A FAIRLY ONLINE PERSON: Leigh Stein talks with Emily Gould
Penguin Random House
Leigh Stein, author of SELF CARE, and Emily Gould, author of PERFECT TUNES, spoke about the concurrent publications of their books from June 11 to June 29.
LEIGH: Emily, my novel comes out in 19 days and I feel like I wake up every morning, put on my one woman band costume, and then go online to shake my tambourine and play my harmonica and tap dance until I get five out of my five thousand Twitter followers to preorder my book. I can’t even imagine what book promotion would look like if I couldn’t (or refused to!) perform my personality in public. Your novel PERFECT TUNES just came out, too. Do you think anything has changed, since your 2017 BuzzFeed piece about likeability? I actually wonder if it’s gotten worse: it’s not enough to be nice anymore; you also have to be virtuous.
EMILY: Thank you for the great opportunity to mention that the Likability essay is excerpted from Manjula Martin’s fantastic anthology SCRATCH, which helps make sense of the complex, nonsensical, institutionally racist and sexist history of writers’ compensation. For anyone who has been following the #publishingpaidme hashtag, I recommend that book for added context and even glimmers of hope.
I was actually just thinking that you have a chance right now to shift all conversations about your book away from anything that has to do with your personality (a mode of book promotion that I fucking hate, even as I understand how and why it’s become de rigeur in the era of personal branding) and towards the current news cycle, which is making your book seem downright eerily prescient! (You could insert a link here to literally anything that’s happened in the past week in media, lol). I think you are actually lucky that SELF CARE is coming out right now; it’s rare to be able to publish a novel at the exact right historical moment. I have spent a big chunk of my career championing forgotten books that were ahead of their time, so I know what I’m talking about!
Ok sorry re: your actual question about how to do the tap dance of book promotion during the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter revolution. It’s really going to be impossible to feel like you’re doing it right, and you will be tempted to apologize for existing and asking anyone to pay attention to you/your book right now. I would counsel you to remember that selling your book is not only for you and not only about you. It’s about the people who will read it and enjoy it (which I think many people will!!) and maybe be taken out of their lives for a moment of respite, or see some complex issues though a slightly different lens than they otherwise might -- which is one of the many things good satirical writing can accomplish. And it’s also for the people who worked on the book and who are working on its launch; when it’s hard to show up for you, you still have to show up for them. Publishing, for all its faults, really is a team sport, and as a book coach and editor you know how many people it takes to make every book happen.
Ok, so here’s my question for you! When you decided to create the fictional women’s media company Richual, how did you start creating the characters? Maren, Khadijah and Devin are all so complex -- they’re addicted and complicit and hilarious and flawed and real. While none of them are caricatures of specific people, they’re all reminiscent of various real-world analogues. How did you get familiar enough with the worlds in which such women move to be able to write them so vividly?
LEIGH: I spent a lot of time scrolling and screencapping, telling myself it was “for my art”! I used “social listening” or cyber eavesdropping to create my characters and the universe of Richual, the fake Instagram-esque company at the center of my novel. There are three main characters. Devin is a beautiful white influencer, someone who seems “to genuinely enjoy the taste of edible flowers.” She’s the girlboss whose morning routine would appear on The Cut. I’m fascinated by these women whose influence is built upon showing you their perfect life but also insisting in the caption that they’re flawed and they’ve suffered, just like you. (I followed Lee from America for inspiration and she eventually came out as struggling with orthorexia.)
Maren, Devin’s work wife, is a workaholic and thinks she’s better than everyone at everything, which gives her a false sense of control and permission to drink. Maren is a caricature of me, at least of who I was when I resigned from running a private Facebook group of 40,000 women writers. I took all my worst qualities and then turned them up from like a 6 to a 10. As with any satire, I looked for the absurdity and hypocrisy in society (social media) and then exaggerated everything. Devin is a figure of the wellness industry and Maren is a feminist girlboss.
