Night of the Living Rez, which is beautiful, and Bryan Washington's Lot, which we already talked about. And I'm trying to read and keep my brain calm during this stressful time of putting out a book.

So I already said the dog show, very important. I also want to plug lesbian real estate television, Small Town Potential it's called, very fun.

Aatia

Is that an HGTV original?

Emma

Sure is, sure is. Yeah.

Aatia

Right on.

Emma

Takes place in the Hudson Valley if you want to live out your Hudson Valley fantasy.

Aatia

So gay. Yeah.

Emma

So gay. And speaking of Gay Hudson Valley, I'm also really excited about Trust and Safety by Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett that just came out [...] It's a queer novel about a straight couple that moves to the Hudson Valley who rents their out building to a lesbian couple and the wife of the straight couple feels feelings and real estate and hijinks ensue.

Aatia

Ooh! Oooh!

Emma

Yeah, so fun. Like it's the kind of book that I was like, “I need to go to bed early” and I would just stay up until 2 AM and my partner was like, “what are you reading?” and I was like, “shhh don't bother me!”

Aatia

That's such a good feeling. I wish that every book could give you that. I love that so much.

Emma

I know, I know. I really wanted Housemates to feel fun and sexy and immersive and not super pedantic. I feel like when I talk about it sometimes I'm like, “it's about art and it's about community!” But it's also, I hope [it] has silly jokes in it. It also comes for the queers.

Aatia

Yeah, the humor is there. Definitely.

Emma

Thank you. Thank you. It has some good sex in it. It has a lot of strange characters. I tried to definitely have fun and take pleasure in the writing of it and I hope the pleasure comes through on the page, so we shall see.

Aatia

I think it definitely shows and I think a love for community and storytelling also shows up very clearly in your work.

So thank you so much Emma for talking to us. Where can people find you to keep up with your work?

Emma

Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Aatia. I am on all the things, including TikTok. So Instagram X, I guess, and TikTok @frumpenberg. like Frump and then Eisenberg mashed into one. So, yeah, I'm having fun making some videos on TikTok as well and connecting with the younger girlies. So find me there, too.

Aatia

Beautiful. Well, thank you so much!

Emma

Thank you.

Aatia

Bye bye!

You can get your copy of Housemates over on our website!

Sources Mentioned:

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Queer photographer Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbot’s wife, Elizabeth McCausland, art critic, historian, and journalist