"You Don't Have to Write an Essay About Your Marriage and Your Divorce"

A Conversation with Merve Emre

First, a note to the new subscribers who have found their way here. I started this newsletter because I was, and still am, obsessed with talking to writers about process and ideas in the context of real life. I always hope that these conversations can be a balm or an inspiration or even, sometimes, a provocation for people trying to make something despite all the challenges. If you are a parent trying to write, welcome. If you are a writer thinking about becoming a parent, welcome. If you are a writer with no skin in the parenting game trying to get a sense of all the different ways other people approach this often crazy-making work, welcome. If you’re a person who just likes reading extremely informal interviews about writers and books, also welcome. I think you’ll find a lot that’s of interest and I’m glad you’re here.

I can think of no better Valentine’s Day interviewee than Merve Emre, academic, critic, and, as of this past July, Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. Not just because she’s writing a book about love and literature but because to talk to her about art and ideas is to bear witness to another kind of love story — between a woman and her work. It is to recognize the inherent romance of encountering a text or another person’s mind; the pleasure of passing an idea back and forth. This is something I relate to and enjoy.

But unlike many of the writers I interview, Merve seems to have a version of that romanticized writer’s life long enjoyed by men with wives willing to tend to their earthly needs. She has two young children but somehow writes for nine to 12 hours a day and travels extensively to universities and lit festivals as a kind of evangelist for the pleasures of reading and writing, and for its social good. We have joked that she is a machine but the truth is that her productivity is the result of strategic human decisions. She is a woman of ambition who has built a formidable body of work and carved out a cultural presence while navigating the challenges of family and academia. And she has stronger opinions than a computer ever could on the roles and responsibilities of critics and writers.

So this interview is probably less balm and more provocation but maybe that’s what we need on this day of culturally mandated expressions of love. I offer it to those of you who are in love with literature and ideas, and perhaps curious about the potential liability of writing autofiction about a husband you may or may not eventually push out of a window to his death.* Read on for my conversation with Merve about educating a new generation of writers and critics, the ethics of writing about children, and the beauty of relentless sublimation.

*spoilers ahead for the film Anatomy of a Fall

We meet again. How’s your new job?

It's fantastic, I'm so happy. I've realized something about myself, which is I absolutely need to have my own thing. I have something that I am building, something that I have a vision for and that I implement. I think that the very rigid bureaucratic structures of academic departments were never going to feel like a fruitful fit for me.

And you took the job with the very modest goal of changing the way we talk about literature.

Yeah, no big deal. I also have an administration that is 100% behind what I'm doing, and I think that's really rare to be able to say, particularly in the humanistic disciplines.

Has it changed your home life at all?

Well, now I live five blocks away from my mother, and that has changed my life. And it's interesting, I was thinking about how I don't need her to help with the physical labor of raising children, which I would have needed more help with when they were younger. But now it's just delightful to drop them off with her for an afternoon and to pick them up and to hear both sides, my mother and my children, narrate how much fun they had with each other. And last time we spoke, I told you I had one friend and now we have friends.

Before you were a bit nomadic.

And isolated and feeling quite self-contained, but now it feels like we have a wonderful community of people who I share a lot of professional and personal interests with so that is extremely different for me compared to the last seven or eight years. What I'm about to say is so banal, but a fuller life is a happier life. And I don’t think it's taken anything away from the writing and the programming or scheming that I do, it's only added to it, and it's let me bring the energy that I get from the friends that I have, the people that I speak to, back to the work that I'm doing. It feels really good.

I am naturally an inside person, inside a home and inside my brain, and I have to remind myself that actually getting out and having a full life of family and community is important.

I was also really contemptuous toward the people I went to high school with who moved back to the town where we grew up so that they could live five blocks away from their parents. I didn't do that exactly because my parents left the town where I grew up to move to New Haven. But now I have a newfound understanding and sympathy for people who just want to be back in a place that feels like home. And while it's wonderful to have all of these different and sometimes difficult experiences, it is hard, I think, to feel stable or satisfied without that feeling of being grounded in the world, of being at home in the world.

