By Breen Nolan

I first met Emily May the summer of 2021 in a Zoom room. We were attending the Southampton Writers Conference and spent five days workshopping our essays with a small group of other writers. It was the height of the Delta variant and the West was burning; everything felt bleak. But May’s writing beckoned to something in me that felt like hope. Her prose was poetic, raw, and funny. I was impressed with the way she could travel through time and excavate herself fearlessly. Over the years, we’ve spent time together in other writing workshops, exchanged endless texts and emails, and become close friends.

In her debut essay collection, Some Girls, May scrutinizes the lies girls are force-fed in adolescence. She explores the time period when girls still called their parents from payphones at the mall, wasted time in AOL chat rooms with dial-up internet, and devoured the pages of Cosmopolitan to learn how to unleash the hidden quality that will make you the most magnetic girl in any room. May’s writing is smart and blistering. She’s not afraid to rifle through dark corners and expose the contradictions of humanity. May is also a talented visual artist. Her artwork, like her writing, is drenched in the political. It makes you think.

Some Girls is a love letter to all girls and women trained to shrink themselves and encouraged to perform for the sake of the male gaze. It’s a book for all of us who refuse to do it anymore.

 

The Coachella Review: Let’s talk about how these essays came to be.

Emily May: I started writing and envisioning this collection about ten years ago. It’s taken many, many forms since then. What I originally thought would lead to a collection no longer exists or isn’t in the book at all. So, it has completely shed its skin and taken on a whole new form over years of workshopping, revising, rewriting, throwing things out, and reviving other pieces.

TCR: What were some essays or themes you ended up not including?

EM: Some [essays] were less linear in time. I had an essay published in Entropy about journaling since I was ten years old. I thought that would make it in, but it didn’t seem to make sense for the final cut. I had a long piece about Catholic school that’s still kind of sitting around, and I don’t know what to do with it. But I have faith that it will somehow take on a shape further on down the road. Even if I don’t use any of the words, the idea is worth holding on to.

TCR: On the topic of journals, I love that you included some of your old journal entries. How did it feel to look back on your girlhood and weave old thoughts into the space you’re in now as a woman?

EM: I have all of my journals in a bin right next to me as we speak. And in truly the most Virgo move of all time, I recently decided to catalog all of them, and I have them numbered with a corresponding Google Doc. Each number corresponds to the dates and where I was living at the time, from childhood to the present moment. But in all honesty, I don’t go back and reference them very often because it’s so… cringeworthy does not even begin to explain. [laughs]

It’s scary to look at yourself like that. I think the parts that did end up in [the book] were what I could bear to look at and what I found might be poignant. I think the scariest part of that whole process is reading something [written] when you were twelve and thinking, ‘Oh, I haven’t changed at all.’ It truly is a reminder of, you know, who you’ve always been.

TCR: Some Girls is a love letter to women and girls, especially our generation [Millennials]. It’s a connection to who we are now and who we used to be. Many of these essays focus on the body, the experiences of being a young woman and what [society] expects girls/women to do and become. When you were putting these essays together, did the themes emerge organically?

EM: You say it’s a love letter, and I really feel that, too. I feel like, for our generation specifically, maybe along with Gen X, we’ve lived through this brief time period where we could take certain things for granted. And now, we’re watching everything slip away. It’s very definitive of our experience, existing at the height of this freedom, and being sort of gaslit into thinking, ‘Well, what do we have to worry about?’ Millennial women love to say, ‘You don’t even know how hard it was in 2001; the boys were not sensitive, and everyone had to be a size zero.’ But now, you have a generation of young people who have been radicalized way, way farther than most of the boys that we knew when we were fourteen years old. So, [Gen Z] is going to grow up and tell a completely different story.

Going back to what remained on the cutting room floor. I didn’t have to do too much work to weave them all together. That was something I was initially stressed over, making sure [the essays] all fit together perfectly, but in the end that was something I didn’t have that much interest in doing. I think that sometimes essay collections can seem, maybe, a little too neat, and I didn’t want mine to be too neat. I think as far as the linear timeline, that was a natural accident. To start with the present moment, then going back in time and moving chronologically back toward the present moment.

TCR: You mentioned what our generation went through when we were younger compared to what’s happening now. And in the essay, “Confessions of a Slutty Virgin,” you peel back the pain, awkwardness and uncertainty of being a teenage girl so well. I’m wondering how you think the younger generation might respond to the topics you’re interrogating as they grow up in an even scarier time for girls and women? Side note: I love that you included AIM screenshots in this essay!

EM: I really hope that everything that exists in this moment will serve the future generation in understanding the world and being more free in it. I think that should be the goal of all of our work, all human endeavors.