Maren proves her feminist bona fides by hiring Khadijah, a black millennial, to run Richual’s editorial content. Khadijah has grown up online and she sees her life as potential editorial content. She also has ideas for how Richual could actually implement feminist practices and policies at the company—beyond corporate branding and jargon. I’ve been told that she’s the only likeable character in the novel.
Each of my characters thinks she has it the worst and no one understands what she has to go through. I think that’s the experience of being online—feeling isolated and misunderstood, even in your own community.
I was reading PERFECT TUNES in bed last night and when I got to the part where Laura wanders the Met museum by herself, I started crying, remembering what that used to feel like, wondering when I’ll ever get to go to a museum again. I remember all these luxurious stretches of daytime I used to have when I was in my twenties and working in the restaurant industry at night. I didn’t have a cell phone to check every five seconds. Can you talk a little bit about writing a novel about how the world changed overnight (9/11) and then having that book come out during the pandemic? And how did you think through the choice to use 9/11 as a turning point (I know many writers right now are probably asking themselves if their plot should accommodate Coronavirus)?
Emily: That’s funny about people liking Khadijah best because I think she’s sort of the most calculating of all of them, but also probably the smartest. I guess I liked Maren best? I loved the scenes with her loser boyfriend who she’s just continuing to be with out of inertia and because he enables her drinking. Seeing Maren through Khadijah’s eyes is pretty chilling.
I really hated that my book had to encompass 9/11, though I did it to myself. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to realize that if I made Marie, the daughter character, 14 at the end of the book, she would need to be conceived circa 9/11. This is maybe a cautionary tale about being bad at math.
Leigh: LOL
Emily: Anyway, for me it was what the COVID-19 pandemic will be for years to come -- something that happened to everyone also happened to your characters, and you have to use it or else it’ll be absurd. For me it was a chance to think through Laura’s youth and self-centered naivete. It’s awful, but she’s mostly inconvenienced by 9/11. She doesn’t reckon with it in any real way because she’s too busy experiencing the most important dramatic thing that’s happened to her in her very young life -- her doomed love affair with doomed Dylan. When I was living in the East Village in 2001 I was so, so distant from reality, living in this fantasy world slightly outside my body and my experience. It was sometimes fun but I’m also shocked that I made it out relatively unscathed. A lot of what I did during my first 3 or 4 years of living in New York was premised on pure curiosity, like a baby’s curiosity. What happens if I do this? Oh. Anyway, I’m glad I’m not young anymore but it was fun, interesting and intensely nostalgic to get into that mindset in order to write this character.
I love what you said about how being isolated even in your community is the experience of being online. I know that you are, like me, by nature a fairly online person, and you’ve worked and lived a big part of your life online for years. What’s your internet consumption and output like right now? If it’s shifting, do you think it’s good or bad or neutral, and do you think you’ll retain some of the habits you’re developing now in the future? Lol, the future.
Leigh: I remember just a few months ago, when the Coronavirus pandemic touched America, how much I was doomscrolling. I didn’t have the attention span for a 22-minute episode of Schitt’s Creek because in those 22 minutes, so much could happen online. No fictional narrative could compete with the unfolding horror of reality.
I heard Anna Holmes interviewed once (maybe on the Longform podcast?) and she described being on Twitter when the platform had just come out. She would leave her apartment to go get lunch and come back to scroll *exactly where she had left off.* Like her Twitter feed was a novel. That’s how I feel today, catching up on the latest—it’s not just the pandemic, of course, it’s the protests, it’s the election, it’s the latest media scandal.
I’ve been writing about my life online since I was a teenager, so I’m very aware that I’m performing a version of myself in public that comes across as authentic and real to other people. I’m super conscious of what I share and what I keep private. There are so many tweets I draft and don’t post! (Usually dark jokes about having a nervous breakdown.) I want to be seen as strong and successful, so that’s the image I put online. But I can also feel extremely isolated in this role; the more “successful” I appear online, the more people contact me to ask me to do favors for them, or coach them through a crisis. In the weeks leading up to my book promotion, I’m extremely grateful for the handful of close friends whom I can be vulnerable in front of, offline.