Is the new job mostly a plan to mold the youth in your image? Is it changing the way you see criticism at all?

It is in a couple of different ways. The first thing I will say is that I've been working on this series, The Critic and Her Publics, in which I bring critics to Wesleyan and talk to them about their approach to criticism and then spring a surprise object on them that they need to perform an interpretation of impromptu and in conversation with me. That has been incredible because every single person is phenomenal but they're completely different from one another. I think it has actually made me much less inclined to want to reproduce the world of young critics in my image because there are a million different ways to do this. And no one way is necessarily better than any other way, it's just different. At least when you're operating at the highest levels of competence and individual artistry, I think. I do think it's made me much more appreciative of people who do it differently from how I do it. So that's one thing. The second thing that it's made me realize is that English departments, film departments, art history departments, comp lit departments do not teach students how to write criticism. They teach them how to write a college level essay that has an audience of one, it’s the person who is grading that essay. I think you need an entirely different curricular structure to teach criticism. The same way I think you need an entirely different curricular structure to teach journalism. It's not just about recording somebody and then writing down what they're saying. You need a different curricular structure to teach something like broadcasting or podcasting or translation or adaptation.

Yeah, I really felt that when I went back to graduate school after having worked outside of academia after college. The college essay is not a genre that exists outside of that educational framework.

And to be clear, I think it is supplemental to it. I don't think that this should replace what academic departments or disciplines are doing. I think there is a great benefit and need for the autonomy that they have. But I think, increasingly, students want to know how they can go into the world and make things, how they can create an essay, how they can create a podcast, how they can create a translation. Those require an entirely different set of skills and an entirely different approach to literary production and consumption. So I have been thinking a lot about where those approaches might link up with the approaches of more traditional departments or disciplines and where they diverge and you need something really quite radically different. But part of what I think is that in the humanities, you see so many people grasping at these different discourses of value to try to explain why we do what we do or why we ought to do what we do. And I was just thinking that if you're a student who wants to read and to write and to figure out how to contribute to the production of books in one way or another, to be told, ‘oh, the skills that you learn in this literature classroom will be really great for you to go work in tech or in business or whatever.’ That's so disappointing, isn't it? We should actually be teaching how to do and make the objects that they want to interact with in the world.

I do think being able to write and communicate well is a benefit in any field. And I am always encouraging young people in my personal life who love to read but want to be engineers or doctors or whatever to take an English class or two. But I also wish I would have had had the kind of education you’re describing because it would have given me some kind of roadmap, however crude, to get where I wanted to go and instead I’ve had to kind of self-educate when it comes to writing for a public in whatever genre.

Well, the other thing is, I'm just thinking about my own education and I didn't understand anything about how books were actually made beyond the figure of the author who had written them. I think for all our conversations about trying to demystify practices of literary production and consumption, the way that we teach undergrads is still incredibly author-focused, and it makes it hard for them to understand how they could possibly play a part in the world of literary culture without being writers themselves. Of course, there's so many different ways to play a part in the world of literary culture that have nothing to do with being the person who is writing the book. And some students are much better suited for those other kinds of roles. They would make incredible editors or publishers or critics or translators, but they're not necessarily going to be the person sitting down to write the work of domestic realism in the Year of Our Lord 2024. So it's also part of just showing them the whole panorama of how you participate that doesn’t necessarily involve being the author.

I want to talk about the Mom Rage review. I know that you read widely and have latitude to write about whatever you want. How do you choose? What was the process like for that piece?

It was assigned to me by my editors.

And what do you think they wanted out of it?

It was a complicated piece for lots of reasons. And I think that what ultimately everyone agreed that they wanted was for me to write something on the ethics of parenting and of writing about parenting.

This is an obsession of mine.

Right, of course it is. So I think setting aside the valence of the review itself, I think that it was useful for me because I got to think about something that I had been thinking about a lot, which was how much can you expose your children? How much can you expose them when they can't consent to that exposure, and how much can you allow them to expose themselves even after they can consent to it? I think that the book was really useful for helping me think about that and actually for helping to change my own practice around what I do and don't disclose about my children.

