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.