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| Emma Copley Eisenberg, photo by Sylvie Rosokoff |
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the new book The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Granta and McSweeney's, and she directs the Philadelphia-based literary organization Blue Stoop.
Q: In a New York Times review of The Third Rainbow Girl,
Melissa Del Bosque calls the book "an unflinching interrogation of what it
means to be female in a society marred by misogyny, where women hitchhiking
alone are harshly judged, even blamed for their own murders." What do you
think of that description?
A: I love this, it's such an astute reading.
Del Bosque picked up so well on the work I was trying to do
to show that it's not so much what happened in the moment these women were
killed but rather everything that happened after that can teach us about the
ways our culture tries to shove complicated histories of oppression and messy
individual people into simple stories, in this case the simple story of
Appalachian men being "dangerous" and women being "naive,"
destined to get murdered.
We live in a world where we will do almost anything for a
dead woman, but very little for a live one and where we are content to use the
coal and timber mined from Appalachian communities but are not much interested
in understanding the real issues facing contemporary West Virginia.
If you zoom out and look at all the threads I try to trace
in and out of the case in my book, what I hope you will see is that misogyny is
everywhere in our culture, not only in this particular part of
Appalachia.
Q: Why did you decide to write the book, and what impact did
writing it have on you?
A: 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 and was trying
to write some of the material that would become the book as fiction, but it
wasn't working.
Then while I was in graduate school for creative writing in
Charlottesville, Virginia, 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.
Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify
for you?
A: The Third Rainbow Girl is truly the only title I ever
considered for this project which is very uncharacteristic of me!
One of the first things that I learned about this case from
the coverage that was available was that there had been a third woman
named Liz who hitchhiked across America with the two women who were killed, but
she parted ways with them before arriving in West Virginia and survived.
I connected with her and she shared with me her feelings of
survivor's guilt, that she was not harmed but was definitely traumatized by
what happened.
As I researched and reported and learned more, the idea that
many people, both in Pocahontas County and outside it, were traumatized by the
events surrounding the murders and their investigation began to take root in my
mind.
There are many "third Rainbow girls" in this
book--Liz, yes, but also the nine local men who were accused of these crimes
over the years and their children, as well as the next generations in the
families of the women who died and the law enforcement officers who
participated; men and women I met during my years there, and perhaps me
also.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from this book?
A: As a fun thing in coordination of this book's release, I
had an artist design enamel pins that simply say "BOTH/AND."
This book taught me, over and over again, that two things
that seem in contradiction--victim, aggressor; misogyny and the pain of men;
defense, prosecution--can both be true at the same time. One person's trauma
does not cancel out another's, even if they are the one who inflicted it.
We won't ever find justice--in our courtrooms or our private
lives--if we force ourselves to choose and only believe one single story.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm returning to fiction! Writing fiction taught me how
to make vivid scenes and render real people as complicated on the page, writing
nonfiction allowed my fiction to become more joyful and strange. I'm working on
a short story collection and a novel.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: This book has three main "highways" if you
will--the crime, as we've talked about, the history of the rich community where
that crime took place and the ways it reveals important history about
Appalachia more broadly, and the way my personal story intersected and informed
the other two.
If you like essays, memoir, cultural criticism, history, or
writing about criminal justice, you may find something here for you.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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