Interview of Emmalea Russo by Freya Bennett
Vivienne, Emmalea’s first novel, is funny, smart and delightfully bold. A debut that feels fresh and fiercely alive. I chatted with Emmalea about crafting a morally ambiguous protagonist, the alchemy of blending glamour with grit, and the digital chorus of voices that surrounds her elusive central character. From her poetic roots to her interest in astrology, she shares how her unique perspective shapes a novel that questions art, legacy, and the stories we tell about brilliance, ambition, and recognition.
Hi Emmalea, congratulations on Vivienne! How does it feel to have your first novel out in the world after publishing several poetry collections?
Hi Freya. Thank you! It still feels surreal. As I write this, it’s about a year since Vivienne was officially published. Vivienne, the novel, is a Virgo. Other Virgos: Vivienne’s granddaughter, Vesta, the city of Los Angeles, Blanche DuBois, and me. There’s a book called Purity and Danger. I feel like this is an apt description of the Virgo archetype and Vivienne.
The book opens with the question, “Did Vivienne Volker kill Wilma Lang?” What drew you to starting with this moral ambiguity, and what did it let you explore about art, legacy, and memory?
I am always interested in questions of moral ambiguity. As disquieting as it is, ambiguity is where true thought and feeling live. Adorno said something like—and I might be butchering this quote but—intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. This question, and the mystery surrounding it, opened up other questions about what it means to “harm” with art, to kill, to be offended, to heal—for better or worse, to leave a mark. And it allowed me to explore the seduction of authoritarian-style groupthink—the immediate YES or NO, as opposed to dwelling with the question, in suspension, and thinking for yourself, living by your own code, eschewing trends and avoiding bandwagons.
Vivienne is part recluse, part icon, part myth—was she inspired by real “forgotten women” artists, or did you build her as a composite character?
I like that trinity: recluse, icon, myth! The title of the show that Vivienne’s works gets scrubbed from is called “Forgotten Women Surrealists” which strikes me as kind of funny. Like, what does it mean to be forgotten? To be remembered? Revived after a time? Vivienne is an icon and a myth, in part, because she is so reclusive and ungraspable. She is a composite character, and also her own weird thing entirely. I read a lot of commentary, YouTube mostly, about iconic, mysterious, or controversial figures, in order to form the backbone of her public image: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Camille Paglia, Martin Margiela.
The novel’s “Greek chorus” of internet comments and text messages feels both surreal and cuttingly real. How did you conceive of this device, and what role did you want it to play in the story?
I wanted it to play a fun and rowdy yet disturbing role. The chorus of commenters needed to introduce Vivienne on the digital stage before we meet her in private. I wanted the swirl and derangement of the voices to create a momentum and set things up very quickly, at breakneck internet-speed. Then, the book reveals what’s happening at the same time in Viv’s real life: her slower, rural, quirky morning at home before the family finds out about the online shitstorm. I like that odd cloud of tension between public and private.
The book asks, “What is the cost of vision, what is the price of art?” Do you see Vivienne’s betrayals and sacrifices as essential to her brilliance, or is that connection itself a cultural myth you’re questioning?
I do think these things—sacrifice, betrayal—are entwined, knotted up, in Vivienne’s work and personality. It’s interesting that you see her as brilliant. I guess the book positions her as a figure who some people find brilliant and others dismiss as a sort of grifter or kook. Maybe she’s both. But I am drawn to her action of quitting, stopping, dropping out. I just rewatched Good Will Hunting, and that movie kind of kicked off a trend of films about complicated (and very hot) geniuses with rough pasts, who disturb and exhilarate everyone around them, and also resent this idea of like, living up to their potential. I think there is something inherently disturbing-exhilarating about brilliance, just as there is something disturbing-exhilarating about ambiguity. At the start of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names, he writes: “What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.” I love this.
There’s a striking mix of glamour and grit in the novel, from fashion and surrealism to garbage trucks and rural Pennsylvania. How did you approach blending these textures together?
I’m glad you felt that. I wanted both. I think a good novel should be like a fragrance. It should stay with you as part of your atmosphere and have a few different notes. I was thinking of that perfume from the 90s by Thierry Mugler: Angel. It’s both sickeningly sweet, like carnival candy, and gritty, animalistic, like post-carnival dirt and hay. It’s also polarizing, like Vivienne. I wanted to create an atmosphere, a feeling of polarization, without like, being shocking just for the sake of it. Part of Angel’s appeal is its slow burn. So I attempted to blend the grit and glamour to get that. It’s alchemical. Lots of trial and error. I live, part of the time, in rural Pennsylvania. And I lived for many years in New York. So these contradictory but creepily complementary atmospheres are part of me. Can’t help it.
You’ve written poetry, essays, and now a novel. Did your background as a poet and astrologer influence the surreal, dreamlike quality of Vivienne?
I think I’m always reaching for a kind of dreamy, uncanny, surreal feel in my work. And my astrology practice certainly informs it—in many ways I’m unaware of, probably. But, the concept of synchronicity is everywhere in my work, I think. Astrology is such a wild and interesting language and an antidote to digital flatness because it’s dealing with textures of time. Our astrology charts don’t make things happen in our lives. But, they tell us about the quality of time at the moment we were born, the vibe and the atmosphere. We cannot remember our own births, of course, so they’re always uncanny but astrology offers this chart, this bizarre document, of that moment in time. In Vivienne, we see two worlds – the world of the internet, the IRL world, the city, the country. I’m interested in the threads that secretly link these seemingly disparate zones. Astrology is a link.
Many women artists have been sidelined or forgotten until much later in history. What conversations do you hope the book sparks about recognition, memory, and the art canon today?
I hope it sparks interesting thoughts, strange feelings, wild sensations, intoxications, and conversations for individual readers. A client of mine said she heard a few people at work discussing the book, and that made me so happy. But, I never set out on a mission to spark a particular conversation with any of the things I make. And I actually get irritated when I’m reading a novel and I can sense that the author is trying to beat me over the head with a message. People have really polarized reactions to the ending, which I see as a good thing. But, it would be interesting to see more conversation surrounding some of the topics that the ending (a section entitled “Afterlife” which I won’t spoil here!) brings up—biology, technology, reproduction, the use of artist’s bodies for particular purposes. Messaging masquerading as art, even.
