A Love Letter to Emily
That's MY president!
I log on with Emily Sharp at 10:30 AM, a little hungover from White Claws and lack of sleep (I can only fall asleep after 2 am). She’s wearing a trucker hat that reads, “THIS ACTUALLY IS MY FIRST RODEO.” I joke that it’s fitting because this interview with Emily is my first interview as a Serious Journalist. My work is often diaristic, informal—primarily, I write about myself—but with this new Kid Girl series called “A Love Letter To: __,” I’m challenging myself to delve into another person’s psyche and how it inspires their work. As an excellent interviewer herself, Emily was the first person that came to mind to open this series.
Settling in, she pulls out a Dodgers cap and says being called a “fake fan” for wearing the hat was the main reason she became a legitimate Dodgers fan. “Most of what I do is out of pettiness. Not enough people know that,” Emily deadpans.
I met Emily ten years ago at writing camp, where she wrote lovely, thoughtful fiction, and I wrote about sex. I grew up Christian, and she grew up in Connecticut, so we had a mutual understanding of judgmental twats. Hardly anything has changed.
I Would Vote For Her
Emily is primarily known in Internet circles for her excellent, admirably unserious newsletter Emily For President. She, unlike me, posts consistently and often. Emily For President (affectionally abbreviated “E4P”) weaves political discourse, historical context, and pop culture commentary with interviews from interesting, well-informed people (not including me). Her work is rigorous yet approachable. Though she would be loathed to call what she does “writing,” Emily’s work approaches every topic, from police abolition to Taylor Swift, with academic rigor and wry humor. She was a history major at Emory University, wrote her thesis on Roy Cohn, and is a longtime Housewives franchise fan (she’s got layers, okay?).
In 2020, she interviewed Lisa Rinna, her favorite housewife. “Listen… Everyone hates her. Everyone loves her. Serving cunt, looking good, getting brand deals, tits to the neck, lips to the Gods.” I ask how Ms. Rinna was to interview, and Emily laughs: “Exactly the same. If it's an act, she brought it to the phone call. She has the one quality I have never been able to hack into. She does not give a fuck. I give every single fuck. All of the time. Even if it's not my fuck to give, I'll give it.”
Emily is open and funny as usual, but I get the sense she isn’t used to being asked the questions. I ask her why she chose to build Emily For President around interviews. “Everyone is so interesting,” she says. “Why people make decisions, what influenced it. The deeper answer is I’ve tried for so long to be liked and understood. I’m doing it [for] people because that’s what I’ve always wanted. I’m perceiving them and asking them questions because that’s what I’ve always wanted for myself.”
I remember sitting on Emily’s dorm bed and hearing her play “Undo” by The 1975. I remember thinking it was the sexiest song I had ever heard and playing it on repeat on my iPhone for the duration of the summer. I remember she was always the quickest person in the room; smart but unpretentious. She casually brought up the impending Wendy Davis versus Greg Abbott election during class, as if the Texas governor race was common knowledge for every fifteen-year-old girl from Connecticut. “I know myself really well because I’ve always known myself,” She says. “Who I am is a lot like who I was as a kid…Being myself has really kept me from being popular. I’m not a subtle person in the slightest.”
I point out that that’s probably an intimidating quality coming from a teenage girl (it was for me), and Emily counters, “But just because I knew myself doesn’t mean I was confident in it. I feel like the confidence is something I’ve only started to gain in the past year or so. I think women that know themselves, especially at a young age, have likely gone through something that has forced them to figure out who they are. Once you ‘survive’ something, you’re more confident in your ability to keep surviving. I’ve never gone through anything really traumatic. I had a small mental breakdown one year, but that’s the extent of it.”
When Emily Met Roy
This breakdown led to Emily’s fascination (and subsequent) work on Roy Cohn, the Republican ghoul of the 20th century. Fictional versions of Cohn have been immortalized in Tony Kushner’s seminal play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991) and the film Citizen Cohn (1992). And in 2019, two documentaries (Bully, Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn and Where’s My Roy Cohn?) explored Roy's devastating, confounding legacy in the Trump era.
“When I was going through that mental breakdown, I did lose sight of parts of myself. I like to be passionate about something, and that was one of the things that I lost for most of a year. I had no drive,” Emily recalls. “I really just want to talk to him. I’ve been thinking about doing a seance to summon him from hell.”
Roy Cohn was a highly influential figure throughout several presidential terms. During a project on the Lavender Scare (an off-shoot of the Red Scare), Emily repeatedly came across Roy. His council led to Eisenhower passing laws that enabled the federal government to discriminate on the basis of sexuality. Even if it was just suspected that you were gay, your job and livelihood could be endangered. “If one person talked and was like, ‘I saw that guy sucking dick back behind the alley after work one day, I think he's gay,’ you would be fired.”
