Emily Gould's Blog

Recently Raffi realized that he can pull up my shirt and poke my belly button and play a drumbeat on my stomach. He finds this hilarious. I think it’s the existence of my stomach, one – stomachs are inherently funny – and also that he can reveal or conceal it via pulling my shirt up and down. I probably shouldn’t let him do this but it makes him happy, so I indulge him. I say stuff like “you also have a tummy! There’s your tummy!” and poke him gently, which he doesn’t care about at all (this might be slightly too advanced of a concept.) The word “tummy” is awful but I use it anyway. I say the dumbest things to Raffi all the time, often in a baby talk tone I thought I would never use but which seems to just happen. Lately it seems like he is beginning to understand us. So it seems important to try to be as comprehensible as possible, even if that means saying “tummy.”
Sometimes I touch my own stomach and take a moment to be weirded out and amazed that Raffi used to be in there. As he gets bigger and more independent, it seems increasingly improbable, like maybe it didn’t even happen. When he’s poking me in the belly button, sometimes I say “That’s where you used to live.” Maybe he does remember it, in some inarticulable way. Maybe that is also part of the joke.  If your mom gave birth to you and you still have access to her, this is a fun thing to think about next time you see her. You can give her a hug and see whether your body still dimly remembers being a part of hers. 

dykings:

emilybooks:

Happy New Year, dear readers. Next month, we’ll be at HousingWorks Bookstore Cafe in NYC for our first event of 2016. 

Come out to celebrate the release of Emily Songs by Sara Renberg. Emily Songs is a collection of tunes inspired by books released by us––talk about flattering! 

Emily Gould, Chloe Caldwell, Joshua James Amberson, and Niina Pollari will read from each of the books. A performance by Sara Renberg and her band will follow.

Make sure to RSVP on Facebook and catch an advance listen to Emily Songs over on Bandcamp. 

See you in the stacks soon!

in one short month, Joshua and I are flying across this VAST NATION to New York City, where we are going to play a fantastic reading/show hybrid.  I personally am going to die a little when Niina Pollari reads from her book Dead Horse and then we play a song based on that book.  DON’T MISS IT/US. 

I’ve been dwelling so much lately on the things that seem like they’re missing in my life, and it’s been bringing me down. Having a baby is a tightrope walk; you have to plan and think about the future, but somehow avoid spinning out into endless anxiety about how you will afford the future. Today, given a rare spare hour, I decided to think about the things I’m grateful for, the things I am incredibly lucky to have. They may not be ‘preschool tuition’ or ‘a permanent home in the neighborhood I currently live in and love,’ but they’re better because I have them, right now, and they are more than enough:

my partner, who gets me, who understands why I do what I do even when it doesn’t make sense on paper, and who does stuff like tell me unprompted that my new oversized cardigan is “cute”

my angelic perfect baby who I am even more grateful for right now while he is being babysat after a week and a half of no babysitting ahhhhhh praise the lord, who is healthy and happy and sometimes whispers “ba ba ba” to me as though confiding a very serious important secret

that the bar we live above closed its backyard

my parents are alive and healthy

my brother is a cool, good person with a great partner

my best friend, who made it through this year with me and despite everything not only still loves me but also loves my baby

my new mom friend, who I am so lucky to have found and who I would totally be friends with even if we didn’t both have little babies and live a block away from each other

my farflung Mom Thread friends whose lives I love hearing about and whose advice and supportive wise council about all things Mom and not sustains me, without whom I would be lost, depressed, and would have to google things like “head shaking = autism?” and whose emails are like excerpts from excellent books

that I finally remembered and had time and enough cash to order new leggings to replace the pilled, threadbare maternity leggings I have still been wearing

Swizzle didn’t eat the baby (yet) (I almost didn’t list this one because I don’t want to jinx it)

my health

my phone

the friends and family who bought us 100s of baby books when Raffi was born, which I was churlish about at the time but now I get it

that I am lucky enough to have a toehold in this bonkers expensive ugly beautiful city, even if I don’t get to live here forever, at least I have right now

my diastasis isn’t totally gaping anymore and I didn’t really even have to do anything (ie physical therapy) in order to fix it (if you don’t want to google this just know it has nothing to do with the vagina)

our babysitter is awesome

I got to start going to non-Baby and Me yoga again and have gone three times!

