Festival Spotlight: Editing Jesse Eisenberg

The millions of pages of correspondence generated by New Yorker writers and their editors during this magazine’s first six decades take up a good chunk of the New York Public Library’s archives. These days, the weighty deliberations of where to insert a comma, when to remove a joke, and how to figure out the right headline take place largely over e-mail. The first Shouts & Murmurs piece that Jesse Eisenberg e-mailed to The New Yorker, in 2012, was called “Separation-Anxiety Sleepaway Camp.” All I knew of Jesse then was his heartbreaking performance in “The Squid and the Whale,” a movie directed by Noah Baumbach, who himself has been a frequent contributor to Shouts & Murmurs (and who, like Jesse, sent his first piece in over the transom, where it waited in the slush pile like everyone else’s; and who, like Jesse, I interviewed at The New Yorker Festival). The sleepaway-camp piece needed some tightening and fiddling, but I knew right away that I would publish it. It had the same loopy, high-wire intensity that Jesse’s movie performances have. He submitted it in December, and because it made sense to run the piece in early summer, when camp starts, editing it wasn’t my top priority. We arranged a phone call, so that I could explain to Jesse what sorts of changes I wanted him to make. In the meantime, he sent me another e-mail.

Dear Susan,
In anticipation of our call about the Sleepaway Camp piece, I have just finished something else that may be more appropriate for you.… If you hate both, I will send you a fruit basket instead.

I didn’t hate the piece, which was “Marv Albert Is My Therapist,” and within a few months both stories appeared in the magazine, to good response, and a couple of others were published on newyorker.com. Jesse is easy to edit: he’s open to suggestions and cuts, and he is eager to brainstorm about how to resolve a problem, whether related to taste or accuracy. A few examples from his e-mails:

—“I think ‘papyrus’ is really funny, but the previous joke of ‘looking after the book’ made me laugh. Is it okay to revert it back?”
—“As for the Israeli/Palestinian thing, I completely understand and have a dozen alternatives that will not offend the myriad races of New York.”
—“I vaguely remember seeing caves in Pompeii though I was likely suffering from a carbohydrate overdose in Italy.”

Then Jesse sent a story called “If I Was Fluent in …,” the first of many pieces in which he prods and pokes at cultural stereotypes. Here are some snippets from the editing discussions, which took place throughout fourteen high-minded e-mails:

J. E.: I’m just worried that there’s no joke there (since we took out “diarrhea”) and “fragile intestinal tracts” seems both funny and not cutesy. If you think it doesn’t work, feel free to cut it though.
S. M.: Honestly, I think “intestinal tract” will get a laugh.
J. E.: I hope that’s the first time you ever wrote that in an email.
S. M.: That’s the kind of email that makes us say, “I wonder if Mr. Shawn ever typed that sentence?”
J. E.: I ask myself that every night.

Next Saturday, I will interview Jesse at The New Yorker Festival. I’m looking forward to more onstage exchanges of this calibre.

Tickets for the event are available online and at the box office.