Emily Temple: On the Beauty in Language, Female Anger, and Writing as a Debut
Emily Temple is the debut author of The Lightness and the managing editor of LitHub. She holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow and the recipient of a Henfield Prize. Her fiction has previously appeared in Colorado Review, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Indiana Review, Fairy Tale Review, Sonora Review, Sycamore Review, No Tokens, Territory, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Calvino Prize by Robert Coover.
I had the pleasure of asking her a few questions over email. We discussed beauty in language, female anger, longing, and what it was like for her to go from writing for LitHub to writing as a debut author.
First, let me say that I adore your use of language in this novel. Lines like "like layers of luscious fat draped over cold gray bones" brought me up short on more than one occasion. What is your process like when it comes to drafting or revising these sorts of images? Are they phrases that come to you fully-formed or do they take more tinkering?
Well, first let me say thank you! The language is always my favorite part, whether I’m reading or writing. Sometimes images or phrases do in fact pop up out of nowhere—the one you quote above was one of those, and I fought for it in the copy editing process (the note I got was “does fat really drape?” which is fair enough, but I wanted to keep it anyway). I often let the sounds of words guide me when writing, especially when writing descriptions—so the sound of the sentence itself might drive the meaning instead of the other way around. Of course, that doesn’t work all the time, but I think it can lead to some interesting places.
But don’t get me wrong—lots of sentences in the book only came together in edits. Every time I read through a draft, I try to mark sections that I think are lazy or boring on the line level—often these are utilitarian sentences, there to make something happen, to get characters from A to B. In those cases, it’s in the editing process that I massage it into something that is both interesting to read and gets the job done (without gilding the lily).
On the subject of language, much of The Lightness's language seems to center around that feeling of physical and even mental lightness. From scenes that make note of the amount and kind of light in a room to ones wherein Olivia entertains thoughts of being above everything or that everything is only temporary, this book drives home that sense of buoyancy. What can you tell us about your decision to focus on that particular theme?
It's funny—once you start writing towards a theme, you start to see it everywhere. I knew I wanted to set my story at a meditation center like the one I had visited as a child, and from there it was almost a matter of playing around with language: meditation center, levitation center, enlightenment, lightness, nothing, no-thing. I kept seeing connections, conceptually and semantically, and I kept following them, and writing toward them, until the book was suffused with light and lightness.
I also recognized in your book the sheer force of the female rage and desire permeating the story. Have you always been interested in the subject of feminine anger and longing, such as Olivia, Janet, Laurel, and Serena experience during their shared summer?
Honestly, I think anyone who has been a girl or a woman has always been interested in feminine anger and feminine desire, whether or not they ever decide to write about it. It’s hard not to be, when as a girl you are repeatedly told to make yourself smaller, to make yourself quieter, to want less, be happy with less, to make yourself more “appropriate,” whatever that means. Girls are taught to lessen their impact on the world; boys are taught to increase theirs. We are taught not to be angry, because anger is unattractive. We are taught not to express desire, especially sexual desire, because it’s somehow unladylike. I don’t know about other women, but all this makes me even more angry and even more desirous.
Again and again, I come back to the scene where Olivia first sees Serena, Janet, and Laurel sitting together, and I'm struck by the otherworldliness of the moment. It reminds me of Nick Carraway seeing Daisy Buchanan for the first time in The Great Gatsby and other moments where an outsider lays eyes on a person or persons whose grandness of self elevates them to a level resembling godhood. How important was it to you to evoke that kind of feeling in the reader as well as in Olivia whenever these girls appear on the page?
That moment, when Olivia is first struck by these three magical girls, sitting still and meditating while everyone around them moves, was an early touchstone for me when I was creating their dynamic. It came to me almost cinematically—I can see it very clearly—which makes sense, because as you point out, it makes use of a relatively common trope of storytelling: that moment when the outsider glimpses the world (or the person) to which they want to belong. It’s very similar (not coincidentally) to the way we portray love at first sight. Anyway, yes: I wanted to capture that sensation of experiencing someone else as remote and magical and mysterious—and then, by the end, slowly recognizing them as the human they always were. (Or not, depending on the character. Some people are just magic through and through.)
This is your debut as an author after writing for LitHub as the managing editor. What has the experience of being a debut been versus your experience as an editor? How has writing for LitHub informed or shaped your approach to writing fiction?
In very meta fashion, I recently wrote an essay about this for Lit Hub. But in brief, yes: I’ve been writing about books for the internet for over a decade, in one capacity or another, and it’s certainly shaped my fiction—how could it not? First of all, my job has required me to read a lot, which is the most certain way to become a better writer. Secondly, my job has taught me to write quickly and cleanly, and to let go of needing that first draft to be perfect—which for me, is necessary to get to the end of that first draft at all.
I also think you can see echoes of my Lit Hub writing in little stylistic elements in the book: a fondness for lists, and for neatly gift-wrapped paragraphs, and for the kind of direct address that makes the reader feel you’re leaning in and whispering something just for them.
Can you tell us a little about your writing routine, if you have one? What kind of process did you go through when it came to writing The Lightness?
My writing routine changes based on what else is going on in my life, but two things are pretty constant: I write in the mornings, and I write in bed. The former because I feel like my brain is better fresh, before it’s started worrying about the world, and the latter because I am firstly a creature of comfort. Plus, if you’re writing in a comfortable place, it’s much easier to trick yourself into staying their longer. It’s much harder to get up from your bed than to get up from your desk.
For The Lightness, I had a lot of advantages: I started it during the second year of my MFA at the University of Virginia. I was teaching, but I wasn’t working full time, so most days I was able to get up, have my coffee, and then write until noon. When I moved to New York and took my job at Lit Hub, I had to keep writing with less time, which basically meant getting up at 6am every morning to write and/or edit for a couple of hours before I went to my job where I . . . write and/or edit for the rest of the day. I’m out of that routine now, but I’m trying to coax it back as I get going on a second book.
Finally, I'm a sucker for new media to consume. What have you been listening to lately? Reading? Watching?
I just finished watching The Great, a highly irreverent and mostly invented take on the ascension of Catherine the Great, and now I’m finally watching Insecure, which I’m loving too. It’s hilarious and extremely well written. And I’ve found myself rereading a lot these days for one reason or another: Octavia Butler, Virginia Woolf, Shirley Jackson. Can’t really go wrong there.
Emily Temple holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow and the recipient of a Henfield Prize. The Lightness is her first novel.
Her fiction has previously appeared in Colorado Review, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Indiana Review, Fairy Tale Review, Sonora Review, Sycamore Review, No Tokens, Territory, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Calvino Prize by Robert Coover. She is the managing editor at Literary Hub and lives primarily in a queen-sized bed in Brooklyn.
About the Interviewer
Sebastian Murdoch is a fiction writer living in Jackson, MS with her two cats, Kafka and Yoshimi. Sebastian is a graduate of the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA program, where she studied under experienced and talented writers such as Hester Kaplan, A.J. Verdelle, Rachel Kadish, and Michael Lowenthal. Her short story, "Georgia's Errand," can be found on the Johannesburg Review of Book's website, and she is currently an intern for WriteorDieTribe.com. You can find her on Twitter at @SEMurdoch, on Instagram at smurdoch94, and at her website sebastianwrites.com.
