You might know Emily Gould from her Gawker days, or more recently, from her e-bookstore venture, Emily Books. Her newest novel, Perfect Tunes, is a heart-wrenching story about giving up one life for another—literally for someone else, namely your child. Laura comes to NYC to be a musician and finds herself falling for a fellow musician—and of course, this changes everything. Fifteen years later, Laura’s daughter is now a teenager with lots of questions. Laura’s life is different and she likes it…for the most part. Gould weaves music, NYC, motherhood, best friendships, and adolescence into a novel about what it means to sacrifice for your child and how things just might be okay, even when it feels like they’re not.

Gould was gracious enough to answer some questions about her new book over email during the hectic days of quarantine and social distancing.

Can you tell me a little about the impetus for writing Perfect Tunes?

I wanted to write about a mother-daughter relationship, but instead of introducing the characters once they’d established their bond, I thought it would be interesting to work backwards—showing who Laura, the protagonist, was in her life and her work before she even had an inkling that she would become a mother.

You’ve written a collection of personal essays and this will be your second novel—do you prefer one over the other?

Writing nonfiction used to come much more easily to me than fiction when I was younger. As I get older, the opposite is true! I’m working more slowly and deliberately in general but also being more cautious, which is bad for personal writing.

As a mother of a toddler who has struggled with space to pursue one’s art/creative outlets, I found some of these paragraphs so painful to read. There is a quote on p. 148: “They didn’t understand that even when you weren’t with your child, the child continued to exist in a part of your brain that you either had to consciously work to silence, or as a low hum of anxiety that colored everything. Either way, you were fucked. Either way, pleasure and creativity were sacrificed entirely, or only permitted in small doses.” How have you, as a writer, managed to co-exist with this? Do you think it gets easier over time? Different?

It’s really hard. I was just describing it in another interview as “always having another tab open” in my brain. I can only hope to get better at it, I guess, as my kids get older. I hear very cheering dispatches from women in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s about creativity. It doesn’t stop being painful and enraging, though, that most men don’t have to make these kinds of sacrifices and tradeoffs when they become parents.

I think you’re absolutely right. I’d love for male writers to be field questions about parenting and work, but I suspect the majority of work is done by their partner. How do you think the creative community can support women, and mothers, especially?

There should be more residencies which specifically meet the needs of mothers and parents with young kids—shorter stays, onsite childcare. In general, though, I think the creative community is at the mercy of the larger structures of our economic and political systems. We need universal healthcare and childcare in this country so badly.

What are you struggling with, as a parent and as a writer, right now?

Ha, well! It’s early April 2020, we’re quarantined in our apartment. My older son is really struggling with it. He’s almost 5 and he really misses school, his teachers, his friends. He’s the kind of person who desperately needs an audience. I’m trying to have compassion for him and understand that his anger and acting out are coming from anxiety and sadness because his world has been upended. It’s really, really hard. In disaster movies kids are always so docile and sympathetic. You never see them behaving like jerks.

What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?

I reread The Age of Innocence recently—there’s a fantastic new edition with a foreword by Elif Batuman and an introduction by Sarah Blackwood. It’s a great book about tiny gestures and moments, gossip and clothes and interiors, so many casually cruel moments, yet it also manages to capture something eternal and very reassuring about New York—its immovable New York-ness. It’s also very engrossing, which is important right now.

Lately I’ve been reading Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out, which was famously “ghostwritten” by Ariel Levy. It’s very very diverting and well-executed. That lady has had a crazy life!

What advice would you give to a writer trying to juggle parenthood and writing?

I wouldn’t dare give advice! I sometimes feel like everyone doing this has it figured out better than I do.

What’s next on the horizon for you?

I would probably have answered this very differently a month ago. I’m hoping to write more about mothers, people who have shaped my life and been “mothers” to me in a more abstract sense. I’m also really interested in birth, both the lived experience of women giving birth and the cultural constructs surrounding it. In general, though, this year, I want to find a way to be useful—to my family and my community as we travel through this tragic and transformative time. Whether that’s with writing, teaching, or with some other kind of work, I don’t know yet.

Photo Credit: Sylvie Rosokoff