A CONVERSATION WITH EMILY NEMENS
by MICHAEL COSTARIS
Emily Nemens read the first short story I ever wrote. I cobbled it together in a panic after realizing her workshop submission deadline was a week earlier than I’d thought. It wasn’t good. I know that now. But still, she approached the draft with a generosity that kept me writing, highlighting what was working and cutting what wasn’t. That same generosity shapes Clutch. Her new novel explores the complexity of female friendship against the pressures of the contemporary political landscape. It is unsparing, delving into the darkness of this moment, without ever losing its humanity.
I spoke with Emily about writing beyond the bildungsroman, managing a large cast, the challenges of editing fiction while writing, and her decision to step away from The Paris Review to focus on her own work. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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Michael Costaris: The “four young friends trying to make it in New York” genre is one of my favorites. Clutch feels both within that tradition and an evolution of it. The women are older; success has already come to them. Where did this idea begin for you?
Emily Nemens: I love a good bildungsroman, but I’m also 42. Reading, again and again, about 22- to 26-year-olds figuring it out—sure, it’s interesting, but for me that train has left the station. What I’m preoccupied with now is this: once you’ve come of age and set your goals and standards, once you understand what you want from life and what you want to make of the world—if you get there at all—how do you maintain that? How do you evolve and sustain it? Because it’s hard out there. Everything feels very provisional and precarious for elder millennials—people who are meant to be hitting their stride.
MC: Do you think this is unique to millennials? I ask as a millennial now firmly entrenched in adulthood. The hallmarks that defined success for my parents’ generation—home ownership, retirement, education, savings, all that adult stuff—feel exceptionally hard to attain.
EN: I’m not going to say, “Poor us, we’re the first generation that’s ever had a hard time.” Because the Depression! World Wars! But I do think that coming off the baby boom—and what felt like American prosperity moving in one direction for a generation or two—there’s been a real about-face.
I wrote a lot about homelessness and precarity, service-economy workers, class, and acute poverty in Cactus League. That’s an important conversation to continue, but I also wanted to look at a different segment: elder millennials who have had privileges and successes and yet are still struggling to hit what they define as “success.”
MC: I see a lot of writers tackling this. Do you avoid reading other work in a similar vein while you’re writing? I know many writers feel strongly in both directions—the pull between seeking inspiration and fearing another style overtaking their own.
EN: Well, I read a lot, pretty voraciously at this point. I was a very serious musician as a kid, so I wasn’t reading much growing up—all practice, all the time. In my twenties, I was doing a lot of visual art, so again—I wasn’t reading as much as I wanted. For the last 15 years, I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up. And I have all the feelings you just described: I don’t want to be too affected, I want to maintain my voice and autonomy, but I’m also just a hungry hippo in terms of wanting to metabolize as much as possible. I’ll be making up for lost reading time until I die.
MC: A reason I asked is that McCarthy’s The Group feels inevitable when discussing this novel. Had you read it?
EN: I was very late to Mary McCarthy; I hadn’t read it when I began Clutch. I had about 10,000 words of this project, and thought I had a long story. My agent read those pages, said she thought this was a novel, and told me to read The Group. Turns out, she was right! It helped me a lot.
MC: What were some of the things you learned from it?
EN: Well, as I said, the opening section came very quickly, almost like a fever dream. Then, when I thought about expanding into a novel, I realized, oh—I actually have to imagine what their lives back home look like. That’s when all these secondary and tertiary characters came in. Because, of course, they have other friends outside of the friend group. Huge networks. Parents. Children. Coworkers. All of that. How do you write that, times five!? McCarthy, and Rona Jaffe too—another great mid-century ensemble novelist—were really helpful for thinking about structure with a big cast. I learned to keep it as tight as possible: domestic spaces, and the people who live inside those homes, rather than building out full universes for each woman.
MC: You do something interesting in continually deepening the reader’s knowledge of these women. Many of the later chapters digress to earlier moments in their lives, recontextualizing certain aspects and filling in gaps. The reader is always learning more about these characters.