Raffi slept for an hour in the parking lot of the Mashpee Commons Gap and I got all new underwear and threw away all my old ones

I can feel around in my mind for pieces of my book and sometimes find them there, underwater glaciers, little icebergs popping up just barely visible

recommendedreading:

Issue No. 187

AN INTRODUCTION BY EMILY GOULD

As Jen Beagin’s story begins, we meet a narrator who dresses up for her shift at a needle exchange because she’s eager to see a junkie she has a crush on, a man she’s mentally nicknamed “Mr. Disgusting.” By the second page, they’ve finally struck up a conversation. Mona is alive to the minutiae of Mr. Disgusting’s physical presence, which is, as you’d expect, disgusting—but, we immediately understand, also endearing. “He was wearing the leather jacket she liked—once white, now scuffed and weatherworn, with a cryptic tire mark running up the back. There was a dead leaf in his hair she didn’t have the nerve to pluck out.”

I fell in love with Jen’s writing in much the same way Mona falls for Mr. Disgusting. I was wary. Even though this book came to me from a trusted friend, the great writer Elisa Albert, I wasn’t expecting to like it. It had been a long time since I’d read a novel. I was a new parent, exhausted and low on patience, and the only books I’d read for weeks had Baby or Sleep in the title, usually both.

But as I read these first few pages I found myself noticing details that hooked me, and then all of a sudden I was in deep, unable to stop reading. I had to find out what happened to Mr. Disgusting (spoiler: nothing good!) and, more importantly, to Mona. What else would a woman whose romantic type is “obviously doomed” go on to do in these pages? The answer is totally unexpected.

This book is the magical kind that illuminate a small, self-contained interior world so completely that you feel that you’ve experienced another life within your own. As I closed Pretend I’m Dead, I felt unaccountably sad—not because of what happens in the story, which is a little bit sad, but because I wanted to keep spending time with Mona, and stay inside her head. The excerpt here is only the beginning of the story, and this book is the beginning of a literary career I’ll be watching closely, hoping to fall in love again with something or someone disgusting, compelling, funny and real, like all of us truly are.

Emily Gould
Co-Founder, Emily Books

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Hole
by Jen Beagin
Excerpted from PRETEND I’M DEAD
Recommended by Emily Books

He lived downtown, in a residential hotel called the Hawthorne, a six-story brick building sandwiched between a dry-cleaning plant and a Cambodian restaurant. When she arrived three Cambodian gang members were loitering in front of the restaurant. It was broad daylight and she felt overdressed in her black kimono shirt and slacks. She also felt whiter and richer than she was. The sixty bucks in her pocket felt like six hundred.

The lobby had the charm of a check-cashing kiosk. A security guard stood at the door and a pasty fat man sat in a booth behind thick, wavy bullet-proof glass. Mona slipped her ID through the slot.

“Who you here to see?”

She gave him Mr. Disgusting’s name.

“Really?” he asked, looking her up and down.

“Yeah, really,” she answered.

Mr. Disgusting came down a few minutes later, wearing gray postal-worker pants and a green t-shirt that said “Lowell Sucks.”

“You look nice,” she said.

“I scraped my face for you.” He took her hand and brought it to his bare cheek and then clumsily kissed the tip of her thumb. She blushed, glanced at the fat man behind the desk, who studied them with open disgust. “You get your ID back when you leave the building,” he said into his microphone.

They shared the elevator with a couple of crackheads she recognized from the neighborhood. Mr. Disgusting kept beaming at her as if he’d just won the lottery. For the first time in years, she felt beautiful, like a real prize. They got off on the third floor.

“It’s quiet right now, but this place is a total nuthouse,” he said.

“Doesn’t seem so bad,” she lied.

“Wait until dark,” he said, pulling out his keys.

His room smelled like coffee, cough drops, and Old Spice. All she saw was dirt at first, one of the main hazards of her occupation. She spotted grime on the windowsill and blinds, dust on the television screen, a streaked mirror over a yellowed porcelain sink. The fake Oriental rug needed vacuuming, along with the green corduroy easy chair he directed her to sit in.

Once seated, she switched off her dirt radar and took in the rest of the room. She’d expected something bare and cell-like, but the room was large, warm, and carefully decorated. He had good taste in lamps. Real paintings rather than prints hung on the walls; an Indian textile covered the double bed. He owned a cappuccino machine, an antique typewriter, a sturdy wooden desk, and a couple of bookcases filled with mostly existential and Russian novels, some textbooks, and what looked like an extensive collection of foreign dictionaries.

