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 collection 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 collection 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 collection.
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 collection 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 collection 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 collection; 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.
