Chloe Cheimets speaks with Emma Cop­ley Eisen­berg about the big ques­tions that informed her mes­mer­iz­ing debut nov­el, House­mates. They dis­cuss the dynam­ic between artists and col­lab­o­ra­tors who are in a roman­tic rela­tion­ship, the queer scene in Philadel­phia, and cre­at­ing art in our con­tem­po­rary times.

Chloe Cheimets: In 1939, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Berenice Abbott and writer Eliz­a­beth McCaus­land pub­lished Chang­ing New York, a land­mark pho­to series. In your book House­mates, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bernie Abbott and writer Leah McCaus­land devel­op Chang­ing Penn­syl­va­nia, their own mul­ti­me­dia col­lab­o­ra­tive art project. This book is in con­ver­sa­tion with his­tor­i­cal fig­ures with­out being explic­it­ly about them. What drew you to this kind of project? In what ways are your char­ac­ters sim­i­lar to their antecedents, and in what ways do they diverge?

Emma Cop­ley Eisen­berg: It’s true! I came across a biog­ra­phy of Berenice Abbott in 2017 at the exact moment in time when I was ask­ing all these big ques­tions, Sheila Heti-like, ​“how should a per­son be?” It felt like being an artist and being a queer per­son in Amer­i­ca were impos­si­ble, and it felt like find­ing love and being tru­ly togeth­er with some­one was impos­si­ble. In the biog­ra­phy, I learned that Abbott was this raw, ambi­tious, tal­ent­ed les­bian pho­tog­ra­ph­er who went on a real road trip with her crush – an art crit­ic named Eliz­a­beth McCaus­land – and they came back as life part­ners and cre­ative part­ners, ready to embark on a city-defin­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion. That road trip (what hap­pened on it?) birthed my nov­el. I want­ed to take the idea of a car jour­ney being the site of life-chang­ing inti­ma­cy and artis­tic inspi­ra­tion but make it fun­da­men­tal­ly about the chal­lenges fac­ing queer artists today. Many of the places that Bernie and Leah go in House­mates are actu­al places that Abbott and McCaus­land went, but many of the fic­tion­al stops diverge from the real ones too. Very lit­tle else of Abbott and McCausland’s real lives made it into House­mates but a great deal of the book found its ori­gin in them. McCaus­land was tall and fat and butch. Abbott had a men­tor, the French pho­tog­ra­ph­er Eugene Atget, who taught her how to see and whose artis­tic lega­cy she took up and car­ried with her for the rest of her life. McCaus­land had a girl­friend whom she tossed aside for Abbott; Abbott had a big heart­break with a wom­an­iz­ing princess before she met McCaus­land. Every­thing else I made up! 

CC: House­mates has a nest­ed struc­ture. There’s the cen­tral sto­ry of Bernie and Leah, queer artists, house­mates, and col­lab­o­ra­tors. And then there’s a frame sto­ry that echoes the cen­tral sto­ry –anoth­er queer artist, unnamed, at least a gen­er­a­tion old­er, who also col­lab­o­rat­ed with her lover, watch­es Leah and Bernie and nar­rates their lives as well as her own. How did you land on this nar­ra­tive voice? What does she add to the text?

ECE: I didn’t set out to write a nest­ed struc­ture; I’m but a sim­ple girl that usu­al­ly likes pret­ty sim­ple sto­ries of char­ac­ters who just open their mouth and nar­rate. But I’m a huge believ­er in the idea that craft inno­va­tions usu­al­ly come to be because of prob­lems you’re hav­ing in the writ­ing. I kept writ­ing the point of view of this nov­el in dif­fer­ent ways, and it always felt like it wasn’t quite work­ing, wasn’t quite direct­ing the reader’s atten­tion to what I want­ed the book to be most about. More than being a love sto­ry or a road trip sto­ry or a sto­ry about Trump’s Amer­i­ca in 2018, I most want­ed this book to be about art­mak­ing – the cost of it, what it can and can’t do, and how it is actu­al­ly done. So I kept try­ing to solve the point of view prob­lem and then one day the first per­son point of view just sort of appeared, ful­ly formed, talk­ing to me. I had a choice – shut it out (who was that voice? I’m almost done with this book!) or let it keep talk­ing. I decid­ed to lis­ten. And I’m glad I did, even though the ​“I” makes this book a lit­tle less sim­ple, I think it gives the book a sec­ond lay­er of knowl­edge, of gen­er­a­tional queer dif­fer­ences, and of time pass­ing. The old­er nar­ra­tor is try­ing to fig­ure some­thing out for her­self – can art real­ly save your life? – by watch­ing and learn­ing from a younger gen­er­a­tion of queer artists. 