EN: This was a big focus during revision. The first versions of the book had much more exposition up front—like, “Here’s everything you need to know about these women.” I cut it back, and cut it back, and cut it back. My goal became to drop the reader in as a kind of sixth friend in Palm Springs. The reader is in the conversations, getting the mannerisms, the points of view, the behavior, some of the interiority. But as they keep going, they come to know the women more and more.
MC: I thought it was a great choice. The novel kept taking on new contexts as it progressed. Each character became more complete.
EN: Something my editor said—this really helped—was that it feels like making a new friend. At first it’s superficial. Then you learn stories from their past. You hear about moments that shaped them. You might not know at the beginning that something happened to this woman at 32 that altered the course of her life. But over the course of the friendship, you eventually get close enough to hear that story and understand it in context. I was already doing some of that organically, but once she framed it that way, I could see a clearer cadence—going deeper and deeper as the manuscript goes on. Of course, you don’t want to mire the book in backstory, so it’s about balancing those historical reveals with forward momentum.
MC: The narrator helps with this too. It’s very unusual in contemporary literature. I can’t remember the last time—aside from rereading Dostoevsky—when a narrator had a distinct voice but remained unnamed. When did you land on resurrecting this older technique?
EN: Dostoevsky was actually the inspiration. I was reading Crime and Punishment, and it’s close third-person with Raskolnikov—and then, like, 200 pages in, there’s an “I,” and I was like, what is happening? It really blew my mind. At one point, I actually had an “I” in this book too. An early reader was thrown by it and said, “Did I miss a friend? Who is this ‘I’?” And I was like, okay—maybe that’s too confusing. So I kept the tone but got rid of the specific “I.” What’s funny is that only after I finished did I realize, oh man—I did something similar in Cactus League too.
MC: Where do you think that impulse comes from?
EN: I’m coming out of realism, and out of the artifice of realist fiction. A lot of writers have swerved left into autofiction as a way to address how arbitrary the decisions of traditional realism can feel. I went right instead, which is perhaps more of a throwback. Rather than stripping away the façade, I wanted to make the façade more interesting, more ambitious, with the extra dimension of this omniscient narrator. The omniscient voice acts like a traffic controller, the stage manager of the whole thing.
As a writer—whether I’m working on novels or stories—I’m always interested in pushing myself to think more ambitiously about form and the intricacies of structure. In The Cactus League, there was a very clear conceit: the shape of a baseball game. With this book, I wasn’t aiming for something formally specific in that way, but I did know there had to be a kind of dance to keep all the timelines and storylines moving forward. That felt like an interesting helix.
MC: There’s also the challenge of politics. The book, by virtue of the character Gregg, who is a senator, has to deal with the political climate. This feels like one of the hardest needles to thread in fiction—the reality of the moment often feels worse than anything our imaginations can invent.
EN: While I was writing, I went to a lecture by Joshua Cohen, and he said it’s impossible to write a contemporary novel because we don’t have sufficient perspective yet. He argued that the best way to comment on the present is to write a historical novel that resonates emotionally and politically with our moment—which, of course, is what he did in The Netanyahus. I remember slinking down in my chair thinking, Did I set myself an impossible task here?
It is hard to write about the contemporary moment. I often felt like I just took honest, hard swings and hoped for the best. Certain parts of political reality kept overtaking whatever I thought I was inventing. The book is set in early 2023—Biden-era, which already feels quaint—but by limiting it to a tight window, essentially a headline-heavy three-month stretch, I felt like it could hold together.
MC: The ending—I’ll say this obliquely—reflects where we are now. It doesn’t end in triumph. Was that always part of its DNA?
EN: Michael, I like that your presumption is that it would end in triumph, because my drafts were much darker. Bleaker. And it is bleak out there—that’s where I went first. But I really wanted—for myself, for these characters, for the reader—to allow a little bit of light. So in revision, I kept nudging more possibility into the ending. I’m glad I did. Because as dark as things feel—and as bad as they are—the only way forward is by looking for hope, and working toward it.
