A wife swap within an orthodox Jewish community is not exactly the type of event you bring up in everyday conversation. Author Jessica Elisheva Emerson bravely dives into it on page one of her debut novel Olive Days, which is immediately provocative and lures you to read more. You can read chapter one here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Playboy: What books from your youth gave you the spark that made you think, “I want to do this one day”?
Emerson: That’s such a good question. My parents’ room was full of books and I actually have a collection — I have three kids, so I have a collection of thousands of children’s books in my home. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken. It’s part of a trilogy, and its the most marvelous book. Haunting and exciting, it’s a feminist book too – little girls save an entire community – and it’s extremely magical. I used to reread it all the time.
Another book that I loved to reread as a kid, which I got at a book fair, was On Fortune’s Wheel by Cynthia Voigt. It has a cult following. She has other books I’ve never read because actually, I just kept rereading this one once a year.
And then, I will also say Chaim Potok’s books I picked up at a fairly young age, especially The Chosen and The Promised were very readable for young people. My parents had his books and I blew through them all as a young person. His writing is set in a similar community as mine, in a totally different time with totally different nomenclature. He was essentially writing about the modern orthodox community, so I like to think that was informative. I was thrilled one of his sons was celebrating with me at my book launch this week.
Playboy: With Olive Days, was there a moment or a scene that came to you first and made you think, “Maybe this is a book?”
Emerson: So when I moved to the Pico Robertson neighborhood in Los Angeles, which is one of several really highly concentrated Jewish population neighborhoods in LA, I heard this story from a young unmarried friend of mine in the community. It hadn’t happened to him, but he told me the story of a wife swap in the community. He didn’t have much more to say, but I asked around to see if I could take some people out to lunch or coffee and just hear more. I didn’t think it was an entire novel, but as a writer I was super fascinated.
I was able to talk to a few people. This is not a practice that is endemic to the community, I think it’s unique, but it does happen sometimes, and people were able to give me great details, but never in first person. So that was the spark of the story, but for a while I was working with a love triangle story between this woman and her husband who do a wife swap and the man she sleeps with during it. I worked on it for a while and it just didn’t feel super interesting or true, or a novel — maybe a short story. It took me a while to land on the character of Rina, and in fact the character shifted quite a lot between my original conceptions and Rina. I knew that I wanted to filter Rina’s identity crisis through an obsessive love affair with another character who she meets later on from outside the Jewish community. I actually wrote one of their love scenes first of all.
Playboy: How long did “Olive Days” take to write?
Emerson: I hate answering that question, but I also love it because it tells the story of a working parent. It took me a little over a decade to write and edit it.
Playboy: I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, honestly.
Emerson: The new book I’m writing is going a lot faster. Partially because I don’t have young children anymore, and partially because it’s extremely incentivizing to sell the first book!
Playboy: New book! Can you tell us anything about it?
Emerson: Its working title is Blaze, we’ll see if that sticks. It’s about a 70-year-old Los Angeles folk rock star. Imagine someone who was a household name. He’s only 70 and he’s healthy, but he’s obsessive compulsive and he decides to self-immolate for climate change. Not because he thinks he’s going to save the world, but he thinks maybe some little girl who sees this in the news will grow up to become a scientist that will make a difference. So he sets up a year to get ready, and no one knows except one employee who’s helping him. But after these plans are put in motion, he meets and falls in love with a neighbor who is a water justice advocate and it’s really their obsessive love story. She’s 50 and he’s 70, and readers will have to see how that plays out.
Playboy: There’s a real shortage of that type of love story being told.
Emerson: I will be very curious to see how the many sex scenes land with agent, my editors, and then with audiences!
Playboy: So now we’ll go back a bit. You have written stories, poems, and plays in the past. How does writing a novel land for you compared to past works?
Emerson: I loved it for all ten years I was working on it. I actually deplore writing short stories, which is why I have very few relatively. I love reading them, but I’m terrible with brevity.
Like many novelists, I wrote a previous novel that is back burnered forever, but it was a good exercise for me in creating a long story. I got some very good advice, before I got my MFA, when I tried to take it out into the world. A high-profile agent told me, “We would rep this but this is a first-person coming-of-age story and you’re going to write them forever if you publish this.” I was inwardly very crabby about that feedback. But I sat with it for a couple of weeks, and I didn’t want to write coming-of-age stories. I felt I had a better, more impactful book in me. It just took a really long time to come out.
Poetry came easily to me in my angsty youth. Every once in a while I still sit outside and write a poem, very rarely. I write short stories — many were experiments to see if I wanted to write a novel about these characters. That’s how Blaze started.
Playboy: What have you read recently that makes you feel inspired?
Emerson: I’m always reading but when I write a first draft, I read very lightly. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange is on my nightstand right now and I’m dipping into it, but then I’m gonna try to write like Tommy Orange, which we should all be so lucky!
I did recently finish a book that sort of blew my mind, which is North Woods by Daniel Mason. When I describe it to people, I say “You have to bear with me, because it’s about a property.” It traces a property from pre-Revolutionary War times in Western Massachusetts to present day. It’s such a good book.
Lauren Groff’s Matrix: A Novel was incredible. Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads. He can divide readers, but I loved it. I spent a lot of time diagnosing that book for my future book writing.
As I’m immersing in obsessive love stories — Updike is not one of my favorite authors, but it turns out I spent a lot of time reading him when I write books. And We Don’t Live Here Anymore by Andre Dubus, which is one of my favorite adultery books of all time, I dip back into that one.
Bigger influences: Judy Blume. I never would have written a book if her books didn’t live in my head and heart and in our zeitgeist.
A couple other influential books, too, since I am thinking of them: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Stoner by John Williams, Sabrina and Corina by Kali Farjardo-Anstine.
Playboy: How do you write best – are you a morning or evening writer, or do you have a routine?
Emerson: Walking, I think, is common to many writers. A lot of the drafting I do is in my head as I walk, and then I translate it. For Olive Days, the bulk of it was written in three-day chunks. It was before I had my 7-year-old. My ex-husband would have them for long weekends, so every other weekend I would have three days. I would often go up and take a tiny cheap motel room in Cambria, a tiny California coastal town. I would take a walk in the morning and at night, and write or edit all day long. And smell the ocean.
With Blaze, it’s a totally different method. I’m trying to write every night. I make myself a very large Old Fashioned and I write from bed. I usually don’t advocate writing from bed, but since I work from home I’m at my desk all day long and I can’t bear to go back to it. Anyway, the writing changes as I get to my cherry at the bottom of the glass. (laughs) It’s going very well for me. I’m loving it. I feel a little cozier at the end of my writing sessions.
Playboy: What is the through line in your writing?
Emerson: Almost all of it is filtered through women’s desire. That is something I am laser focused on. Sometimes people say to me that we’ve come so far, you can pick up a million books about that. And women can write whatever they want. And that’s true. And I also think we are so far from an equitable literary landscape. So much time and breath has been invested in men’s desire. And I’m very interested in spending my writing career focused on women’s desire. That’s in my heart space. And it’s what I’m interested in people thinking about, women having agency and and how they actualize desire.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the author of “Matrix” and to correct details about the timeline of “North Woods.”