CC: Bernie and Leah have a com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship. They are col­lab­o­ra­tors and lovers, not quite friends. There’s an imbal­ance between them — Bernie is more artis­ti­cal­ly rec­og­nized and more beloved. Could you speak a bit about this cre­ative and roman­tic part­ner­ship? How cen­tral was this imbal­ance to the sto­ry you want­ed to tell?

ECE: It was real­ly cen­tral. I’ve always been real­ly inter­est­ed in Car­son McCullers’ idea that in any roman­tic rela­tion­ship there is always ​“the lover” and ​“the beloved.” I got to think­ing about how that dynam­ic would shift if two peo­ple in love are also mak­ing art togeth­er. The world often inter­cedes and decides which per­son in a duo is cool­er, more impor­tant, the main char­ac­ter of the sex­i­er sto­ry, regard­less of how true that sto­ry real­ly is. In real life, McCaus­land nev­er real­ly quite got her due; Berenice Abbott out­lived her and out­shone her in the his­tor­i­cal record. In House­mates, I want­ed to con­jure this imbal­ance but also under­mine it, and think about the ways that the less ​“shiny” part­ner in a two­some is some­times the most impor­tant, even foun­da­tion­al pres­ence. Bernie sees some things that Leah doesn’t, but Leah sees a lot of things that Bernie doesn’t too – like how to artic­u­late their joint project, how to love, how to be a part of a com­mu­ni­ty, and how to stay the course of togeth­er­ness over the long haul, qual­i­ties that are tra­di­tion­al­ly under­val­ued in an artist. 

CC: This nov­el reads like a love let­ter to the queer scene in Philadel­phia. What role does this com­mu­ni­ty play in your writ­ing practice?

ECE: I do think of this book as a love let­ter to queer com­mu­ni­ty, for sure, and a love let­ter to Philadel­phia, a major and major­ly gor­geous east coast city that is severe­ly under­seen in lit­er­ary fic­tion. I’ve lived in Philadel­phia almost my whole adult life now and so my neigh­bor­hood of West Philadel­phia, which is very queer and has a very tight knit almost shtetl-like atmos­phere, has become the site of all my becom­ings and mis­takes and impor­tant moments. I have so much respect for this com­mu­ni­ty, for the ways that it holds itself to a high eth­i­cal stan­dard of behav­ior and imag­ines a more just world. I also poke gen­tle fun in the nov­el at the ways that my par­tic­u­lar queer neigh­bor­hood can become pre­scrip­tive and judge­men­tal, often, I think, as a response to feel­ings of guilt and shame about gen­tri­fy­ing a his­tor­i­cal­ly Black area. All of these ele­ments mix and show up in my writ­ing. This com­mu­ni­ty shaped the final project that Bernie and Leah cre­ate in the nov­el, and it inspires me and offers me logis­ti­cal sup­port in ways that are essen­tial to my abil­i­ty to keep writing. 

CC: Penn­syl­va­nia, in all its con­tra­dic­tions, plays a cen­tral role in this book. There’s so much geo­graph­ic and soci­o­log­i­cal detail here about a decep­tive­ly huge state. Tell us about the research process for a text with so much detailed setting.