We’ve worked together long enough—you know that as sarcastic as I am, I’m pretty big-hearted underneath it all. I wanted this to be a love story. An ode to friendship.
MC: This novel had an interesting path to publication. The Cactus League was at FSG, and this book was originally set up at Tin House, which is technically an indie, though we’re seeing more and more major authors migrate there. Can you talk about your experiences inside and outside the Big Five?
EN: I had a great experience at FSG. But then the editor who really went to bat for The Cactus League—baseball pun intended—left. Everyone there supported the book wonderfully, but I didn’t have the same mind-meld with an editor that I’d had on that first novel. What a writer needs, regardless of the publisher, is an editor who believes in the work and sees the project for what it is and what it can become. The version of Clutch I first took out on submission was about 75 pages longer. Bigger. Sprawlier. Messy as all get out. Masie Cochran, the editorial director at Tin House, really got it, saw what Clutch was and what it could be. Being read that way is the ultimate gift and opportunity.
MC: And now Tin House is part of Zando, which was big news in publishing. Zando seems to be doing a lot for independent writing.
EN: They just celebrated their five-year anniversary, and they’ve had some real successes. They’re innovating in interesting ways, especially with their sub-imprints.
MC: Was this book set up pre- or post-merger?
EN: Pre-merger. I think the timing was that I did a first round of edits at Tin House, and then I got a call—“Guess what? We’re moving.” I mostly stayed out of the way while the merger happened, told them (and myself), “Okay, you all get everything sorted, and I’ll be here, ready when it’s time to hit the road.”
MC: And you are literally hitting the road. The rollout feels like a throwback, in the best way: a multi-state, month-long tour. I haven’t seen that in a while. How did that come together?
EN: Clutch is one of the first books Tin House and Zando are publishing together, and I think they wanted to come out strong. I was ready to meet the challenge! Just on a logistical level, at this point I’ve lived on three coasts, so I have friends and family all over the place. And having edited for so long—at The Southern Review and The Paris Review—I have writers I admire working in all corners of the country, this wonderful network of creative people I want to celebrate with. My publicist asked, “Where do you want to go?” And I said, “Where can we go?”
MC: To turn to your editing career for a moment: how has it affected your writing? I’ve noticed for myself that it’s helped in some ways but complicated things in others. It’s hard not to compare. Sometimes I’ll be drafting something and think, I would probably reject this if it crossed my desk.
EN: Almost everything I write comes with that feeling: this isn’t good enough. Usually that means I put it down and go stomp around the house for a while, then return to the desk. My first year at The Southern Review—my first full-time editing job—I had so many voices in my head that I could barely write. Over time, I built a muscle: enjoying the work I was editing, learning from it, and assembling this elaborate Swiss Army knife for fixing problems in fiction.
MC: What’s in that Swiss Army knife?
EN: I love revision. I love expansion. I love writing the first draft and then figuring out what the book is actually about. My first drafts are horrible. Wince-inducing. Always. That phase is just hard for me. But whether it’s later that day, the next day, the next week—sometimes longer—I come back and ask: how can I make this as good as the work I was publishing? At The Paris Review, of course, the caliber of writers I was working with was just perpetually humbling. You leave your ego at the door. I don’t know if I’m there yet, but that’s always the finish line. That’s the carrot.
MC: Speaking of The Paris Review: it’s been five years since you left. That must have been a hard decision. Stepping away from the top of the mountain, when it comes to editing, to focus on writing. One book later, how do you feel about it now?
EN: The goal was to write. It took about ten years, start to finish, to make The Cactus League. And I have a queue of several books I want to write, things I think I could become sufficiently obsessed with to carry a whole project to completion. I started looking ahead and thinking: do I want the next book to come out when I’m 50? What does it feel like to keep that pace while also editing and working as intensely as I was? At a certain point, does editing keep feeding the fiction, or do you hit diminishing returns? That shaped the decision to get out—and stay out—of full-time editing these past several years. But it was hard. That being said, a few years later, I have this beautiful book and I’m genuinely excited about it. I think I made a good choice.
