A Juicy Read About a Messy Queer Communal House

Emma Copley Eisenberg was fresh off a breakup and housesitting in Paris when she started writing Housemates. She found her way into an exhibition of Berenice Abbott’s photographs, where she learned about the photographer’s life partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she embarked on a road trip in 1935. They began the trip as single women; by the end of it, they were romantic and creative partners. Eisenberg was left wondering what really happened nearly a century ago. “I was asking all the big questions,” she says.

The couple fascinated her, but instead of writing a historical novel, Eisenberg wanted to transpose Berenice and Elizabeth onto a canvas of queer intimacy in Trump’s America. So, she set the book in a group house in West Philadelphia. “There aren’t enough novels about domestic, intimate spaces where you live really close to people who are different from you — but aren’t your lover, aren’t your sister or your family member,” says Eisenberg. “I’ve always been interested in boarding houses and group spaces.”

Housemates is narrated by a woman who has no direct connection to the protagonists, whose names are slightly altered to Bernie and Leah. The romance that unfolds between Bernie and Leah is punctuated by the older woman’s musings on her own life experiences a few blocks away. The way Eisenberg treats all of her characters with empathy and dignity is radical; she points out how essential it is that Leah, for example, is fat. “The book is not about her solving her fatness,” Eisenberg says. “They both have real struggles with being an embodied person, but I wanted to let her be a real person and just have that be one aspect of her identity.”

Below, Eisenberg spoke to the Cut about writing a novel that takes inspiration from multiple members of the Miranda July household and includes a cameo from the one and only ????Deliiiiilaaaaah????.

The First Bad Man, by Miranda July

I read The First Bad Man a few years before starting Housemates. I didn’t know you could put two people together who don’t have an official relationship to each other and let them be physical in ways that are intimate but not sexual. I was thinking a lot about that novel when I wrote the scene where Bernie asks Leah to smell her armpit. I think there’s something that owes a debt of gratitude to Miranda July — this idea that putting two bodies in proximity to each other is always going to be interesting, even if it doesn’t result in the typical progression, either sexually or friendship-wise. There is a really interesting uncategorizable intimacy between the two characters: They wrestle and try on each other’s clothes, but it’s not exactly sexual, and it’s not really a friendship, and it’s not family. It fits into this very strange mental space.

I think The First Bad Man also gave me permission to put physical, intimate, gross things on the page, like nose picking and scalp scratching. I think that was the first book that I really was like, Oh. Ottessa Moshfegh is into pooping — fine — but Miranda July’s into these specific physical things that we think are shameful, often. Putting them on the page builds intimacy with the reader, which I think is really cool.

Nicotine, by Nell Zink

I’m really interested in how books become novels of ideas, rendered in a way that’s not pedantic or preachy, and I think Nicotine shows the way that group houses can be well-intentioned but sort of go awry as well, then collapse and dissipate, even though they may have the best political aspirations and goals. I went looking for group-house novels, for sure, when I was writing the book, and I heard a rumor that Nicotine is based on a West Philly group house, that Nell Zink lived in West Philly for a time. And that book is so bonkers. The house in that book literally is made of poop buckets then crumbles.

She really makes the house a character in that book, and I drew a lot of inspiration from that in the sections where the house was like a body, or its blood wasn’t circulating. Also that idea of the divide between aesthetics and politics, that those two things have to be opposed, I appreciated that.

“Goodbye Earl,” by the Chicks

“Goodbye Earl” is very important. That song is so deeply embedded in my brain. I think I started listening to it when I was 11 or 12. I think I always resonated with the idea of saving a friend who was in trouble from a man, and it just has this funny, joyful sort of revenge. I’m also very interested in femme-revenge books and movies and songs, things that let women take revenge against men, but they’re not punished. It’s not like at the end, Wanda goes to jail or something. It’s a kind of imagining of an alternative universe where you could kill a man who’s an asshole and get away with it and sell jam on the side of the road. It’s also the gayest thing ever. There’s just something so funny about it, and all the nouns in it are so funny: the peas and the tarp and the jam and the roadside stand. Sounds awesome. It’s kind of a fantasy of what it would be like to get rid of someone who’s hurting your friend and live happily ever after, which I just find so delightful.

Delilah, the Radio DJ

I became introduced to Delilah in 2011 or 2012, when I was on this road trip across America, and she was the only thing that kept me company consistently through that whole road trip. She’s doing outsider art, I think. She’s doing grassroots, accessible performance art. I stand by that. She’s available to anyone, anyone can call in, and she’s almost like a therapist meets a DJ meets a sound artist, and she’s just so strange. There’s a sense of radical empathy and complete randomness that I find very fun and that I think Bernie and Leah are attracted to as they, too, are driving. It feels like a very important American road-trip sonic experience. I think there is more awareness and appreciation for Delilah outside the urban Northeast. And that’s another thing that matters to me in this book; I want to depict people in rural places having access and cool artistic experiences, too. I think it’s important that Bernie and Leah leave Philly, and they go into rural Pennsylvania.

20th Century Women

That film — which I think is by Mr. Miranda July, right? We’re really living in that marriage — that movie became important to me because it’s about a family, and we talk a lot in queer land about “chosen family.” At first, my publisher was like, “We want to say this book is about chosen family,” and I was like, “Is it? Mmmm, I don’t know.” The more I thought about it — and I think I rewatched that movie, actually — I wanted to think about what “chosen family” means. There can be an idea of a temporary family: something that happens in your life, a community of people that never quite happens again. 20th Century Women really shows an unconventional family, and the house in Housemates is a temporary family, too, I think, that creates a lot of support and also something to rebel against and just a physical space that’s important. Then, it’s over. By the end of the book, the group has dissolved, and I think 20th Century Women gave me that idea, that it doesn’t have to stay the same forever.