You don’t really talk about them in your writing.

No, but I had an Instagram for a while and I deleted all of those pictures. When I was on Twitter, I used to tweet little funny things that they would say and writing about that book suddenly made me think, ‘Oh, you know what? I don't actually think that's okay anymore.’ And that was part of why I decided to leave Twitter, among other reasons. So I am endlessly fascinated by how people write about children. I'm also very struck, and I don't know if you have noticed this as well, that so many books about motherhood, whether they're about motherhood's ethical dimensions or its material dimensions are written by people who have very young children, they’re written by people who have babies who are in the thick of nursing and night wake-ups and who are not getting anything that feels like reciprocal communicative exchange.

So what is available to a writer who is having these experiences? Any other experience of this scope and gravity, we would encourage a person to write about it in an interesting and intelligent way. Not to get into the personal essay of it all with you…

I'm wondering if we would say that. I suppose the reason I flagged the age range of the motherhood books is because I think it gets much more complicated when your children are older and when they're able, among other things, to create competing narratives to the one that you've created about them, about yourself, about your relationship, about your marriage, about your family, whatever. And I haven't found anyone who writes well about older children in ways that don't feel like a violation. I think the person who's gotten closest, although people might disagree on whether or not she violates her children's privacy or reasonable expectations thereof, is Rachel Cusk. I think about her essay for the New York Times Magazine on raising adolescents and I think that that does a really good job of walking a very, very, very thin line. It is jarring to read about yourself no matter how flattering it is. So think about what a child would feel reading their mother, writing about them, no matter how flattering it is. I remember there was a moment when my older son was like, ‘I don't want you to share what I said with anybody.’

Yeah, they know. My older kids will say things like ‘don’t send that picture to anyone,’ or ‘don’t tell Grandma,’ because they know I talk to my mom about stuff.

Yeah, mine have the exact same thing. And I just think, okay, that's their reaction to something they have said which is charming or intelligent. Imagine how they would feel if you were sharing with potentially the whole wide world something they did that was embarrassing or hurtful or painful. How would that child feel once they read the words that you had written? And I think anyone who writes about children needs to be asking themselves that question over and over and over again. And I judge harshly those writers for whom that doesn't even seem to be a question on their radar.

But then, what is a world in which people are not writing about motherhood and parenting? Do we have to fictionalize everything? I don't know how you felt about, for example, the book Liars by Sarah Manguso, but what if, after the colon, it was Essays instead of A Novel. Would that change the ethics of it?

I think it really makes a difference. I think fictionalizing is one approach. The other – and this is what I think about in criticism all the time – is just relentless sublimation. You don't have to write an essay about your marriage and your divorce. You can just write a piece of criticism that's about a book like Liars, and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.

Have that kind of veil.

I mean, this is what someone like Elizabeth Hardwick was so good at doing when she writes “Seduction and Betrayal” or any of the essays collected in that volume. You know what's going on in her life, and yet she's taking all of that energy and she's writing about Dorothy Wordsworth, or she's writing about the Bronte Sisters, or she is writing about Don Giovanni. And so I am increasingly very much in favor of criticism as a form of sublimation.

If you feel that urge to write about the personal, you do it through another object.

Yes, I'm writing about Anatomy of a Fall right now.

Yeah we need to talk about that.

It's funny, I was closing this piece for The New Yorker on Margaret Cavendish, and I was on speaker phone, and my husband walked in and was just babbling about something or another, and my editor was like, ‘can't you just push him out of a window already?’

But then who's going to watch the kids? Okay, let's get into this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because, I mean, that was my big takeaway from that movie. When the credits rolled, I was like, ‘Oh god, she’s the primary parent now. How is she going to write?’ So that keeps me up at night.

Have you watched any of her previous films?

No, now I want to.

You have to because she works with all of the same motifs and all of the same characters, it’s just they're arranged differently in each film. And the different arrangement means that each film participates in a different genre. So there's always a woman at the center who is just shy of middle age, professionally successful and sexually magnetic, and she's always surrounded by these inept and weepy male children. Men-children. Man-childs? What's the plural?

