Emma Copley Eisenberg

Emma Copley Eisenberg's debut book is The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: In a New York Times review of The Third Rainbow Girl, Melissa Del Bosque calls the book "an unflinching interrogation of what it means to be female in a society marred by misogyny, where women hitchhiking alone are harshly judged, even blamed for their own murders." What do you think of that description?

A: I love this, it's such an astute reading.

Del Bosque picked up so well on the work I was trying to do to show that it's not so much what happened in the moment these women were killed but rather everything that happened after that can teach us about the ways our culture tries to shove complicated histories of oppression and messy individual people into simple stories, in this case the simple story of Appalachian men being "dangerous" and women being "naive," destined to get murdered.

We live in a world where we will do almost anything for a dead woman, but very little for a live one and where we are content to use the coal and timber mined from Appalachian communities but are not much interested in understanding the real issues facing contemporary West Virginia.

If you zoom out and look at all the threads I try to trace in and out of the case in my book, what I hope you will see is that misogyny is...[read on]

Visit Emma Copley Eisenberg's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Third Rainbow Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue