Emma Copley Eisenberg on Her New Book ‘Fat Swim’ and the Glories of Writing Out of Spite

Reported by Vogue.

Emma Copley Eisenberg's new collection Fat Swim exists in a strange temporal pocket: she's been tinkering with these linked Philadelphia stories since 2014, yet they feel urgently contemporary. The book arrives after her novels The Third Rainbow Girl and Housemates, but not before them—a deliberately orchestrated publishing sequence that, she argues, made the work richer. Between 2022 and 2026, as her understanding of embodiment deepened, the stories transformed entirely. Some early pieces didn't survive the cut. Others—like "Ray's Happy Birthday Bar" and "The Dan Graves Situation"—still sing. The delay, she insists, was a gift.

Eisenberg draws from a sharp literary lineage. She reveres Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From, loves Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You, and considers Bryan Washington's Lot among recent masterpieces. But it's Jonathan Franzen who catalyzed one of her best stories. In Crossroads, Franzen introduces a character named Marion as "the overweight person who was Marion"—worse still, someone from whom no one on the street would want to see more. Eisenberg read that and felt something crystallize: spite. She would write a Marion "the reader wants to see from every angle, who's also fat." That impulse, fused with an obsession over an obscure YouTuber who posts fish videos, became "Beauty"—about a woman fleeing the beauty-startup economy to make cryptic, slowly-uploaded content in the woods. Sometimes the most galvanizing creative force is pure, unapologetic pushback.

The Algorithm Versus the Billboard

Eisenberg's promotional instinct was equally unconventional. She rented a billboard in Philadelphia bearing the message: "Your gut is a terrible thing to lose." The phrase pushes back against the endless feed of GLP-1 ads and contradictory body-positivity rhetoric—the simultaneous insistence that our guts contain wisdom while also requiring destruction. She'd been collecting recommendations for books, films, and performance art that shaped people's thinking on embodiment, struck by the algorithmic narrowness of what actually appears on her phone. What's the opposite of an algorithm? Something static, public, unavoidable. Something that doesn't change to suit you. She looked to Jenny Holzer and Félix González-Torres, artists who planted conversations about power and mortality in public sight, then learned a guy had rented a Philly billboard to find a girlfriend. Why not use it to shift how we see bodies?

The characters in Fat Swim live as neighbors do—side characters in one story become focal points in another, all viewing the same Philadelphia streets from different angles. It's a technique Eisenberg has always loved: intimacy built from proximity, complexity from perspective. And the billboard, funded by what she calls "Monopoly money" from a legal settlement, felt like recirculating that resource back into the ecosystem of her work. It's a reminder that the most radical book promotion might simply be asking people to see what they've been taught not to look at.

Read the original at Vogue.