Nothing Happens Nowhere

Ilana Masad interviews Emma Copley Eisenberg about her first novel, “Housemates.”

By Ilana MasadJuly 19, 2024

• Fiction

WHEN I MOVED to Los Angeles in 2021, Emma Copley Eisenberg—who at that point I knew only through her writing and the internet—reached out to tell me that her sister was also new to the city and that she thought we’d get along. She was right; we did. Even if we hadn’t, though, Eisenberg trying to friend-matchmake her sister and a Twitter mutual was a perfect example of the value she places on community-making, whether that’s close to her home in Philadelphia (where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts) or on the other side of the country.

Eisenberg’s books reflect this same care: they, too, take an interest in the ways that people—whether by choice or circumstance—come to share beauty, art, conflict, loss, and literal and figurative spaces with one another. In 2020, she published The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia—a book of memoir, reportage, and cultural criticism that arose from her time working and living in Pocahontas County in West Virginia. The book investigates the murder of two young women who were hitchhiking to a festival; it also explores the New York City–bred author’s coming-of-age in the rural landscape and its many-layered community.

Eisenberg’s debut novel Housemates (2024) follows Bernie and Leah, two twentysomething queers who live in a group house in West Philadelphia. They decide to take a road trip through Pennsylvania and document what they find in photographs and words. Inspired by Berenice Abbott, a large format photographer, and Elizabeth McCausland, an art critic who shared a romantic as well as artistic relationship with Abbott, Eisenberg’s fictional pair learn to understand their respective and shared identities even more deeply during their travels.

Soon after the publication of Housemates in May, I spoke to Eisenberg about perspective, embodiment, place, and beauty.

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ILANA MASAD: Housemates is narrated by an older woman, Ann Baxter, who’s able to access Bernie and Leah’s lives and histories much in the way a novelist accesses her characters’ lives, which is to say—not completely or for eternity. How did you discover Ann, and what did having her as the narrator allow you to do in the book that you wouldn’t have been able to with an omniscient third-person perspective?

EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG: I am not that woo-woo of a person, but the way the narrator came to me was definitely pretty woo-woo. I was having a problem: I wanted the novel to feel bigger than just two young queer people in West Philadelphia becoming housemates and going on a road trip; I wanted the book to include more zones of time than just 2018 (where the book begins) and include the experiences of queer ancestors and artists who had come before Bernie and Leah. I was writing the book in close third, but it felt too limited, too claustrophobic. It wasn’t putting the reader’s attention on the big questions.

So, I was typing one day, not feeling good about the POV, and all of a sudden a first-person voice appeared fully formed, speaking to me. At first, I thought it was maybe Berenice Abbott, the real-life, queer, large format photographer speaking from beyond the grave, but I quickly realized it wasn’t that literal. It was someone older, who lived near Bernie and Leah, who would understand their environment in West Philly. It was someone who had lived in a queer artistic partnership that hadn’t ended well. She was watching Bernie and Leah for her own reasons, to figure out the answer to a question, which is, I think, can art save your life?

I wasn’t sure this kind of narrator would work at first. But I read Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019), which all create a narrator who is telling the story for their own reasons and can telescope in and out in ways a straightforward third-person POV can’t. I hope the narrator makes the novel bigger, more intergenerational, and more ambitious—a word I consider to have positive connotations.

A couple of things strike me here. First, the idea that the novel felt like it was “just” about two queer Philadelphia residents. From a craft perspective, I see what you mean, but we’ve—or at least I have—been so conditioned to think that our stories don’t matter enough on their own. Second, the fact that Ann came to you in this “woo-woo” way—which, of course, mirrors the mysterious and somewhat magical way she’s able to access Leah and Bernie’s lives.

It’s true, we have been so conditioned to minimize the importance of intimate stories, stories about two people meeting and becoming immensely important to each other. I’m sure that did play a role in my thinking—probably internalized homophobia and misogyny and fatphobia too (Leah is fat). But I think because the book started from historical inspiration, I did always want to find a way to acknowledge history, queer history, queer artistic ancestors.

As Ann Baxter tells the story of Bernie and Leah, she’s turning over what has and hasn’t changed about being a queer artist in love with another queer artist from her experiences decades ago. I wanted to put pressure on the “it gets better” narrative of queerness and think about the ways that being a queer artist looked and felt different before gay marriage and Instagram—and not always for the worse.

Let’s talk about bodies: in Housemates, every single character has one, distinct and precious and perfect in all its imperfections. Except, that is, for Baxter herself—who is largely disembodied, appearing physically within the book only briefly. As a writer and human, you’re invested in critiquing and dismantling fatphobia and material anti-fat bias.

How does writing fiction—and writing Baxter telling the story of Leah and Bernie in particular—relate to your own embodiment? Or is writing a disembodied action, where you’re more a brain inside a body than a body with a brain?

Wow—I have literally never thought about how Ann Baxter doesn’t have a body. It’s true, she doesn’t, and something in me resists giving her one. I don’t want to reduce her, maybe, or pin her down. All interpretations are valid. But maybe when I’m the teller, the author, the writer, I don’t have a body, or I could have any body.

I have indeed written a lot about embodiment in fiction and anti-fat bias in fiction, yet when I’m writing fiction—when it’s working, anyway—I am in a space of openness, specificity, and the human (rather than an argumentative, analytical, or intellectualizing one). I try to really believe in the specific body of every character, in its realness and particularness and fleshiness in a way that is about delight and play and experience.

