Emma Copley Eisenberg has always considered how her characters take up space, whether in 2020’s The Third Rainbow Girl, 2024’s Housemates, or her newest book, Fat Swim, a wide-ranging and wonderfully embodied set of linked stories taking place in and around Philadelphia.
To mark Fat Swim’s recent release, Vogue spoke to Eisenberg about drawing inspiration from Miranda July, Raymond Carver, and Bryan Washington; her literary beef with Jonathan Franzen; renting a billboard to promote her book; and more. Read that conversation below.
Vogue: What was it like to go from publishing a novel to releasing a collectsion of short stories?
Emma Copley Eisenberg: It’s so weird, because this is actually my oldest book and my newest book at the same time. I’ve been working on Fat Swim in some form since 2014, and I definitely thought my first published book would be short stories, but it just didn’t feel ready. Then I started to explore other things, and I’m really glad I waited, because the stories got so different. I was working on The Third Rainbow Girl and Housemates simultaneously with this book—I think the oldest stories are “Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar” and also “The Dan Graves Situation.” Both of those are stories that I still connect with and feel excited about even though they’re older, whereas I actually ended up taking out a bunch of older stories and writing all-new ones for this book.
When we sold Fat Swim and Housemates together, Random House stipulated that Housemates had to come first, even though it was not written, I think because of the perception of how stories perform in the marketplace. But I think it was actually an amazing gift, because I did so much work on my understanding of myself as an embodied person and the theme of the collectsion really came together between the years of ’22 and ’26. It wouldn’t be the same book if I’d published it before Housemates; it would be a totally different story collectsion.
I’ve heard you talk about Grace Paley, but who are some of your other favorite short story authors?
Even though I was a little spicy in my take about All Fours, I actually do really love Miranda July’s short story collectsion No One Belongs Here More Than You. I’m a real old-school Raymond Carver girlie; Where I’m Calling From is an incredible story collectsion about addiction and loneliness. He has this really beautiful story called “Fat” about this waitress who has a super fat customer come in and sit in her section. Everyone in the restaurant is being really cruel and mean-spirited towards him, and she’s trying to figure out what’s going on and why, and it makes her think about her own life and then decide to change her own life based on the cruelty of how the world treats this person. Lot by Bryan Washington is maybe my favorite recent short story collectsion; I think it’s so beautiful what he does with the geography of Houston.
You dedicate one of the short stories in Fat Swim to Jonathan Franzen; can you talk about that a little bit?
My friend was like, Wait, do you love him? And I was like, no. The main character of Franzen’s novel Crossroads is named Marion, and the way he introduces her is: “The overweight person who was Marion.” The rest of the quote is even worse; to paraphrase, it’s like, “There was no angle from which someone on the street would want to see more of her.” I remember reading that and having a moment where I had to take a breath and close the book. It’s a multi-POV novel, so that kind of attitude and real inhumanity in the way that she’s rendered is in all the POVs. I was just like, I want to write a Marion who the reader wants to see from every angle, who’s also fat.
That was the inspiration for the story “Beauty,” in combination with me getting really obsessed with this extremely esoteric YouTuber who posts videos of her fish. Somehow, the desire to create a fat, sexy Marion, and deciding that this fish woman was Marion—those two things fused together and became “Beauty,” which is about a person who leaves the beauty startup economy to move to the woods and make extremely unclear video content that she uploads very slowly. In a way, Jonathan Franzen did me a favor, because seeing that so explicitly was very galvanizing for me. It can be a very powerful thing to write out of spite. It can be very motivating.
How did you go about organizing the reappearances of characters in multiple stories?
My characters are all in the same neighborhood, and if you’re a main character here, then you end up being a side character somewhere else. I’ve always loved books like that, where the characters all live close to each other. In the story “Swiffer Girl,” there’s a very oblique reference to Alice’s dad from “Fat Swim,” and I think it just felt like the same people or images kept returning to me over and over again and wanting to be seen in different ways and in different stories. It was really fun to get to choose different main characters all kind of looking out at the same city and the same cast of characters, but from different angles.
You rented a billboard in Philly to publicize Fat Swim, which feels like such a unique kind of book promo. Can you tell me about that choice?
I was kind of asking people what delightfully weird books or movies or shows shaped their thinking on embodiment, and people would give me books and sometimes videos or performance art, and I was like, this is so great. Then I would scroll on my phone, and all I would see is GLP-1 ads or people being like, “The body keeps the score, trust your gut.” Then, at the same time, everyone was like, I’m trying to lose my gut. I was like, wait a second. It just started to feel like this weird contradiction of the body having knowledge, but we’re also destroying and shrinking the body into submission.
I started to play with the phrasing of the message that ended up on the billboard: “Your gut is a terrible thing to lose.” I feel like there’s so many things I’m probably missing, and so many amazing art pieces in the world that I’ll never see, because my algorithm doesn’t show them to me. My friend was like, “What’s the opposite of the algorithm?” And I was like, it would have to be something that doesn’t change and isn’t tailored to a person, something that is totally static and would be in a public place. I got really interested in learning about people who have used public art installations, like Jenny Holzer and Félix González-Torres, to start conversations about important social issues and put art in the path of everyday people who wouldn’t normally seek out museums or books. I also saw a story about a guy who rented a billboard in Philly to get a girlfriend…
I hope that worked.
Yeah, me too. I don’t know what the update is on that, but I found an article about him saying that renting the billboard wasn’t that expensive. I knew I was going to get some money from the Anthropic lawsuit, and I was like, this is Monopoly money until I receive it, and I want to do something with it that puts it back into the ecosystem of my work, and does something very human with it. And so the billboard just felt like the right thing.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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