I feel like all these rage bait articles like, “Gen Z Thinks This,” are so pointless and not real at all. I think it’s to distract us from the bigger enemy at hand, which is the ruling class who wants to take all of our rights away. I think there are micro changes between generations and that we’re gonna misunderstand each other on a surface level. But I think once you get past that aesthetic layer from generation to generation, we are generally the same.

I feel like every Gen. Z woman that I know, have met, or work with is so far ahead of where I would have been at their age, whether they’re twenty-three or eighteen. They’re savvy and know themselves so well. I really hope that that continues and that this moment of terrible cultural development doesn’t hinder that.

TCR: You’re also a visual artist and include some of your art in this book. Can you talk about your relationship to both mediums?

EM: I’ve been pursuing both seriously for the same amount of time. For a bit, I felt like I had to choose between the two of them, and I never could. I’m always cycling between them based on what I’m prioritizing at the moment, but I’ll always return to the other. I wouldn’t say that I think about how they interact with each other when I’m engaged in writing versus screenprinting. I think of each act as an escape from the other, which I definitely need. It was fun to be able to put them together in this format. I was happy to be able to feature some visual pieces in here because [the essays and art] do talk to each other. Then Barrett Warner at Galileo [Press] gave me good advice on how to put them together. He said, “Don’t choose anything for an essay that is too match-matchy, as Nina Garcia would say on Project Runway. Don’t choose a visual piece that reflects the theme of the essay, don’t make it too easy or simplistic.”

TCR: I’m interested in talking with you about how music played a role in the book and in your life. Specifically, the book’s title, Some Girls, based on the song by the Rolling Stones. How has music shaped your creative life?

EM: I think, probably for a lot of us, we experience art before we decide to try to make it. And I think also, for a lot of us, music is our first foray into a creative endeavor. It’s such a visceral experience, music that you love and connect with. That’s always been in the background of my mind all the time. I think that musicians were the first people that I was ever obsessed with. [Since] I was in my young adulthood, discovering the world on my own and being so entranced by these larger-than-life rock and roll figures, that magic has endured. To me, [the music] has always felt all-encompassing: You have the glamor, the art, the sex, the hedonism – those are all things that I love.

Rock and roll was my first love. Then, getting older [I was] into more contemporary artists of the time in the 2000s, like Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart, Wolf Parade, but I [still] always return to Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones. When you said earlier, [the book] is a love letter to girls, that’s definitely true, but I also wanted it to be a love letter to all of the art that I’ve ever loved. From Mick Jagger on down.

TCR: Let’s talk about the Greek mythology thread in the first essay, Some Girls. You wrote of being a kid and your curiosity about the pull to create, and then compared it to Athena being born fully-formed from the head of Zeus. Like, the idea that [to be an artist] you just need crack open and it’s all there. But the reality is, that’s not what it’s like to create. It’s hard work! Can you talk more about that thread?

EM: I remember so viscerally learning about Greek mythology in sixth grade. I went to a school that I loved. I had amazing teachers, and did amazing projects, like [constructing] a Roman villa mosaic out of an eggshell roof, with a handpainted walkway. It really ignited my imagination. I remember all this stuff so well, because it was so rich and Greek mythology is such a rich text, too. When I grew up to work with kids, I would read the same myths to them and they loved it the same way. I get my best ideas when I’m on a run, listening to music. And I had that idea, ‘How did they build this song?’ And, ‘Did these lyrics come fully formed?’ Which had me thinking of Athena being born out of Zeus’s head.

We love to think about artists sitting around by themselves in a little dark room, writing by candlelight. But in reality, these essays have been workshopped for years with groups of people like yourself, and that’s what has made them what they are. So [it’s also] dispelling the creation myth of the solitary artist.

TCR: I love that you brought up workshops, because as much as writing is a solitary endeavor, community is essential. How has community helped you put this book together?

EM: Not only have the various workshops, classes, and residencies shaped the pieces, but ultimately, my writing community is literally the only reason the book exists. All of the times that I would think, ‘I’m quitting, I can’t do this, I hate it,’ the other writers in my community say, ‘No, take some time away, but come back to it’Or, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I was there last week, I completely understand.’ As writers and all artists, we’re temperamental and naturally have a fraught relationship with our work. But we come to [writing] because of what we’ve read and loved. And [we] feel like we’re never going to meet that benchmark. So it’s super easy to abandon a project and think, I’m an absolute one on a scale of one hundred next these writers that I love and who made me want to be a writer. Without the writing community, you just can’t do it, or at least I wouldn’t be able to.

TCR: I’m curious about your revision process. What was it like as you moved through each stage of writing these [pieces] to the moment you turned in the final book?