MFA programs tend to deprioritize the body, and that never really worked for me. POV is body, plot is body, structure is body. You can’t strip away the body from any of these craft elements—or at least I can’t. The bodies of my characters are where a lot of the impulse for fiction comes from—what they desire, what they fear, how they experience being a human person.

But would I say that I, Emma, am a super embodied person? Probably not. I’ve always struggled with being embodied and, like Bernie and Leah, struggled with believing that the mind and the body are connected. Maybe it’s precisely because I struggle to be embodied in life that I can inhabit bodies so deeply on the page? I don’t know.

There’s an interesting tension in the novel between performance and action: the size and old-fashioned nature of Bernie’s large format camera makes it a performance of sorts, whether it means to be or not. During the road trip, people are always interested in the camera. Leah’s writing, on the other hand, is a much quieter action and is rarely noted by those she and Bernie encounter. Yet Leah is the one figuring out that writing and photography can be paired together. Plus, of course, there is the tongue-in-cheek commentary throughout the book about the subset of often privileged queer leftists dedicated to social justice, and the distance between performing one’s values and true activism.

How do you think about these delineations? What can loud or flashy performance do that a quieter, less public action can’t, and vice versa?

Early on, I spoke about Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland to a historian who said that Berenice was “quiet but not shy” and Elizabeth was “shy but not quiet.” That really stuck with me and influenced how I formed Bernie and Leah’s characters. Bernie has a core audacity and a “fuck around and find out” attitude, while Leah is more fearful but also a little bit more active. Leah wears her feelings on her sleeve, whereas Bernie’s are quite buried, sometimes unknown even to her. I was interested in that pairing and why two people with those configurations might be drawn to each other. Bravery, privilege, performance, and integrity are all words at the core of the force field that happens between the two of them in ways that are constantly switching, I think, throughout the novel and the road trip they go on.

I think there is something at play here also between images and words that you’re getting at. The project Leah and Bernie embark on in the novel and later articulate and actualize is about the conviction that images and words need each other, that putting both together does something to human beings in a way that neither does on its own. So maybe images are the performance and writing is the action; performance and action need each other too, I guess.

Beauty is incredibly important to this novel: not beauty as defined by the norms of American overculture—though that kind is in there too, of course—but beauty as it is perceived by Bernie and Leah individually, which Baxter conveys to us. The beauty in the novel never feels like a separate thing, like that, over there, is a beautiful object/person/work of art, but rather a relationship, ongoing and full of potential and evolving. As a reader, I came away feeling like the book found beauty everywhere in the world. What were you hoping to convey through your narrative approach? How do you experience or witness beauty?

Damn, how do I? I love how you’ve articulated beauty here, that the world of the book finds the world beautiful. I’ve been joking in interviews—but maybe it’s not really a joke—that American fiction has a spectrum of beauty. On one side you have Ottessa Moshfegh, who finds nothing beautiful, who thinks humans are disgusting bags of shit and the only thing that aesthetically pleases the eye is an emaciated collarbone. On the other side, I think, you have writers like Grace Paley and her once-student George Saunders who find everything beautiful and see the human light in every person.

Everywhere along the spectrum is good and fine, of course, and makes for fascinating literature. But I did make a choice to try to live on the half of the spectrum where everything is beautiful. I have always been a person obsessed with small beauties, like Joan Didion said she was: more interested in the blinking sign than the big idea. I love a big idea too, don’t get me wrong, but there is something about a physical object that turns me on.

At the same time, I do believe that some things are especially beautiful, and I am a fan of especially beautiful things, like lace and pretty glassware and a nice chair. The housemates in Housemates can be judgy about beauty, and I find that many activist queer communities I’ve been a part of can sometimes position beauty as morally bankrupt and unnecessary and even as the opposite of justice. But why? Why do beauty and justice have to be opposed? I don’t think they are or ever have been.

Place is clearly important to you as a writer. Your first book was deeply connected to Pocahontas County in West Virginia, and this novel is very invested in Pennsylvania as a whole, both its urban life in Philly and the rural life that Bernie and Leah witness during their road trip. Has place always felt important to your writing? To you?

I grew up in lower Manhattan in the ’90s, so in some ways it feels like I come from no place, a place that belongs to the world, and that has changed so much in the past 30 years that it is virtually unrecognizable to me now. If I had to guess, that is probably why I’ve gone looking for other places to love and call home in life and on the page. My earliest stories were set in New York—but so much American fiction is set in New York that I think it began to feel like the place wasn’t working, wasn’t activating anything in the story.

“Nothing happens nowhere” is a thing a creative writing teacher once said to me about place in fiction, and to me that means that place is a fundamental part of what is happening. I love my neighborhood in West Philly, which also gives me the right to poke gentle fun at it, I think. To go on a road trip that’s urgent, you have to be running from something and you have to have somewhere to come back to. Bernie and Leah are running from this shtetl-like, queer, racially segregated, and rigid-thinking place but they also need to love it again when they return, finding it and themselves changed. Rural Pennsylvania is the place they run to, looking for different systems of thought and ways of understanding the world.

My experience of living in a super rural place in West Virginia in my twenties was that in many ways it was more radical, freer, and more open than New York, and that personally surprising truth has animated a lot of my fiction about urban people. Pennsylvania is a really important part of Housemates. The book couldn’t have been set anywhere else—it’s a state that’s so vast and so poorly understood and so deeply mixed and divided. The perfect place to set a book about discovering the both/and of living.

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Emma Copley Eisenberg is a queer writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first book, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (2020), was named a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and other publications. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.

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Photo of Emma Copley Eisenberg by Kenzi Crash, courtesy of Emma Copley Eisenberg.