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When Bernie and Leah, the protagonists of Emma Copley Eisenberg’s new novel Housemates, set out from Philadelphia on a cross-country road trip, they don’t yet know what Eisenberg learned herself while traveling through America a few years ago: that such a journey can engender a fierce and bizarre kind of connection. It’s one that Bernie, a photographer, and Leah, a writer, develop as they add new cities and towns to their list, and—both separately and together—dive deeper into figuring out who they are and what their art means to them.
Vogue recently spoke to Eisenberg about taking inspiration from Thelma and Louise and Patricia Highsmith, and depictions of fatness in fiction.
Vogue: How are you feeling, with your pub date coming up so soon?
Emma Copley Eisenberg: I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. I feel like there’s been a lot of sweet excitement online, more so than with my first book, so it’s fun to be both a debut fiction writer and also not [making] a total debut. I’m just really excited to see who the book’s going to land with, now that I’m kind of on the other side.
Structurally, what appealed to you about telling a road-trip or travel-based story?
I’ve always wanted to write a novel that was one fraction as good as Thelma and Louise. That’s a guiding text in my life, and I think I’ve always been really interested in the special forcefield that happens when you’re in a car for a prolonged period of time with just one other person. I think there’s a lot of intimacy that happens on trips that we don’t see in other places, or any other part of our lives. I’m also really interested in the intimacy that happens in group communal living situations, which I think is also why I wanted to write a messy, queer, group-house novel. So, I got to work with my dreams and write a road-trip novel and a messy group-house novel, but I think with the road-trip novel aspect, it took me a while to figure out how it was going to work. In Thelma and Louise, they commit this crime that sets off a series of events, and everything is really cause-and-effect. Sexy Brad Pitt robs them, and they have no money… you know, one thing leads to the next. I kind of felt like my characters were not going to murder someone. I was like, I already wrote a book about murder, so let’s not do that—and I felt like they were both motivated more by the drive to create something than the drive to destroy something, if that makes sense. It took me a while to figure out what the structure of a road narrative would look like without some big, catalyzing event. I tried a lot of different structures and drew a map of Thelma and Louise that didn’t work, and I finally settled on the idea that it’s the connection between the two of them that is the thing that’s going to develop over the course of the road trip, and everything that’s happening on the road trip needs to develop their deeper connection. Also, each of them has major breakthroughs in their personal art form over the course of the road trip.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve personally learned while traveling?
Yes, I drove about 10,000 miles by myself, living out of my pickup truck after I left West Virginia, which is the area that my first book deals with. I was 24 and really lost and not sure where I wanted to live, not sure what I wanted. And that trip was very restorative for me. It was really expensive—like, I took all the money that I had and put it into that trip—but it kind of restored my faith in community a little bit, I think. I recognize that I am a white lady, and I experience a level of safety that not all folks would have on the road, but I found it to be an extremely human experience, where I felt like people were very open to me as I traveled. I had this very broad commission of thinking about music, specifically country music and bluegrass, as I traveled, and many people like asking me to play with them even though I’m a terrible musician. There was just a lot of generosity that I received on that trip that was very important to me at that time.
What do you wish you saw more of with regard to fatness in fiction?
Well, I’m always thinking about the depictions of fatness in fiction now; it’s become a big part of how I read, fortunately, or unfortunately, and I ran the numbers on the New York Times Notable Books over the past five years. In all that fiction, less than 1% of those books have a fat character. I was surprised by that, so it’s definitely a problem of erasure and just infrequently seeing fat bodies as main characters. We often see fat bodies as side characters or as jokes or as asides, and that, I just feel, is really toxic. It’s this sense that a fat person can’t appear in a book unless they’re a site of repulsion and disgust, or unless the book is about losing weight or solving, like, the problem of their body. I always want to read books that are not about the character’s body, fundamentally; like, they just get to be fat and doing something else, and their fatness is treated like an element of who they are or a neutral aspect. I always want to see fiction that’s about fat people having a really fucking good time. I want to see people in fiction having really joyful and hot sex and being really embodied, and Leah, my fat main character, gets to have a lot of hot sex. She’s also really good at sex, which I wanted to give to her. I wanted to show a character who’s not like, I hate my body and I want to lose weight, but also isn’t like, I love my body and my body journey is finished. I wanted to write someone who’s very in the middle of grappling with a lot of stuff, who’s dealing with the intersection of body dysphoria and fatness. Leah’s nonbinary but has big boobs, so how does she handle that? I don’t really know the answers, but I wanted to put it in and see how the character would evolve.
Are there other books that sort of held your hand as you wrote this one?
There was The Price of Salt, with ye olde Patty, who became a terrible grump later in life, but I was very interested in this idea of an older generation of queers looking down on us and watching what we’re doing now; that book also just has such a sexy, fun, road-trip element. I’ve been really excited about Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s Big Girl; weight is at the center of that book, and I think it’s done in a really nuanced and human way. That books shows a mother taking her daughter to Weight Watchers with her when she’s a kid, which was my experience as well, and I feel we need more books for girls who went to Weight Watchers. I also love Bryan Washington’s Lot because it’s so place-based, and I want my novels to feel really deeply Philly and show the city that we don’t often see in national conversations about queer fiction.
This conversation has beed edited and condensed.
