In a year filled with amazing debuts, Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates is one of the best, an unforgettable novel of friendship, love, and art.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Emotionally rich and quietly thought-provoking, this is simply a stunning debut.”
In her own words, here is Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Housemates:
Why is it so fucking true that the minute you make a playlist for an idea, it becomes a book? I was in denial for a long time that I was writing a novel, the novel that would become Housemates, but then I added a song and then a second and then a third to a playlist that I was calling at the time just “Bernie and Leah,” the names of my main characters, and the novel was, irrefutably, real. I wanted to write about the forcefield between two people and the playlist is what that forcefield sounds like.
“Mr. Brain, he want a song,” goes the Barry Hannah essay on writing. “Mr. Brain, he sick of sickness. He want a song, Jack. May I suggest that writing itself is freedom from consciousness as much as stimulant to it.” You may, Barry Hannah, and it’s suggestion that I agree with. When the writing is going well and I’m really in it, rally jamming, there comes a kind of fusion or unity between the song I’m listening to and the sentence, paragraph, or scene I’m writing so it’s all one giant, mega song.
There is no question that this is a truly wack playlist, maximalist and “eclectic” with no grounding genre, theme, or aesthetic other than a general sense of the songs being important to the general changing mood of Housemates. There are not one but two (arguably more) truly corny and cringe songs here. This makes sense because Housemates is a truly wack, maximalist, eclectic and, at times, corny book. So sue me! But this is what happens to me, this is what dreaming up a world in my head looks like and sounds like. It jumps and u-turns, it meanders and digresses, it changes course. Housemates is a book about wanting to leave, leaving, being gone on the road a long time, and then having nowhere else to go but home.
Actually, I think this playlist does have a uniting force and that force is real feeling. These songs mourn and wallow and refuse and call out to God and question. “Time After Time” and “Choreomania” always make me cry, “Indestructible” and “Make Me Feel” always make me move my ass, “How Mountain Girls Can Love” and “Daddy Lessons” always make me want to get out of the city and touch grass, and “What’s Up?” always makes me more alive. They’re big songs that swing for the fences even if they don’t always hit, and that’s what I tried to do too. This is a playlist for road tripping but also for living. I hope you enjoy.
“Your Woman”: White Town
This is a song that begins a thought, a phase. It sounds grungy to me, like a black plastic trash bag, which is what Bernie uses to move into the group house where she will live with Leah and the others in West Philly. The song is full of what I “could never” do – be your woman. In this part of the book, the characters are all about saying no to what they don’t want, especially Ann, the narrator, who is a shut in and doesn’t leave the house until she does.
“Choreomania”: Florence & the Machine
This is a yearning song, a song to listen to as you are young and unmoored and taking the subway back and forth to your shitty job. It’s also a song of movement, of anticipation. Leah especially wants to spring forward, but doesn’t know how. It’s the wanting and the suppression at the same time, a choked and churning feeling, that gives this song its heat. “Something’s coming, so out of breath,” the song pants.
“Knocking on Heaven’s Door”: Guns N’ Roses
This book is set in central Pennsylvania and features a toxic father figure who drinks himself to death so we needed one dirtbag old white man song. This is a song about being proximate to death, about knocking on the door but it not opening, getting grace where others haven’t gotten it. It’s a survivor’s guilt song, and Bernie has a lot of survivors guilt. It’s also a song about being tired, getting tired of your own shit, your own coping mechanisms, getting ready to change but not changing yet. Also wtf is up with that phone dialing part? Incredible artistic choice.
“Indestructible”: Robyn
This is the song that plays in the group house party scene where Bernie and Leah first touch each other and then decide to go out on their road trip. Every queer Zennial novel needs a Robyn song and while I was tempted to include her number one banger, “Indestructible” is a sleeper hit full of self knowledge– “I’ve never been smart with love; I let the bad ones in and the good ones go.” At its heart, it’s a hopeful song, a song about wanting to be one of the good ones, one of the pure ones, about hoping that this time, after all the disappointments, will be the big love. It’s a giving yourself a chance song.
“Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It”: Stars
This is springtime in a song–too hot in the sun and too cold in the shade. Bernie and Leah roll out of Philadelphia in May with some sleeping bags in the back and very little in the way of a plan. It’s a song that makes me see them in the car, looking at each other, still tentative with each other, and afraid. They have put themselves in the path of the plot, but are still unsure of what to do. “What do I do when I get lonely?” the woman’s voice in the song comes in to ask. Bernie and Leah do not yet know.
“Make Me Feel”: Janelle Monae
What is it about the hollow sound of a tongue clicking? This is a song that could wake a person from the dead of winter, grief, or dissociation, a song that forces you to smile and be in your body and look at the world. “Damn!” It’s a song about things that have gotten too complicated all of a sudden being simple again, a stripping down to the basics song, a joy song.
“How Mountain Girls Can Love”: The Stanley Brothers
I fully own this is a bad transition. Which is a thing that happens when you are radio channel surfing on a road trip. On a road trip, you’re encountering whatever the world is up to, and poking around for the right mood. This quick song is a classic of Bluegrass excellence and also a nice ode to “mountain gals,” a population of folks that are close to my heart and extremely queer.
“Daddy Lessons”: Beyonce & The Chicks
A half cloudy half sunshine kind of a song and an excellent highway song to really cruise and cover some ground. It has a quiet, understated intensity and I love the way Beyoncé and Natalie Maines pass the baton of the vocal lead back and forth to each other. (Housemates is full of both daddy lessons and daddy issues.)
“The Rose”: Bette Midler
This is not a “good” song per se. But it is one of the most played songs by Delilah Rene, aka Delilah, host of the kind of terrible but extremely sweet nighttime song request and dedication radio show listened to Americans in every state. People call in and tell Delilah of their woes, and she plays one of approximately five songs on tap for them; it’s the great equalizer.. Leah becomes really into Delilah one dark night on the road trip, in awe of how many people she reaches and comforts. Also if there is a truer fear about love than “You think that love is only for the lucky and the strong” I don’t want to know about it.
“Time After Time”: Cyndi Lauper
This is the ultimate love song to me. From the moment it played over Romy and Michelle doing a weird synchronized dance in Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion to the moment my partner and I walked out of our wedding ceremony to it, it holds a strange and deep place in my heart. This is the song playing for Bernie and Leah at a very *special* (sexy!) moment. It’s also of course about time–how it passes and what it feels like to be available to the same person over and over again for whole life.
“Purple Rain”: Prince
A song to listen to cruising slow on a backroad or parked under a tree in a city parking lot. This is a dark night of the soul song, a song to reach for when things are at their worst. Bernie and Leah and Ann, Housemates’ narrator, know about dark nights of the soul. This song comes from gospel and you can feel the church in it, Prince down on his knees, reaching. This is an it’s always darker before the dawn song and a song about a love that is uncategorizable – not “your weekend lover” but maybe “some kind of friend,” a song that descends into a wordless guitar solo and then into strange violins and then finally, into silence.
“What’s Up?”: 4 Non Blondes
This is a song to come home to, a song to listen to yet again, and to listen to on repeat over and over and over as you unpack, think, walk, eat, fuck. It’s a song that asks a question without any answer, ever, which is life isn’t it? It’s a good song for a montage, to show time passing where the details don’t matter too much. We lived, this song might say. And then things changed. We’re feeling “a little peculiar,” we’re praying “every single day for a revolution.” What is going on? What, what, what?
Emma Copley Eisenberg is a queer writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first book, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, was named a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, VQR, American Short Fiction, and other publications. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.