Housemates

I was beyond excited to read Housemates (pub. Date May 28, 2024) by Emma Copley Eisenberg because she writes the Substack Frump Feelings, where in 2023 she wrote about anti-fat bias in books. I was not disappointed.

Eisenberg herself, at ElectricLit, described Housemates as “about falling in romantic love and art love with your housemate (queer chaos!), about figuring out how to relate to the artists that came before you, and how to live in hyper close proximity to other people.” It is all that and so much more.

Eisenberg uses a unique structure with three points of view. The novel opens from the perspective of an unnamed, older person who had been a photographer but was currently alone after her partner, dubbed “The Housemate,” died about fifteen years prior. While at a coffee shop in 2018, she sees two queer young women looking at a physical map of Pennsylvania and talking about a road trip.

The young women are Bernie and Leah, a photographer and a writer, who conceive of taking a road trip and making art that is a combination of Bernie’s photography and Leah’s writing. Bernie is girlish, thin, and from a working class background in central Pennsylvania. Leah is boyish, fat, and from a well-off Jewish New York family. They met when Bernie answered Leah’s ad for a 5th housemate to share the 3-story Victorian in Philadelphia that Leah lived in with her girlfriend and two other queer friends.

We learn both Bernie’s and Leah’s backstories, how Bernie learned large format photography from a famous photographer/professor, and how Leah is interested in so many things a professor once gave her feedback that her work was “exhaustive and exhausting,” a phrase that echoes in her head. Through it all, Eisenberg describes Bernie’s admiration of Leah’s fatness, and Leah’s attempts at acceptance of it. There is anti-fatness, in how Leah struggles and how the world treats her, a nonbinary fat person, but by the end, when the unnamed photographer/narrator is taking their photograph, Leah acknowledges her fatness and seems to better accept who she is.

There is the epic road trip and the landscape and beauty of Pennsylvania, a bonfire made of the photography of a terrible man, and the magic of finding other queer people where you don’t expect to. The language Eisenberg uses throughout is beautiful.

What I didn’t know is that there was a real Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, a lesbian photographer-writer couple in the 1930s who did a series on “Changing New York” and which I now need to read more about.