Emma Specter on the Bridge from Journalist to Memoirist
Emma Specter (she/they) is the author of the upcoming debut memoir, More, Please. Originally from New York, Emma studied creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio. Their ability to balance blog-like candor and wit with highbrow social commentary is even further elevated by their compassion and work for social justice; aside from advocating for myriad causes. Specter is also a Vogue union steward, empowering her fellow employees of Condé Nast to know and advocate for their rights.
Kathryn Bailey: You currently work at Vogue as the culture writer, which feels like the millennial journalist’s dream; how did you get there?
Emma Specter: It is definitely a dream, one that feels reliably fake to me every time I wake up and log on to write a story like “TK Things I Thought About Timothee Chalamet Playing Bob Dylan.” I ran my campus blog in college and always felt funniest/most like myself when writing things for the Internet (all the way back to my eighth-grade fashion blog, the URL of which I will never reveal); I started freelancing in roughly 2017 (and I do mean “roughly”; the five publications I placed stories in that year all folded or replaced their editors), then got a gig contributing stories to the news and entertainment site LAist that turned into a full-time job. When LAist shuttered in 2017, I dicked around in LA and cried a lot for a few months before moving to NYC, where I briefly temped, babysat a lot, and eventually found my way to an assistant web editor job at Vice’s now-also-shuttered fashion and art magazine Garage (specifically, through Twitter; a mutual at GARAGE reached out to me to ask me to take an edit test when the role was opening up.) I spent a very happy, chaotic, frenzied year at Vice, then interviewed for my current web culture writer role at Vogue and started that job in 2019. I’ve been there for five years, which is bananas, especially given how fewer staff jobs there are in digital media than there used to be; I try very hard not to take it for granted.
Bailey: Have you always written nonfiction?
Specter: No, actually. I was a champion note-passer in school, but I grew up with two journalist parents and thought until college that nonfiction was the last thing I wanted to get into. Specifically, I thought journalism seemed boring, because who wants to “just ask people questions and write down the answers,” as I once summarized my dad’s job to him when I was nine? I didn’t learn until college—when I was getting B-minuses on my sloppily assembled creative-writing fiction assignments while working pretty much full-time on the campus blog—that you could shape nonfiction, and specifically journalism, into an opportunity to display your voice. Honestly, I’m still not totally sure I have a “voice” in fiction, but I know I do when it comes to narrative nonfiction, so I’m just trying to run with that while keeping my secret novel draft mainly a Saturday-morning pursuit these days.
Bailey: Which came first professionally: journalism or creative nonfiction? How different are the two for you, as a writer?
Specter: Definitely journalism, due to my aforementioned nepo-baby status. My parents definitely weren’t crossing their fingers for me to become a women’s-media blogger, so it’s not like they were pushing “the 5 Ws” at me over the breakfast table, but I definitely internalized a lot of lessons about their (and, eventually, my) profession, arguably the most important being: journalists are people, and people fuck up, so you better make sure to stay humble. I think a common misconception is that journalists check their true selves at the door when they report a story, as opposed to creative nonfiction writers who get to be more free/honest, but TBH, we’re all loaded with biases and I think the presumption of neutrality/moral authority that people commonly place on journalists is a potentially dangerous one. Ultimately, I think it’s all about acknowledging and owning your own viewpoint, whether you’re writing a feature story or creative nonfiction; once you’ve done that, you can begin to look beyond it.
Bailey: Are there any challenges in transitioning between the two? For example, with tone switching or interjecting your own voice and personality? I imagine that while working for so long on your memoir, it could be a bit of a brain scramble to pivot between the two.
Specter: I’ve been really lucky in that my bosses at Vogue (and at GARAGE and LAist, and even my college blog) have encouraged me to write personally about what moves me in my own life—most recently and significantly, fatphobia and the dangers of diet culture—without asking me to do the kind of “hot take” around my experience that can often perform well but cement the writer in the Discourse in a way that isn’t always beneficial. For that reason, it wasn’t too hard to pivot between memoir-brain and Vogue-brain, especially since the memoir contains elements of reporting; everyone in media deserves the kind of editors and mentors I’ve had, people you can go to and say “Is this weirdly too TMI for a reported story?” or “Is this too reported/boring for a personal essay?” and trust them to give you the answer that’s right for you, not just for the company you happen to work for.
Bailey: What appealed to you about writing a memoir? What advantages does that have over your work in journalism? This can be specific to More, Please or just regarding the genre itself.
Specter: Honestly, as a journalist, I’m rarely the expert in any situation. I’m usually interviewing the expert, so it was very tempting to me to feel like I was the person with the most knowledge to contribute, and to contribute that knowledge in memoir form. I thought about what topic I was truly the “expert” on (a.k.a. what thoughts did I spend the majority of my time chasing while I was supposed to be doing other stuff?), and unfortunately/fortunately, that topic was my eating disorder. In a memoir, you get to tell your story full-on, without finding a timely “news peg” for it or filtering it through the lens of a feature as you often do in journalism, and after years of living with an eating disorder that so often felt poised to rob me of every last scrap of joy, I felt ready to tell—forgive me—the fuck out of that story.
Bailey: Did you have any hesitations around tackling a memoir? Do you feel like there’s any risk in putting out more personal work? What about potential payoff?
Specter: God, yes. I forget who first told me that you shouldn’t write a memoir before thirty unless you’ve achieved something incredible, but a hearty thank you to that person, because I felt insane every day until the book sold (and still many days after), sure that I would soon be exposed as a fraud. I no longer feel that way, which probably goes back to the whole “owning the narrative” thing from my last answer, but I often have concerns about sharing too much of myself; however, I also have concerns about putting writing out there that isn’t emotionally honest and doesn’t truly represent the depths to which my ED has taken me over the years, which frankly feels like a huge cop-out and an insult to my fellow disordered eaters who will (hopefully) read the book and hunger to recognize themselves in the same way I used to.
Bailey: Who are some of your biggest influences? When I read your work, I’m reminded of Jia Tolentino, Lindy West, and Tracie Egan Morrissey, to name a few; I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that these are all early 2010s Jezebel alumni. Did that era of writing/culture/the internet have a big impact on you?
Specter: Okay, well, somewhere in my boxes of books there is a red-wine-stained Moleskine that contains the genuine, unironic line I wrote in shaky fountain pen when I was on a solo trip to a goat farm in the Angeles National Forest in 2017: “I just think if I could get a job at Jezebel my life would feel meaningful.” So, in other words, yes, that era of Internet writing had a big effect on me (and continues to; I’m such a fan of what current and recent Jezebel writers like Kylie Cheung and Ashley Reese are writing, whether it’s for that site or for other outlets.) I am more influenced by Kelly Conaboy’s writing than I would like to admit, yet here I am, admitting it; I’m also a Jia Tolentino stan (I’m very unique in this way), and if I had to list all the writers I’m now obsessed with after first reading them on Jez and other dearly-departed sites like The Awl and The Outline, this interview will never be over (much like the soul of online writing, which lives on despite the efforts of harebrained media bosses and VC backers. Support your local media union!)