“Are you a linguist or something?” she asked.

“No, I just like dictionaries.” He sat directly across from her, on the edge of the bed, and crossed his legs. “I find them comforting, I guess. Most of these I found on the street.”

“You mean in the trash?”

He shrugged. “I’m a slut for garbage.”

“Your vocabulary must be pretty impressive,” she said. “Do you have a favorite word?”

He thought about it for a second. “I’ve always liked the word ‘cleave’ because it has two opposite meanings: to split or divide and to adhere or cling. Those two tendencies have been operating in me simultaneously for as long as I can remember. In fact, I can feel a battle raging right now.” He clutched his stomach theatrically.

She smiled. It was rare for her to find someone attractive physically and also to like what came out of their mouths.

“What’s your least favorite word?” he asked.

“Mucous,” she said.

He nodded and scratched his chin.

“I wasn’t born like this,” he said suddenly. “Moving into this hellhole did quite a number on me—you know, spiritually or whatever. I haven’t felt like myself in a long time.”

Keep reading

resonated with me so much. I think the phase I’m in right now is the one Lydia labels “Bad.”  It isn’t that Bad, I don’t want to get too dramatic about it. It does come hard on the heels of “magic,” though, and stands in sharp contrast to it. Suddenly – overnight – my baby is eating food, sleeping most of the night, almost crawling. It’s weird to not be needed by him in the same way. He would rather climb on me like a jungle gym now than cling to me like a tiny monkey. When we nurse, unless he’s really tired, I feel like we’re having a small wrestling match. He puts his fingers in my mouth and laughs when I pretend to eat them. (That part is awesome. We have a joke!) He takes big handfuls of my hair or skin and yanks. (Not awesome.) A week ago he never wanted me to put him down. Now he wants to be apart from me, lying on the floor, yelling at his toys.  

So it’s weird not to have a little tiny baby anymore, and yet to still feel so hamstrung. It might take more than six months to figure out how to reconfigure every aspect of my work and social life around my new role as a parent, it turns out! While that shouldn’t be surprising, it adds to the overwhelming feeling I have under any circumstances of falling behind, not having enough time or brainpower to accomplish everything I want. Except now it’s like, can I accomplish half of what I want?  Can I figure out how to not wear clothes that are basically pajamas at least a couple of times a week? Can I remember what my book was about?  

This week I went to Manhattan for a meeting and a lunch, and I got to run into stores and do little errands between the two things. I wore a plaid shirtdress, Gap maternity leggings, a sweater that could stand to be drycleaned or lint-shaved, an unfashionable coat and a big backpack with my laptop in it. Midtown was full of women whose impeccable clothes shone with care, all those clean black fabrics. I felt damp and rumpled and in a shop window I didn’t quite recognize myself. I had a flash of how much care I used to put, years ago, into my appearance – not recently, like, more than a decade ago, when I barely had responsibilities and wore eyeliner on a regular basis.  It sounds superficial but I have to get a shred of that person back, or at least the more recent iteration of her who wore real pants and got manicures.  Every minute I’ve had away from my baby I’ve spent looking at this screen, straining to work as much as possible. I always know what time it is. Right now I have 25 minutes left and I’m going to use those to work. Next week, though, I’m going to use babysitter time to buy jeans that fit. My brain feels like a wrung-out sponge anyway, so fuck it. 

Incredibly I have never done an AMA before I don’t think? If you’re free next Wednesday you can go to Skillshare and ask me anything (about writing and publishing) (and what book to read next.) 

“I loved this book. All your books. I’m a huge, huge fan,” I told Mary Gaitskill when I met her yesterday in advance of our Lit Up interview. It was so horribly awkward to say this for some reason! It always feels oddly humiliating to confess to being someone’s fan. I’m not really sure why!  But I was glad I had said it when, toward the end of our conversation, we started talking about fame, how unpleasant it must be to be Rihanna-level famous and how many people aspire to being famous anyway.  Mary’s theory is that people confuse fame with love. That seems right. I don’t think it’s because people are stupid. It only starts to seem obvious that notoriety of any kind is a barrier between you and other people after you have experienced a taste of it. 