EM: Luckily my editor and publisher didn’t have many things to overhaul. After I got his notes, I implemented those. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m gonna give this whole book one more read through before it goes back to him and out into the world.’ I thought it would take a night. It ended up taking a week because [I was] reading each piece for the last time [before it went] out into the world. [Which] was extremely stressful. I was then thinking, ‘What if anything is misconstrued?’ Of course, it’s going to be. But you can’t overthink it and you can’t start writing for every reader, or else you’d never be able to put anything out. I was remembering this Melissa Febos quote, and I don’t have the direct quote, but she said something like, ‘Instead of getting hung up on anyone who’s going to misconstrue your writing, think of your good faith reader who needs to read what you’ve written.’ That was so clarifying because it’s so easy to imagine the million people or everyone on the Internet who [will] read your book or read anything you’ve written and then plaster something you said all over, out of context. So instead of imagining that, imagine your good-faith reader who is going to understand what you meant.

TCR: What a great way to think about it, especially in terms of managing criticism or rejection. What can you say about criticism?

EM: Well, I’ve never been savaged in the pages of the New York Times Book Review but of course would welcome the opportunity. Criticism is just part of being a writer. I wouldn’t describe myself as someone with thick skin whatsoever. But in workshops, when somebody says, ‘Well, I don’t get this,’ or ‘I don’t like this’ about something I think is true, I’ll just weigh it and think, ‘You know what? You’re not my reader, and that’s okay.’

As far as rejection, we all know that you could submit one hundred times and you’ll be lucky if you have one acceptance. So, I had to trick myself into not caring about that. I did a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2016 and my goal for that month (other than writing) was to submit enough that when I got a no, I didn’t even feel it. There’s a James Baldwin quote, “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”  So I had that in mind. There are a million great writers who gave up. If your goal is to keep doing it and to keep being a writer, it’s just endurance.

TCR: You wrote about different books in this collection, including Chris Krause’s I Love Dick, and the Preliminary Materials for a Theory of a Young Girl, written by the French philosophy collective Tiqqun. What other books have influenced you?

EM: So many. I wanted to have a whole section in the back of the book for acknowledgements of every book I’ve ever loved. I love Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? I love White Girls by Hilton Als. His essays to me are just the absolute. Obviously, I feel like every woman who turns into an essayist goes through a major Didion phase, and I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t or that I don’t remain Didion-pilled. I love Greil Marcus’s cultural criticism, Lipstick Traces. Anytime there’s a “secret history,” I’m in! Lester Bangs’ Psychotic Reactions. Reading about that book as a freshman in college in the back of a Rolling Stone issue, and just being like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to read this!’

TCR: I’m obsessed with the fact you included a soundtrack at the end of the book. Do you listen to music while you write and revise?

EM: Totally, yes! I once heard a writer give a talk and she recommended, especially when you’re writing nonfiction or memoir writing, to put on the music that you listened to at the time you’re writing about. I loved that idea, so I do that. But then sometimes I put on music of how I want to feel, or how I want to write. I would go to the library and just listen to Lana Del Rey and write and revise this collection. But I think even more important than what I’m listening to is what I’m reading. The highest compliment I can give to any piece of writing is that it sparks in my mind and makes me want to write. I was reading Anna Dorn as I was revising this, which was perfect because it gave me a little bounce in my step, and got me excited to have more fun with it.

TCR: Do you longhand revise? Or are there certain questions you ask yourself during the process?

EM: Honestly, [laughs] I once took a workshop, and one of the other writers said that she would revise her pieces paragraph by paragraph, and look at the verbs and blah, blah. And I’m just like, ‘Oh my god, that seems like you’re analyzing a dead body.’ I was like, ‘I’m not doing that.’ I revise by pure vibes and sound. How does it read? How does it feel? That’s what I care about. Or, Does it have a bounce and a flow? I’m not going back and looking at transitive and intransitive verbs and stuff like that.

TCR: What are you looking forward to now that the book is out in the world? Or what are you not looking forward to?

EM: Selling the movie rights, mostly! I think, now that it’s out, I don’t even know how to feel. I can stress about my loved ones’ reactions to it, or strangers’ reactions to it. But honestly, I would love to have one moment of true celebration for it. And then, move on to the next.

TCR: I love it! Do you know what you’re going to work on next? Or, are you already working on something?

EM: I have a couple ideas. I will probably take a decade-long hiatus from essays. I want to write a dating book, a personal finance book, and a book about how I think almost all movies are bad.

TCR: [laughs]What are you reading right now?

EM: I’m just about to finish Love Junkie by Robert Plunket. It’s such a romp. I love it! I also just picked up Sensitive Anatomy by Andrés Neuman. I’m really excited to get into it. I think it will make me want to write.

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Breen Nolan is a writer from Rochester, New York. She is a current MFA candidate in the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency program in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts and is the managing editor at The Coachella Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.