Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl, published on January 21, 2020 by Hachette Books. She is also the Director of Blue Stoop, a “home for literary Philadelphia.” She spoke with Scott Stein on February 20.
Scott Stein: Thank you for speaking with me, and congratulations on the publication of The Third Rainbow Girl. It’s receiving great reviews from all over and I really enjoyed it. After working on it for so long, what’s it like knowing your book is out in the world being read by people? What’s it like to see your book listed on the lists where writers hope to see their book listed?
Emma Copley Eisenberg: Thanks so much, Scott! It’s great. And it’s complicated. Ultimately, it feels great to have her out there in the world on her own connecting with readers.
SS: The Third Rainbow Girl is about a 1980 double murder, which went unsolved until a trial 13 years later, though as your readers will discover, that didn’t really solve it (at least I don’t think it did). The book’s also about the trial itself and its aftermath, and about life in Pocahontas County and your time there. What drew you to this story?
ECE: The time that I spent in Pocahontas County, West Virginia stayed with me and nagged at me for years after I moved elsewhere, and I had heard about the murders while I lived there but didn’t dig too deeply into them at first. I was in graduate school for fiction writing in Charlottesville, VA and was trying to write some of the material that would become the book as fiction, but it wasn’t working. Then several events happened in quick succession—the Rolling Stone Rape on Campus article was published about UVA, two young women, one white, one black and trans, went missing from the area and the forces that would become pro-Trump white supremacists started rearing their heads all over town. I realized I wanted to participate in the conversation occurring around these issues so I started writing some small journalism pieces.
Opening the door to nonfiction turned out to be the way into writing this book more honestly and ethically, as you can make clear in nonfiction your own background and what you are bringing to telling a particular story. I started reading some of the coverage about the 1980 Rainbow Murders that was available online, and immediately it became clear to me that the story that existed was deeply wrong and portrayed a stereotyped image of this place I had known so well and of the kind of women who might come there as travelers. It was an impulse to contribute, to tell the story hopefully better than it had been told before. And then my own personal experiences came knocking again and began to rhyme with the things I was learning about the murders, so I decided to include some pieces of insight into the contemporary community I gained while living there as well.
SS: The Third Rainbow Girl is a comprehensive, rigorous account of the events surrounding the murder and the trial and provides extensive background details about many of the people involved in the case. What was the research like for this book? Was any of it especially challenging? Is there anything you wish you’d been able to learn but could not because of lack of access?
ECE: I started working on this book in 2013, so the research and reporting took about five years. I also wrote about this online, but the hardest thing was getting ahold of the trial transcript for the first trial of West Virginia vs. Jacob Beard, the local guy who was convicted and then eventually tried again and found not guilty. It’s extremely complicated but essentially you can’t buy trial transcripts (unless you are very wealthy or already have a book deal) and you can’t take them out of the county clerk’s office, so I sat there and individually photographed about two thousand pages of trial documents. Eventually, after I sold the book I was able to purchase the transcript, and I was also ultimately able to watch the footage of the trial, recorded for the first time in the state of West Virginia by Court TV.
I also spent a lot of time in the office of the local paper, looking through all of their back issues from 1980-1993 which was super cool because it also taught me what people were thinking about, writing about, eating, listening to, and more. I’ve always been told, and I retweet this, when it comes to research of a time past, “read in the period, not about the period.”
SS: Can you describe your writing process? Was it all the research first, and then the writing after, or was it some research, some writing, some research, some writing, and so on, or something else? Can you discuss how you draft and revise? Do you have a set time to write? Do you use an outline? Do you blast loud music or need silence?
ECE: It was very messy and twisty and inefficient. I don’t recommend it. Essentially, I worked on the book for about four years before I sold it, driving back and forth between Charlottesville and Pocahontas County, West Virginia and then Philadelphia and West Virginia. I wrote about 300 pages which my agent then helped me distill down to a proposal of about 60 pages. Then after the sale, my editor and I worked together on writing the book section by section. By fall 2017, when I really sat down to write the book I had done almost all of the research, but I still had some reporting to do—the more expensive trips I’d needed money to complete. So I mostly researched and reported and then wrote, but even during the years 2017-2019, I was still doing some additional research and reporting. My editor then helped me refine each big section down to individual chapters and cut what wasn’t truly part of the project. I like to write in the morning before the anxiety kicks in, and then a little bit again after lunch. I need music, usually the same song, playing on repeat one.
SS: Your book helped me to have a much better understanding of the history and people of Appalachia. Do you think most Americans have inaccurate, preconceived ideas about the people there, or that they don’t think about Appalachia at all? Is there a particular misunderstanding or stereotype your book corrects?