You’ve been yourself in public for so long. How do you differentiate from internet Emily and offline Emily? (Or do you?)
Emily: In my twenties I would have said there was no difference. A decade and a lot of therapy later I understand that I am constructing an online and offline self with varying degrees of conscious intent. I try to be mindful of the ways I’m making myself too vulnerable and also of the ways I’m using Twitter or Instagram as a validation machine; I take breaks and I try to never have relationships online that don’t have an IRL or at least a one on one component. It’s definitely a work in progress though; I’ve lived through so many different iterations of the forms of media that now control us all, and I feel weird about that. It’s shaped me, and not necessarily for the better.
Leigh: A big theme in PERFECT TUNES is how having a child impacts an artist’s life. I know so many women who can relate to the trade-offs Laura must make as both a parent and a musician. When Laura’s childfree friend Callie asks her to write a new song and Laura says she just needs more time, Callie says, “You’ll never have more time, Laura. You keep saying things will be different in the future, but it’s never happening.” I don’t have children, but Callie’s voice is the tough taskmaster inside my own head that drives me to achieve. When you think about creative labor, ambition, and parenting, what is it that you wish more people would talk honestly about? I was at your Greenlight event and an audience member asked you how you’re writing right now (during quarantine, without access to childcare) and you said simply, “I’m not.” (In asking this question, I’m taking a page right from your book: “To childless people, children were a logistical problem to solve: find a way to pay for and arrange childcare, and you were free.”)
Emily: Well, the big lie that capitalism sells us is that we can escape the rules that bind other people if we just work EVEN harder. Truly unlearning that is, I think, my next big project. The reality is, there are no exceptions to the laws that rule the marketplace - it just seems like there are because some people are better than others at hiding the ways they are or aren’t supported. All of us, me included, are too ashamed and too prideful to admit how much we are hobbled by having kids and how precarious our work and lives have become. Lynn Steger Strong’s forthcoming book WANT is great on this.
I also want to give space, though, to the idea that becoming a parent is a worthwhile project in its own right, not as a distraction or a problem but as a worthy form of work. Not worthier than other forms of work, but just, legitimate in the way that any other job is. The thing about writing and parenting is that both of them have the same confused and confusing quasi-work status -- because they are motivated by love, we are expected to do them for that reason alone. In both cases it’s not enough. I think the same kind of VC-backed feminism that you skewer in SELF CARE has contributed to the idea that being a mother is a kind of detour on the path to success. Probably everyone of every gender could use a hearty dose of reflection about what success really entails. I know I could!!
Leigh: It’s no accident that so many of the girlbosses I wrote about in my piece for GEN Mag were childless when they launched their companies. I found this amazing interview Emily Weiss did for The Cut about the steps she took to launch Glossier: “I wrote out, ‘Here are all the things we need to launch: website. Chemist. Office space.’ And then I just checked them off, one by one. Put all the balls in the air. Got pregnant with Glossier. Incubated. Gave birth to four beautiful products.” To the girlboss, fertility is just another metaphor for productivity.
I think you’re right in that assigning every kind of labor a marketplace value leads us to constantly question how we’re spending our time and energy. Even the fact that we categorize so many activities as labor now (there’s creative labor, which is separate from the work I do to earn a living, not to mention emotional labor, domestic labor)—shows how much we view our lives in terms of performance and output, what can be quantified, measured, valued. I set out to write SELF CARE because I felt overwhelmed by all the mixed messages women get about caring for themselves, being good feminists, and following through on their ambitions. Online, it’s easy to call a woman out when she gets one of these pieces wrong. It’s much harder to imagine what it would even look like for a woman to get them all “right.”