That's such a good question.

Who are clamoring for her help and her approval, and she has these really conflicted feelings of tenderness, but also exasperation to toward them. But they're really useful for taking care of her kids, and she's always leaving her children with them, and she loves her children, but with this kind of air of preoccupation, because she really loves her work. Her work is the source of real jouissance for her, and each film is a little bit different. You could see how what I'm describing could totally be like a comedy, and two of them are, and then there's one that's more like an erotic thriller, and you can see that. And then we have Anatomy of a Fall, which is a kind of procedural. It’s always the same setup, but they are always switching genres.

What was fascinating to me, among many things, was that it was the inverse of what I usually hear when I interview writers. Because writing is not particularly remunerative for most people, it becomes a kind of secondary thing. The schedule, the household, is held up by the person, usually, a woman who is trying to write and the drama or conflict that ensues is how she can do that with all of her domestic responsibilities. And this was a successful woman writer, and the husband is the primary parent and the one who is asking for time to write and is frustrated and has built his life around the child and the child's needs. So it got me thinking about how, when there are children, there's usually someone in a relationship who has the privilege of the uninterrupted schedule. I watched that recorded argument that they play in the courtroom between the husband and the wife two times in a row, I was so riveted. Who has the privilege of the uninterrupted schedule in your house?

Neither of us.

Neither. How does that work?

Neither of us has the privilege. I think that- gosh, I'm trying to figure out how to say something about this that isn't trafficking in the kinds of betrayals that I was just talking to you about earlier. Perhaps what I will say is this: there is a very strange little book by Pierre Bourdieu called Masculine Domination that was published in 1998 and translated in 2001. In that book, he is interested in what Marx calls the domination of the dominated, i.e. the expectations that men labor under when they are presumed to be, by all kinds of social actors, the dominant partner in any marriage or in any institution or organization. And Bourdieu is interested in that book in how the expectations that men will be dominant deforms them. The book is actually anchored to a really wonderful reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and the figure of Mr. Ramsay, which I think is great. I didn't realize that Bourdieu was a real Woolfian, but he is. He thinks Woolf and Woolf alone really tells the truth about the relationship between gender and education. So I think that what is interesting to me about Anatomy of a Fall is that the husband character in it isn't just burdened by the extra care that he has to do or burdened by the desire to write and the inability to find time to write. He's also burdened by the figure of the conquering man that he is not. There's a really powerful language of “choice” that is threaded through that whole film. So when they're having that fight on the recording, she's saying, you chose this life. You chose this.’ Right? ‘You chose this life.’ And he's saying, ‘I didn't choose it. I didn't choose it.’ And I think part of the question that the movie asks us is: in any marriage and in any relationship between a parent and a child or two parents and a child, how can we possibly identify the consequential choices that we make that make our lives look the way that they look?

Yeah, I think about that all the time.

When all these choices are things that happen in a kind of unobtrusive and daily way. Sometimes you can go back and say, ‘okay, you wanted to move back to your hometown.’

Let's renegotiate the terms.

Yes, let's renegotiate. And sometimes it really is quite explicit: you got a job, we're moving here for that job. But even that isn't as explicit as we initially think it is because, you know this, sometimes in that moment a person is like, ‘yes, of course, I will be happy to do this for you, and what a lark, what an adventure we are going to go on.’ And then a year later when you're miserable, you're like, ‘I didn't choose this. I might have accepted it and I might have gone along with it, but I didn't choose this. And so I think that movie is really interesting on these questions of, like, when do we have agency? When do we make choices? And, in particular, when do we feel like we've been stripped of that agency or stripped of that ability to choose when who we are doesn't align with some model of who we think we should be? When we are the beta man as opposed to the alpha man, or when you are the conquering woman as opposed to the woman who is cared for by someone else. When did you choose that? How did you choose that? How do you create a story or a narrative of that choice?