ECE: I’m glad! Appalachia has a particular history and a particular relationship with broader America—essentially one of having its resources systematically extracted and its people dehumanized to make the process of resource extraction easier (go read What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte and Ramp Hollow by Steven Stoll). Also, as I talk about in the book, I think especially right now it’s important to remember that Appalachia is not “the heart of Trump Country” as so many 2016 think pieces would have us believe; rich white people in the suburbs of Philadelphia voted for Trump in far greater numbers than poor white people in central Appalachia did. West Virginia voted Democratic in every twentieth century election except four, and the turn towards voting red is a relatively recent development. West Virginia has the highest percentage per capita of trans young people of every American state. A lot of queer people live in Appalachia, and a lot of people of color.
SS: So much of book publishing seems focused on categories and genres—true crime is one section in a bookstore or a website, personal memoir another, history of a region another—but The Third Rainbow Girl can’t be contained by these designations. When did you realize you were writing a book that didn’t fit into a rigid category? Did you plan it that way from the beginning or is that how the book spontaneously evolved as you wrote?
ECE: Much more the latter. I don’t know many writers who think much about the category or genre their book will ultimately get placed in by the publishing industry, but the industry and the nature of our lives under capitalism demands that such categorization take place. But I always knew this book was weird and that it wouldn’t fit into the norms of straight true crime or memoir or history. But many fans of traditional True Crime have already been severely disappointed by my book—it spoils everything up front! It has too much history and feelings!—and I think it’s those impulses in the book that mark it as definitely no one category.
SS: I’ve seen The Third Rainbow Girl marketed as a true-crime book, and of course it is that. But it’s more than that, and your personal life ends up being an important part of the book. Can you talk about how that affected getting this book published? I think our readers, some trying to get their own books published, would be interested to learn about what challenges a book like this faces when you’re looking for an agent and a publisher. Was there ever pressure to make the book fit more neatly into a single category for marketing purposes? What are your thoughts about the way publishing deals with books that are more than one thing? Or the way it possibly discourages such work?
ECE: I think having the right agent who gets the book is probably the most important thing, closely followed by the right editor. My agent works primarily with literary fiction and literary nonfiction and has fantastic taste, so I knew right away she got the book’s weirdness and would never push me in a more traditional or genre direction, so the proposal we crafted reflected the book’s true nature and attracted editors who wanted to work with that kind of a book. I chose the editor who ultimately acquired the book because he also understood the book’s weirdness and was excited about it, rather than deterred by it. Marketing and selling any book ultimately flattens the book’s complexity, but that may have been more true of my book than some others, as certainly the True Crime aspect took center stage in the way my publisher has rolled out this book. But my feeling has always been that the book will reach its true readers, and that if people come for the murder and stay for the class analysis, West Virginia history, and complicated gender stuff, I’m ok with that.
SS: It’s evident in The Third Rainbow Girl how important community is. Did living in Pocahontas County or writing this book influence the major work you’ve done for the writing community here in Philly, co-founding and running Blue Stoop the last couple of years? Can you talk about the importance of community for writers?
ECE: Definitely. I think it’s been a pretty straight shot for me from Haverford College, a small super community-oriented place, to Pocahontas County back to doing community arts work in Philadelphia. Pocahontas County taught me a lot about both the joys—people truly show up for each other, you are never alone, you are among a family larger than your biological family—and the struggles—you can’t cancel anyone, no one can ever play just one social role—of being so interconnected and dependent on your community.
Everyone needs colleagues, people to talk to along the way and walk with down the road, and I’d argue that artists need colleagues more than anyone else. Writers really need colleagues, for what we do is so solitary and strange. Everything good that has ever happened in my writing life has come from people—people who have pushed me harder or tossed me in a new direction or told me I’m working hard and doing a good job. Writing community is more than professional networking, it’s emotional solace and urgent companionship.
SS: Finally, after spending so many years working on a book, and now being on tour to promote it and enjoying the moment, maybe you haven’t started your next project. But have you, or are you thinking about a next project? What can you tell us?
ECE: I’m at work on a novel and a story collection! Queerness, fatness, fun with language, Philadelphia and American travel will all make major appearances. Stay tuned <3
SS: Thank you so much for talking with me. I hope you have continued success with The Third Rainbow Girl and I will definitely stay tuned for the novel and story collection.
Scott Stein is the author of four novels: The Great American Betrayal, The Great American Deception, Mean Martin Manning, and Lost. His writing has appeared in The Oxford University Press Humor Reader, McSweeney’s, Points in Case, Philadelphia Inquirer, National Review, Reason, Art Times, Liberty, The G.W. Review, and New York magazine. Scott is Teaching Professor of English at Drexel University, Director of the Drexel Publishing Group, and Founding Editor of Write Now Philly. He tweets @sstein.