ECE: At a cer­tain point, I real­ized that though I lived in Philadel­phia, I knew rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle about the rest of the state, which is so var­ied, and includes Steel­ers coun­try, Penn­syl­tucky, coal coun­try, almost-Cana­da, and the Poconos, among oth­er areas. I began to take day and overnight trips to dif­fer­ent parts of the state, see­ing nat­ur­al caves, Amish coun­try, post-indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ing towns, dra­mat­ic moun­tains, and more. I began to learn about events that put Penn­syl­va­nia on the nation­al stage, like Flight 93, the plane that went down in a reclaimed coal mine on 9/11, and to study Philadelphia’s deci­sive role in the 2020 elec­tion. I read Gal­way Kin­nell poems and think pieces, but most­ly I just drove myself around and did what Leah and Bernie do – talk to peo­ple. I still con­sid­er myself a begin­ner when it comes to Pennsylvania.

CC: Bernie is a large-for­mat pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Accord­ing to this book, it’s a painstak­ing, but mag­i­cal medi­um. What drew you to write about pho­tog­ra­phy? As an art form, how do you think it com­ple­ments text?

ECE: In anoth­er life I would have loved to be a pho­tog­ra­ph­er; I’ve always wan­dered to the pho­tog­ra­phy wing in any muse­um. My dad always ques­tioned whether pho­tog­ra­phy was as much of a ​“real” art form as paint­ing, say, and I always main­tained that it was. The real Berenice Abbott with her big heavy cam­era was the start­ing point and it didn’t take long for me to learn that large for­mat is still an art that is prac­ticed today. I was attract­ed to the ways it has his­tor­i­cal­ly been cod­ed as a tool only used by ​“the mas­ters,” usu­al­ly men, and how fussy and dif­fi­cult it is. I am some­one who is always attract­ed to hard things, and I think Bernie is too. While I was writ­ing the book, there was also some syn­chronic­i­ty going on because all these arti­cles began to come out about how Gen Z is cast­ing their phones aside in favor of return­ing to film pho­tog­ra­phy. Every­thing old is new again; we’re hun­gry, I think, for slow­ness, and for detail and nuance in our images. I was also real­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the idea that a large for­mat camera’s eye can actu­al­ly ​“see” more than a human eye. If that’s not a metaphor for the nov­el itself, I don’t know what is. 

CC: This book con­fronts a lot of recent Amer­i­can his­to­ry. We encounter so many events of the last decade – the Trump pres­i­den­cy, Black Lives Mat­ter protests, COVID. What about this peri­od did you want to capture?

ECE: I want­ed to set the book in 2018, in the mid­dle of the Trump years, as a record of that time when we were halfway in, when many of us felt that all the sys­tems we were accus­tomed to rely­ing on were crum­bling, but hadn’t yet ful­ly decom­pen­sat­ed. We didn’t yet know how much worse things were going to get; in some ways, that year was the last gasp of the old way of think­ing about Amer­i­ca, maybe. I was inter­est­ed in those big Events you men­tion, but maybe even more, I was inter­est­ed in how those big Events were talked about, made into infor­ma­tion or sto­ries or news which then became nar­ra­tives that fil­tered down into our lives. I had a lot of fun bring­ing that aspect onto the page by play­ing with head­lines that are part real and part fake, and writ­ing fake obit­u­ar­ies and par­o­dy­ing the rev­er­ent and with­hold­ing tone of cen­trist pub­li­ca­tions like The New York Times and the Asso­ci­at­ed Press.

CC: What are you read­ing and writ­ing right now?

ECE: I’m very excit­ed that my next book, a short sto­ry col­lec­tion called Fat Swim, will be out next year. I’m hav­ing a ball going back into a few of the sto­ries to tight­en and deep­en as well as writ­ing two brand new sto­ries. I love sto­ries! They are maybe my favorite form, cer­tain­ly my home base and first love form. Read­ing wise, I’m real­ly look­ing for fun­ny right now, and I’m real­ly look­ing for real feel­ing, big feel­ing, books that swing for the fences emo­tions-wise rather than hedg­ing their bets with irony and mean­ness and dis­af­fec­tion. Recent­ly in this vein, I real­ly loved Broth­er and Sis­ter Enter the For­est by Richard Mirabel­la and We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart.