The novel I did not have to write

It's ok to write chaotically

My debut novel Housemates’ cover will be revealed this Thursday, December 21 over on Electric Lit. I’m warning you now that I’m going to send a special, one-time email that day, but I won’t do that ever again. Below is the story of how she got here and how your book might too.

Alexander Chee

says, of writing a novel: “You write the novel because you have to write it. You do it because it is easier to do than to not do. You can’t write a novel you don’t have to write.”

Cheryl Strayed

says, of writing her first novel: “I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest…I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands. I’d suffered. I’d given it everything I had.”

I’m fascinated by both these quotes. By the idea that writing a novel would be easier than not writing it, and by the idea of a novel as something physically, lodged in your body which, only through its writing, can be released. But they both used to intimidate me too, as I was writing my novel. What does have to feel like? And second beating heart? Did the messy document of words and characters called my novel, feel like either of these things? More often it felt like hope and confusion and ambition and suspicion and intution.

Yet both quotes speak strongly to my experience of writing my first book, The Third Rainbow Girl, which is not a novel. It’s a “strange” and “hard to classify” book; people still don’t know where to shelve it in a bookstore. My personal recommendation is memoir, or essays, or even general nonfiction if that’s an option, but you do you.

I remember very clearly sitting in an auditorium at Bryn Mawr College for a reading and conversation with Maggie Nelson in 2017. I remember a West Philly crush of mine was there, a hot lanky butch in a beanie, and I was behaving chaotically. But then someone asked Nelson why, though she was even then best known as a writer concerned with queerness and philosophy, she first had to write two books about the murder of her aunt. “It was just a boulder,” she replied, in my memory. “It was the biggest boulder I had to move out of the way before I could write anything else.”

I was stunned. The events of my early twenties spent in a unique rural community in southeastern West Virginia and how they felt in conversation with two murders that had also happened there in 1980 felt like that to me. I imagined a cave with a big rock at its mouth and what it might feel like to have the rock moved out of the way. That feeling of release came, not when The Third Rainbow Girl was published, but a few months before, after it was too late to change anything and people were reading it and reacting. I was walking around Philadelphia talking to my editor on the phone and I began to cry. The boulder, I realized, had been rolled away and the cave was open. What would I do now?

Almost nothing in my writing career has been linear. I got my MFA in fiction and basically only read fiction until the year 2015. I thought my first book would definitely be fiction, probably a short story collection, which is what my agent, meeting me at 27, took me on for. My short story collection, Fat Swim, which contains work as old as 2014, will come out in 2025, and it will be my third book. If you had told me at 27 that my first book would be a reported memoir and my second would be a novel I would have patted you gently on the head in patronizing disbelief. Where, I might have asked you, would I possibly have learned to write either a memoir or a novel?

In 2016, because we were all told that novels sold better than story collections, I tried to write one by expanding my short story “Ray’s Birthday Bar” (IYKYK) — fun fact, that story appeared in the same issue of American Short Fiction as the story that gave us “The Bad Art Friend” discourse, so you can’t find the issue online for love or money — and showed it to a few friends and my agent. They liked it OK but not a lot, and I agreed; it wasn’t really a novel, it was just two characters in a place. I already knew the ending, kind of, because I’d already written the story version, so it wasn’t exciting to write. I wasn’t writing to find anything out, I wasn’t surprising myself. It definitely didn’t feel easier than not writing it or like a second beating heart. I put it in a drawer.

And then sometimes, shit just happens. I saw, by chance, an exhibit about the pioneering large format American 20th century lesbian photographer Berenice Abbott, and then my parents gave me a biography of her for Christmas which I did not read. But then I read it, and holy cow. I became fascinated by the real life relationship between Abbott and the art critic Elizabeth McCausland, who would become her romantic and creative partner for more than thirty years. More specifically, I became obsessed with a roadtrip the two took together in 1935. By all accounts, they both left single and creatively adrift, and they came back together and with clarity of artistic vision. What had happened between them on all those days spent driving through the United States and all those nights they spent in motels?

I had to know. I had to know not out of intellectual curiosity but out of pragmatic need; I too was a queer woman artist trying to find love and what to do with my life. I wanted to go somewhere with a stranger and come back with a partner who would teach me how to be. The trouble was that I lived in a country that is fundamentally hostile to queerness, women, and art. How had these two historical queers managed then? And what, ultimately, had torn them apart? In this way, I found the questions that I was trying to answer. Exhausted from researching The Third Rainbow Girl, and selfishly wanting answers that would translate to my contemporary problems, I updated the character to the present day and called her Bernie. Bernie’s voice came easily, and my agent was enthusiastic.

After my first book was published in January 2020 (I was one of the lucky ones who got half a book tour in before COVID hit) we sold two books of fiction: the completed short story collection and Bernie’s voice, as a partial novel, to an editor who really got both books, though she asked if we could publish the novel first—a not unconventional ask, it turns out. Sure, I said! I would have said anything. I signed a contract. Now it had become the novel I was legally obligated to write.

And when I tell you that from spring 2020 to spring 2024 everything has changed, I mean everything. The title. The POV. The character I felt most connected to. The fundamental sense of what the book was about. The book’s editor. America. The world. My heart. My brain. My body. The color of my walls. The story of myself as someone doomed to be alone forever. The novel I dreamed up in 2018 was not the same novel I sold and promised to write in 2020 was not the same novel I was writing in 2022. The novel that will be published and that you and I will hold in our hands (on May 28th!) is the novel I had to write because it is the novel I’ve humbled myself before and lay on the ground for and sacrificed for and missed drinks and birthdays and sleep and income generating hours for. Chee and Strayed were right, of course; it was just that I’d misunderstood them.

Housemates is the novel I had no idea I had to write, and the one that was born inside the writing, day by day, hour by hour. It was born from procrastinating, from therapizing, from masturbating, from walking, from driving, from reading, from meeting my partner and getting married, from watching my dad get sick, and from changing my mind over and over and over again. I guess what I am trying to say is that it is possible to find the novel you have to write by writing a novel you did not have to write, or many, and that all of these may at first have been considered the “same” novel.

I tell all this not because I’m so interesting, but because perhaps you are. Some books are boulders or second beating hearts, and some books are your future self, a self you never could have imagined until you wrote it into being. Perhaps you too are writing a novel you had no idea you had to write, in the sense that it has never been clear what the fuck you are doing. Isn’t that what’s beautiful about a novel maybe? That it can stretch and change so much and still be called the same word. Perhaps this is all a long way of saying I wrote one book and took it over the finish line and then I wrote another one, and this is what the second one felt like.

Housemates will be a Gemini. How chaotic! Just like her making.

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Toppings

• Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas. I came of age at almost exactly the same time and place as the author, so admittedly this novel spoke to my exact niche experience of being a weird teen at a weird arty hippy high school in Manhattan directly after 9/11, but the quality of prose and the intensity of the characters (two queer besties told in a remarkably innovative “I” and sometimes “we” structure) makes it so this novel translates to any and all. One to curl up under the covers with, or a great gift.

• The Gilded Age on HBO. Tis the season for period pieces. Cynthia Dixon as the spinster aunt wearing a bustle? A social climbing conniving wife of a capitalist railway tycoon? Yes please. (I’ve heard good things about The Buccaneers too but haven’t watched yet.)

• Claire Saffitz’s “The Only Chocolate Cake Recipe You’ll Ever Need.” In time for Friendsmukkah or any holiday you celebrate, I made this chocolate cake recipe with regular flour instead of cake flour because I was too lazy to go to the store and it was enough to pull me out of a post egg-retrieval-for-freezing slump. The frosting is not thick and sweet but rather light and fluffy, and the cake itself is also tender and almost bitter. It uses some methods I wasn’t familiar with (reverse creaming??) but everything is explained well and it’s no more complicated than the Magnolia bakery one I was used to.

• HGTV’s Restored by the Fords. My favorite bedtime show. A twee sister with nice bangs and hunky older brother restore historic homes in central Pennsylvania, keeping their original character in tact. I mean…sweet dreams my friend.

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Book Scoop

There’s enough book in here already, but I’ll be back next month with an update and an ask.

yours + happiest holidays,
Emma