"intense tight-knit communities become this testing ground against which people are able to find out who they really are and who they are not"
Housemates author Emma Copley Eisenberg on writing "housemates and roommates and strange uncategorizable friendships and mentorships," plus a writing prompt inspired by Craiglist roommate ads
Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. Previously in this space we’ve talked about pitching, caring for our attention, and approaches to creative research. Today’s newsletter features
, whose novel Housemates is out today.I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.
Today’s tending is a piece by Emma Eisenberg, who I’ve admired for years as a writer and a creator of literary community. Her first book, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, is an incredibly deeply-researched book of narrative nonfiction and makes use of the personal in a way that’s so smart and surprising. (If you haven’t already, go read and come back so we can talk about it! I really think the personal narrative comes in at exactly the right moment, and I thought about it a lot as I was shaping my next book, which also uses personal narrative alongside research.) Emma’s also the founder of Blue Stoop, a literary organization in Philadelphia, that’s been such an important space for community online and in-person for people in the region and beyond.
Emma’s new book, the much-anticipated novel Housemates, publishes today, and she was generous enough to talk a bit about why she’s drawn to writing about friendship and community. Below, she describes why these relationships fascinate her, and she offers a really fun prompt to use in your own writing.
Emma, on writing about friendship and communities of friends
I’ve always been interested in communities of people bound together in ways that are hard to describe and that’s what both of my books are about, it turns out. I read Sophie’s Choice by William Styron and my main takeaway was that it would have been fun and sexy to live in a boarding house in Brooklyn in the 1940s.
I guess what fascinates me is the way that intense tight-knit communities become this testing ground against which people are able to find out who they really are and who they are not. My novel Housemates is about a queer group house in West Philly that exists within a broader neighborhood of queer (in the ethical and political sense) social life in the city. The house where they meet is made up of five housemates who seem to have formed a set of collective views on what is the right way to live, yet both of my main characters are chafing under this belief system. Moving away from the group and towards each other is how the story gets ignited, a story that ends up being about two people traveling in a car across rural Pennsylvania and making art together. They are not quite lovers, not quite family, and only sort of friends.
In writing Housemates, I went looking for books that use this testing ground to magnificent effect. I found Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (employee and boss’ daughter wrestle each other in an apartment they now share?), Nell Zink’s Nicotine (a group house made of literal buckets of shit turns out to also be made of misguided ideas!), Raven Leilani’s Luster (mistress + wife and child share a house), Richard Mirabella’s Brother and Sister Enter the Forest (siblings as estranged housemates), and Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different (a group of friends comes together to fight housing inequality, among other delightful and complex plot elements).
“Friend” and friendship” are kind of catch-all words for people that we don’t know how to define, and I’m really interested in that undefinable quality. Housemates and roommates and strange uncategorizable friendships and mentorships are fascinating to me because as a culture these are the people for whom we have no box, yet they are the relationships that often shape your life. You are wildly intimate with the people you live with – you hear them cry and come and fight on the phone with their mothers – but you’ve never met their parents or seen the place where they grew up and you don’t know what the office where they go every day looks like. We don’t have words for this kind of fellow feeling that is at once super close and super far away.
if you’d like to try it out . . .
Go to Craiglist’s roommate wanted ads and pick the most bananas or charming ad you find. Roommate ads are incredible texts, sites of enormous subtext and longing and humor. Write a scene from the perspective of the person who answered the ad looking at the person who wrote it. Make sure you let both characters ask each other a lot of questions. What people say they want in a roommate are often not the things they really want.
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the novel Housemates and the narrative nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, which 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, VQR, 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. You can find Emma at @frumpenberg on IG, Twitter & TikTok.
Emma writes the great newsletter Frump Feelings, which I bet you’d love!
Emma’s on tour for Housemates! Full schedule below. Or buy Housemates.
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Thank you so much Nancy!! 🏡🏡💞🏡