Toward the end of our conversation I said something I had been thinking about for a while: Sometimes, when people who claim to admire me meet me, they act mean to me. I understand why, I think. They need me to fail a test of some kind during our interaction. They’re looking for flaws because they admire some things about me but not others and they need confirmation one way or another about their undecided feelings. Or they want me to know that they aren’t some kind of sychophant FAN, that we are peers and they aren’t impressed by me.  I know that this is what’s going on because I’ve acted both of those shitty ways in my interactions with people I’ve admired over the years. 

But if you have loved someone’s work – even if you don’t love 100% of their work, all the time, or think you might not love all their work 100% of the time in the future, or you disagree with some of the things they’ve written, or they have allied themselves with some person or artwork or political view that you just can’t abide – even so, go ahead and say it. “I loved your work. I am a fan.” If the person doesn’t react well to this, that’s on them. But if you don’t say it and you expect them to just know it? Somehow? based on how you act, but then you act shitty? That is on you (me) and it’s time to cut it out. 

My birthday was great. I slept late thanks to a collaborative effort between Keith and Raffi and then went to work, sort of, at this podcast that I am not going to do for much longer but which has been mostly a lot of fun. I felt awake and not stupid as we talked about the author’s book. I’m leaving the podcast because I need to only have things in my life that are either 100% fun or 100% work – and if work, it has to be work that I care about deeply and/or that I’m getting paid well to do. Anything else is impossible to justify. I had suspected this would happen after I had a baby but I also hoped it wouldn’t. Things that are 70% fun/30% badly paid work have a strange appeal. They’ve comprised a lot of my life so far. Sometimes they surprise you by turning into one of the other categories but more often they don’t. 

After the podcast I was hungry but in too much of a rush to eat so I got a smoothie (gross) and went to the Sprint store to get a new phone to replace the one I lost on the way to the Vegas airport (long story, not relevant) and when I walked in the woman who worked there seemed like she was going to be quiet and surly but then I mentioned mercury retrograde and she turned awesome. By the end of our customer service interaction I was obsessed with her. Mercury retro turned her life upside down – she had been working at a different store, she had a different boyfriend, et cetera. On the ride home, I enjoyed a few final peaceful moments of not having a phone. I read the print NYT, the science part, about the discovery of an ancient horse skeleton. 

Then I got home and my baby was there and he was in a great mood. I had been away from him just long enough to start missing him pretty badly. He currently loves being bounced in a lap and finds it wildly hilarious. He also loves it when you pretend you’re going to eat his face and go “rrararrararrr” near his fat cheek. I hope our babysitter does this stuff when we’re not here. I want to tell her “bounce him! pretend to eat his cheek!” but you can’t really tell someone to do stuff like that even if you are paying them.  (Can you? I have no idea how this works. I wouldn’t though. I’m sure whatever she does with him is fine and the less I know about it the better.) 

After Raffi went to bed I went out to dinner in a restaurant after dark sans baby for the first time in four months with my best friends, the purest bliss imaginable.  I came home and fell into bed and woke up at 2am to pump, it was no longer my birthday, I was 34 now and it was just the rest of my life. 

I finished The Mare by Mary Gaitskill on the subway yesterday and cried. Then I looked up and there was a woman getting off the L at the same time as me who was wearing jodphurs and she had a riding crop in her bag. I had the overwhelming urge to give her my galley. I thought about what I’d say. “You seem like you might like horses – this is a great book with horses in it.”  I did not, of course, do this.  But it still seemed slightly magical to encounter an equestrian on the subway at that moment. 

There is magic in The Mare though it’s unclear whether the heroine, Velveteen Vargas, can actually hear horses talking to her or whether this is her intuition or a projection of her hopeful mind and heart, and it doesn’t matter which, ultimately.  A lot of the book is about the distance between what we think or hope or imagine other people are thinking and feeling and their actual thoughts. No one is better than Mary Gaitskill at describing moments of being able to sense what someone else is feeling, either accurately or so close to accurately that the distance between your two consciousnesses recedes temporarily. 

Also, where was that girl going to ride horses near 14th Street and 8th Avenue? 

raising a child

brushing their teeth thoroughly

following recipes

handling money

knowing when it’s time to quit

paying attention 

not procrastinating

behaving authentically 

behaving authentically yet also not gratuitously hurting anyone’s feelings

planning ahead

not overplanning and getting anxious 

not being too attached to outcomes

not overwhelming themselves with contradictory information

keeping their houses clean

making money

learning from experience

sleeping