Roy was a fascinating anti-hero in fiction because of his outlandish, often perplexing contradictions. “He was just so fucking weird,” Emily marvels. “Everything that you could make a statement about was diametrically opposed with another thing that you could say about him. He was gay and died of AIDS, but he was also the strongest raging homophobe you would have ever met. Very very anti-semitic. But then would also win awards for being an upstanding public Jewish figure. He came from a very established New York Democratic family.” She takes a long pause. “Republican power broker. And I was like, ‘Who the hell is this bitch?’”
“He's one of the worst people that's ever existed in this world. I love him so sincerely.”
These contradictions brought Emily comfort. She describes herself as someone who needs to be passionate about something, and while researching Roy for her thesis, that passion began to resurface. “Studying him gave me back a part of myself that I really missed and had lost. And so I tied a lot of my recovery to Roy.” She says. “In my mind, he is the reason why I was like, ‘Okay, let’s get a little bit better. Let's not suffer any longer. This is fun. I've missed this. I can get back to who I was. Let's do that.’ And so it's weird. He sucks. He's one of the worst people that's ever existed in this world.” She pauses, thinking. “And I love him so sincerely. It's a very weird thing to try to explain to people without explaining my whole mental health journey. But it's true.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking about villains being heroes and heroes being villains. I’ve talked before about how celebrities as people are frequently disappointing and how we reckon with the humanity of public figures. But it’s even more interesting, I’d argue, to delve into the psyche of genuinely hateful, terrible people. In understanding them, we attempt to understand the underbelly of human nature—its color, motivation—and (hopefully) rectify it moving forward.
On being a ‘good’ person, Emily echoes my thoughts. “I’m wrestling with it every day in different ways. If something feels morally gray, I'll sit with it, I'll talk with other people about it. That's a big part of Emily For President, too. There are things where I know where I stand on it, but I want to hear someone else's perspective. I know a lot of people have said [this] to me about Taylor Swift in particular. [But] I’m gonna hold steady and say, ‘Well, yeah, is this morally the clearest thing? No. But am I gonna bop my ass off to Speak Now Taylor's Version? Bet your ass.’ I skirt around ever having a final set answer on things because I think if I did, that wouldn't be me.”
“We perceive people based on their consumption, but then we need them to apologize for it when it doesn't align with our consumption.”
We discuss consumption in a capitalist society and how what we consume has become the most significant indicator of our perceived morality. I bring up this quote from High Fidelity (the movie, not the book)—“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” And I think that’s such a great encapsulation of how we feel about pop culture and our constant judgment of it, obsessively curating our tastes and purchases to better align with viewpoints. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I find great irony in that most online capitalist discourse is centered around what we are purchasing and not the systemic forces surrounding those purchases.
Emily gives a hypothetical example of a woman buying (and then posting about) a Birkin bag on TikTok. “Someone will say, ‘This is insensitive. The average consumer can't buy this. And you're supposed to be a real-life person.’ And so [the influencer's] apology is, ‘I am a real-life person. I'm a real-life person who wanted a Birkin, and now I can afford one.’ We perceive people based on their consumption, but then we need them to apologize for it when it doesn't align with our consumption.”
Spending our lives in a state of moralistic purity, without tension or curiosity, reacting to bad behavior with uncomplicated repulsion, destines history to repeat itself. That’s not to say we should excuse problematic or abusive behavior, but it’s almost always more interesting to face that people are neither plainly good nor evil. Murderers, abusers, and villains all have something human beneath the surface, and there’s something a little rotten about every hero, too. What I’m talking about could be called a form of radical empathy, but I think it’s simpler than that. The most reprehensible actions can always be linked to the same things—love, fear, power. That’s about it.
I saw Emily in New York at a Mexican place in Midtown a few weeks ago. It was the first time I had seen her in person since we were teenagers, but when I say it was like no time had passed, I mean it. She has that ability to make you feel truly, deeply, seen, to emit a kind of sparkling warmth and wit that makes her the most interesting person in the room while still including you in that interest, in that warmth. Before I passed out from jet lag in the Uber back to Washington Heights, we laughed over margaritas at our (mainly my) various “phases” over the years; the hair changes, the boyfriends, the Tumblr era (gag me). I love how she met each version, not just of me, but with people as a whole, with curiosity, humor, and generosity.
As I wrap up my questions, I notice a black cat in the background, quietly curled up in a patch of sun. She tells me the cat’s name is Cat. “My mom showed me Breakfast at Tiffany's at a very impressionable age,” she says.
