Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, a cultural, political, and personal history of disordered eating, and the chapbook Toxic, on Britney Spears, bad girls, and the bayou. She is also CULTURED’s books editor-at-large, as well as the gadfly behind “Boots on the Ground,” a new column for CULTURED that offers readers a glimpse inside the cloistered New York cultural world—from book releases to fashion-show afterparties—and unfiltered conversations with the creatives lighting it up.
As CULTURED’s newest vibes investigator, I’m here to report on echoes of hysterical laughter, the din of spilled drinks hitting floors, and the beats just missed inside a series of very loud rooms. I will tell you what I overhear, but because I have kind of mid hearing, I will mostly tell you what other people say they overheard. Each month, I will also be (hopefully, charmingly) interrogating an interview subject I find in one of these rooms: someone with an eye on the cultural horizon and a trigger finger on the pulse, someone who might keep their cards close to their chest but isn’t afraid to drop them on the floor if you phrase the question just right.
Our story this month begins in the line for Dream Baby Press’s Perverted Book Club, which wound down Broadway toward Canal Street on a wet Wednesday night in December. The erotica reading series—on hiatus since a 2022 edition held in the beating heart of Manhattan otherwise known as the Penn Station Sbarro—had relocated to more glamorous surrounds (the Tara Downs gallery in Tribeca), but promised it hadn’t lost any of its grimy, dirty soul.
Attendees were warned that listeners at these events, which bring together literary lightning rods, Internet micro-celebrities, actors, and art-world denizens for reading-cum-performances of short pieces the readers deem “erotic,” from fanfiction to Victorian poetry, have been known to faint. This time around, I didn’t see anyone pass out, though I will say the temperature-to-available-water ratio in the room was not ideal. Nevertheless, over 100 (mostly) girls and gays persevered.
One of Dream Baby’s founders, Matt Starr, opened the evening by tossing carrots to the audience before reading a love poem where one functions as a dildo. Joan of Arca, once described as “Instagram’s Feminist Shitposter,” read Lewis and Clarke fanfiction, while Alex Dimitrov read excerpts of Bret Easton Ellis’s Rules of Attraction because “sex isn’t about comedy, it’s about power.” Lili Anolik read from a never-completed (but astonishingly real) Edith Wharton story featuring phrases not usually associated with the aristocratic, Gilded Age society author, like “nipples hard as coral” and “his fiery third hand.” Disgraced memoirist turned novelist James Frey closed out the night with the only original fiction written for the event (his forthcoming novel, Next to Heaven, is billed as a scandalous suburban sex and murder yarn in the grand tradition of Big Little Lies). I was shocked and appalled that no one penned any softcore starring Luigi Mangione.
I happened to miss actor, expert Instagram story-poster, and artist Jemima Kirke’s reading because my friend’s dress abruptly broke (luckily, the surprise semi-nudity was on theme). Jemima, a frequent Dream Baby collaborator, was joined in the lineup this time by her sister Lola, who stepped up to the mic barefoot in a knee-length plaid button down and earnestly announced that she does not normally read erotica because she “really likes missionary and monogamy.” A musician, writer, and actor best known for her roles in Mozart in the Jungle and the relevantly sex-forward Three Women, she had bravely ventured through the torrid waters of Reddit smut ahead of the evening to find an extraordinarily explicit Western-themed short story featuring fire and gunplay.
The cowboy content was more relevant to Lola’s life than most people in the audience realized. Kirke is a country musician (I recommend streaming “All My Exes Live in LA” and “Thank God for Cigarettes”) who’s harbored a lifelong fascination with the South. She is also the author of a book of her own, featuring a romantic interest referred to exclusively as The Cowboy. Lola’s new memoir, Wild West Village, out this week, is an alternately rollicking, tender, and deranged (complimentary) ride through her coming of age, with pit stops in Brooklyn, Britain, and even Bard College. I called her at her home in Nashville, where she’s lived since the pandemic, to talk country music, Catholicism, sex, family secrets, and air travel.
Let’s jump in. Can you name something overrated, underrated, and adequately rated?
Adequately rated: packing cubes. Overrated: political correctness. Underrated: smoking.
Oh, we're really on the same page with smoking. I loved the part in the book about failing smoking cessation class as a teenager. What is something you're reading or watching right now that's really doing the trick for you?
I just finished Lit, the Mary Karr memoir. And I think that that has me on the road to converting to Catholicism.
Oh yes, well Catholicism has certainly been trending.
It is? Well, maybe that's the name of the article: “On the road to Catholicism with Lola.”
Yes, "Lola Takes a Naive Jewess On the Road to Catholicism."
Perfect.
What's your favorite place to eavesdrop or people watch in the city?
I mean, it's a fucking nightmare, but it's so beautiful: Cipriani in Grand Central Station.
What’s something that you think people are pretending to like right now?
Country music.
So true. But some of us are true believers—even if we're not going to convert to Christianity. What's something worth overpaying for?
Flying business class.
Can you make a prediction for something you think everyone will be arguing about in a group chat in the next couple months?
Who's better in OH, MARY!, Betty Gilpin or Cole Escola?
Well, only time will tell. Onto your book, which I read in one sitting, an approach I highly recommend to all readers. Early on, you quote your mother wondering if you’re too young at 34 to write a memoir, and you describe the book as written less in a traditional memoir mode and more essayistically, exploring womanhood, class, addiction, and the city, among other topics. But I’m still curious about the genesis of this first-person project at this particular moment in your life.
Well, in a lot of ways, it was a happy accident. I started working as an actress when I was 19 and worked pretty steadily throughout my 20s and never really had the chance to explore other mediums besides music. I was really, really fortunate in a way that I think I completely took for granted when I started working. When that slowed down after the pandemic, I found myself like so many creatives just wondering, Well, now what do I do? I had never really thought of myself as a writer, even though I did recently find my childhood resume, and I had written that one of my special skills was that I was a writer, when I was 11 years old.