I’m always wondering to what extent that problem is a problem of having children. Because reading Liars, for example, it's about the problem of being a wife, but to what extent is the problem of being a wife, the problem of being a mother? I think she complicates it in a really interesting way but, again, with all these choices, having a child is the one thing that you can’t take back or rewind. And it’s often the thing that kind of shifts whatever tenuous balance you had before of personhood, of two people negotiating a life together.

I don't think it's particular to children. I'm thinking about this film that I watched on Netflix called Fair Play, which is about these two brokers or hedge fund people. I don't know what people do with money. Whatever, it's two people that work with money.

You watch so many movies.

I really don't. I only watched this because I was looking for films that fit the mold of Anatomy of a Fall. I was like, I want a woman who's really-

Oh, it was for work. That makes much more sense.

How dare you suggest that I watch a movie-

The thought of it was very strange and destabilizing.

But in that film, it's a man and a woman who work at the same brokerage firm or the same hedge fund, wherever they work. And she gets a promotion and he doesn't, and she is trying to persuade her boss to promote him too. And the relationship begins to fall apart, and it falls apart in really violent and abject ways. But you realize that there, it's not about children. They don't have any children. They're not even married. They're engaged and they're planning their wedding. But it's really about this strange inversion, this inversion of gender roles. This guy wants to be fine with it at the beginning because he knows he's supposed to be fine with it because part of being an enlightened man in the 21^st century is that you need to be okay with the fact that the woman that you're with is more successful than you, is out-earning you, has been promoted when you haven't been promoted, et cetera, but can't get with it. And part of the reason he can't get with it is because the whole culture of the place where they work and the kind of whole culture of the milieu in which they exist is one that is completely governed by these expectations of what the man, the alpha man, the dominating man looks like. So he gets really upset when she goes out with the bosses to a strip club after work and comes home and she can't find her keys, and he has to open the door for her. And you can tell that it's the act of having to open the door for her, of him being at home while she has gone out, that drives him crazy. So I don't think it's always about having children.

Well, what was interesting about Liars was that the narrator had a lot of feelings about the childcare and all of that, that it was taking her away from the writing, but what destroyed the marriage was that the husband couldn't deal with her success.

This is what the defense attorney says about the husband in Anatomy of a Fall, he says, ‘he's a project guy.’ He starts one thing, he has- these are all kind of castles in the air, nothing comes to fruition. And the husband in Liars is also like that, he's a project guy. And I do think it goes back to this question of choice, and I think it goes back to this question of freedom, honestly. I mean, I'll just say something very essentializing and a little half-baked, which is that I do think that if you're socialized as a woman, you grow up having to adjust to all of the ways in which your freedom is being curtailed. You're always waiting for someone to tell you what you can't do. So then when you're actually able to do something, you kind of never feel entitled to it. Every time you get something done, you're like, ‘wow, I can't believe I got it done.’ And I think that the men that you encounter in these films or in these novels, they have all the freedom in the world. And so when they can't get something done, it's their fault. And they can’t deal with that. They need to blame someone else. Because when you have the ability to do everything, and no one is stopping you, and you can't get it done, whose fault is that? Who has made the choices that have have resulted in that failure?

So you’re believing Sandra’s side of the story. ‘You have the time, you’re just not doing it.’ As opposed to, ‘I have these responsibilities.’

I can't remember if the last time we talked I told you this but my editors at The New York Review of Books were like, do you want to write about the show Fleischman is in Trouble? And I was like, ‘I can't. I'm just entirely sympathetic to the woman.’ I'm like, ‘that character is a piece of shit. I have no nuance here.’ I'm just like, ‘give Claire Danes whatever she wants. Her side of the story is where I'm at. I really shouldn't write about this for you.’

The conceit didn’t work on you.

Anatomy of a Fall is a more successful production, in part because the character, Sandra, isn't contemptuous toward her husband. I mean, there is a moment when contempt comes out, and that's when she delivers that incredible speech. She's like, ‘You're so afraid of your own failure that you can't even risk it.’ And that speech is edged with contempt. But you get the sense that her feelings toward him are much more feelings of not just tenderness, but also that she believes in him and wants him to take responsibility.

