Craft Corner: The Millions Interviews Emma Copley Eisenberg
Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia was released in January to rave reviews. NPR called it “a masterful work of journalism,” and Melissa del Bosque agreed in her New York Times review: “In the end, The Third Rainbow Girl is not just a masterly examination of a brutal unsolved crime, which leads us through many surprising twists and turns and a final revelation about who the real killer might be. It’s also an unflinching interrogation of what it means to be female in a society marred by misogyny.” It’s a fascinating, dense, and ambitious project that manages to simultaneously work as investigative journalism, true crime, memoir, cultural criticism, and a social history of Appalachia—specifically, Pocahontas County, W.V., where Eisenberg worked after college and where the Rainbow Murders, as they became known, occurred in 1980.
I was excited to talk with Eisenberg and learn how she had approached an undertaking of this size and complexity.
The Millions: Emma, I’ve admired your short fiction for a while, a form with which, in my estimation, you have a great deal of facility. How do you feel your short story/fiction chops informed your work on this project? And, related: as someone best known for, and perhaps most comfortable, working in short fiction, did you have any trepidation about working in the realm of journalism/true crime/creative nonfiction?
Emma Copley Eisenberg: Thanks! I love fiction, particularly short fiction; it’s my first love, my first language. I tried to write this book as fiction at first, but it just didn’t work. I realized pretty quickly that because I’m not from the place where these events took place and where the camera of the book is looking, my imagination would not be able to supply the bone deep details and insights required to tell this story well and truthfully.
In many ways, this book has its roots in genre trouble. I was’s “A Rape on Campus” article came out, throwing UVA’s campus into turmoil. Three, a black student-led protest in response to the failure to indict for the shooting of drew local white supremacy out into the open in Charlottesville. And four, two young women—one white and cis, one black and trans—went missing and were later considered murdered to vastly different community and law enforcement results.