How do you see writing in longform prose relating to your songwriting?
I first started writing songs the Nashville way, which is a lot of co-writing. I remember one of the producers I worked with telling me that my writing was more like prose than it was songwriting—i.e., he was like, "Please go edit this, this is way too long."
I get that feedback a lot and I'm not even writing songs.
[Laughs] Me too, but I think what is so beautiful about country is that there is a succinctness to a country song. It is the ability to say a very, very complicated thing in a very simple way.
Speaking of beauty, you write a lot about the allures and dangers of defining oneself via physical appearance––about beauty as currency with an ever-fluctuating exchange rate, or perhaps even a currency revealed to be counterfeit when you try to spend it, and as one earned through pain and excruciating labor. What does beauty mean to you today?
What beauty means in my life is constantly evolving. Mostly, I would say that it's internal. Beauty in my life today means looking like the main character in a neo-noir '90s film. They're wearing librarian glasses and tweed jackets with shoulder pads, and they're still somehow the sexiest women in the entire world. I think that something the '80s and '90s really promoted about beauty was beyond the all-encompassing thinness that still defines a lot of beauty standards. Instead, it was like, no, it's the woman's intelligence that is really the sexy thing about her. But I think true beauty is love, caring for yourself in a deep way. And wisdom. We've always privileged youth, and I don't think that that's particularly interesting. I'm more interested in being a woman than I am a girl.
I love that, especially with all the cultural emphasis on girl-ifying everything. Let’s have "woman dinner" for once. This book is also obviously pretty rife with tea in a fabulous way, and I was curious whether you were worried about the reactions of the people you wrote about? Are you of the school of letting people in the book read drafts or are you engaging in ask-forgiveness-later culture?
I definitely let people read drafts. For the most part, my rule was, I'm only going to talk about something that happened to another person if they've talked about it themselves, publicly. But I was absolutely terrified. I think I really terrified my family too. I talk about that a little bit at the beginning of the book, but I don't think it was the news that everyone wanted, particularly my parents, when I was like, "Hey, I got a book deal…" They were like, "Um, is it fiction?" My friends would be like, "Well, why didn't you turn it into a novel?"
As we’ve seen with a lot of autofiction, it would probably have been pretty legible.
Yeah, exactly. Welcome to the "Jirke family." Also, you have a lot more freedom when you're writing fiction. I think in a way people might be a little bit more protected, at least with me as the writer, with it being non-fiction.
I was really interested in the way you write about the country music genre as one that rigidly adheres to rules, and compared it to Manhattan’s grid. Your book felt so much like a story of unlearning rules and roles that constrained you, so I’m curious to hear your thoughts on both the comforts and dangers of genre––in music and in books.
I appreciate that reading. I think it comes back to the corny acting truism: you can live more truthfully through the mask. Oftentimes, limitations can give us a lot of freedom. So, I appreciate all the limitations. Something else about growing up with privilege, as I talk about in the book, privilege is a form of freedom. But it's a very privileged thing to do away with your freedom. Genre, whether it's noir or country, actually offers a lot of freedom within limits.
You live in Nashville now, but so much of the book and your life takes place in New York? Are you planning to be in Nashville forever?
I will always go back to New York, and I love New York, but I have really enjoyed not living there. Growing up the way that I did, there is the kind of storied closed-mindedness of people who believe they're very open-minded, i.e. bougie New Yorkers who think the world is as big as New York, LA, and London, and wherever else there are flagship stores of luxury brands. Growing up thinking I was going to be an actress, I never believed that I could live outside of those places. But I always did have great reverence for the South, whether it was because I loved country music or because I loved barbecue.
Okay, last question, which I’ll bring back to sex, since I did get to hear you read erotica recently. I thought your description of your own sexual stance as “largely unskilled but enthusiastic” at a certain point in your life to be iconic and relatable. I was curious if you could talk about your experience writing about sexuality, which can be so fraught for so many women, and which you handled with so much grace and wit.
I typically do feel like sex is just moving around a bunch. That is the best way I could describe it. Despite growing up in a highly sexualized home––not that we were sexualized early, but because we were made into beautiful girls and we modeled our mom's clothing, and there was a lot of emphasis on beauty––there was never a discussion of sex. No one ever was like, "Here's what you do. Here's how you don't get pregnant." I'm always so impressed when I read writer friends of mine write about sex in such a sexy way. Like, oh my God, you know what you're doing?
I know, I read some of my friends’ writing and I’m like, 'You guys are just rocking up to the bedroom with a plan?'
Yeah, yeah, they have a plan. I don't know, I'm just kind of like this [waves arms around]. But it works. People have seemed moderately impressed or pleased. But I did just want to normalize not knowing what you're doing, or glamorize not knowing.
Honestly, we’ve been normalizing way too many things lately. It’s dark out here. Let’s get into romanticizing and glamorizing shit at this point.
Totally, I want to make it hot that you don't know how to tie a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue. I remember in summer camp when we were young, it was like, "Here's how you give a blow job. Take this hairspray and put it in your mouth." And it's like, what? Sex is so funny to me. I have a voice that I sometimes use in sex and I now realize I have no idea where it came from.
Is there an accent?
It's actually a German accent.
Oh, perfect—a sort of commanding Germanic energy to counterbalance the confusion.
Yes, it's actually a very submissive German boy. Just kidding. I really do think sex is funny, and I wanted to write about it funnily instead of skillfully because that's my sexual personality.
Well, thank you for your service, and thank you so much for gabbing with me Lola.
Oh, you're so cool.
And you're so fabulous.