Yes, like, just do it already.

Do it already. Exactly.

And when she tells the son that she loved his father, I believed her.

Yeah, I believed her too. And I think the other reason that film is so good and why it's the best of Justine Triet’s films is because in the first three films, the children are very young and they're just kind of accessories to the drama of the mother breaking down. In this film, you realize that every parent's marriage plot is their child's bildung. And we all know this on some level, but the way that film dramatizes it is absolutely shocking.

But that can be paralyzing, right? Even with the sublimation, it’s still you.

But what’s great about the film is that here is a child who has two parents who are writers. Or, the father transcribes things and the mother writes autofiction. And the child emerges from that film as the true writer because he gets up on the stand and he chooses which parent- he chooses whether to believe that his mother is a killer or his father is capable of committing suicide. And having made that choice, he creates a story about going on this car ride with his dad and his father telling a story about the dog that's obviously a thinly veiled allegory for his father's own desire to be absent from his son's life. And that story is completely made up. No way that story is true. Everyone knows it, but they also know that everyone wants to believe it, that everyone is going to choose to believe it, because how cruel would it be to deny a child the choice that he made?

His story.

And you can tell when the prosecutor, who you want to throw out of a window the whole time, slumps back to his desk, and he's just like, ‘there's no evidence here.’ You’re right, it's not about evidence. It doesn't matter. This child has emerged as the master storyteller. So his parents’ stories are actually- it's not about you writing about your children anymore. It's projecting ten years forward and imagining what your children are going to write about you.

Yes, which, great. I can't wait.

Really? I’m terrified.

You know what? I just hope they feel they have the freedom to do it. But what about the ethics of autofiction? Because yes, he is creating that story, but he has to create that story in part because they're using her books as evidence. ‘It's a novel, but we all know your novels are based on your life. And you talked about how wonderful it might be for your husband to die and for you to be free.’ Speaking of freedom.

Well, there are two ways to understand autofiction, and this is another reason I think Justine Triet’s films are brilliant. There is a bad version of autofiction, which is in every single one of the films. The bad version of autofiction is someone secretly recording someone else and then using that secret recording in a fairly unedited way to try to produce a novel. And that, I think, is actually a bad version of autofiction that aligns with what many critics think autofiction is.

But don't you think that's kind of a straw man also?

It's absolutely a straw man. So then there's the good version of autofiction, which is, if you are someone who is breaking down, the world around you is spinning and spinning and spinning, it's no longer recognizable to you; where there was meaning in your life, now, there is only nothingness. What this gives you is a peculiar kind of freedom. It's the freedom to choose who you want to be. And all of her characters have this moment where they realize, ‘Oh, I am a character. I can be a character. I can make myself up as a character. And, as a character, I can choose which genre my life gets to participate in.’ That's the good version of autofiction, which again, I don't think most people realize, which is when you have become so estranged from your life that it no longer looks like reality, you win from it a freedom that lets you become who you are, and to write who you want to be into existence.

So you're saying good autofiction is wishful thinking?

No, I think good autofiction isn't just transcribing the life that you have. Good autofiction is realizing you can be a character in your own life and creating that life or bringing that life into being in part by writing about yourself as a character.

But if most of the world doesn't see it that way, does that change the ethics of it?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it does change the ethics of it, absolutely.

If the prosecuting attorney is saying, ‘we all know that your books are based on your life. This one is about your marriage, this is about your son's accident,’ whatever it is. If they're reading you that way, then doesn't that create a reality for the people who are implicated?

But this is precisely why we need literary criticism. Because it lets you draw the distinctions that don't collapse these two different kinds of relationships between fiction and reality. And that's why in that moment in the film, the star literary critic is the assistant defense attorney.

Oh, I love her.

She stands up and says, ‘the part that you are quoting is a fantasy that a minor character is having as she is breaking down.’ So that's exactly why we need good literary critics to let us in on all these distinctions between fiction and reality so that one day no one is holding up my piece on Anatomy of a Fall in a courtroom and being like, ‘But look.’