We try to end each season of The Critic and Her Publics with a little twist on our theme—something different and, often, a little risky or uncomfortable. Our final guest, Anna Silman, interviewed and profiled me for Business Insider several years ago. Back then, when Twitter was still called Twitter, it was possible for a profile of someone in a very niche industry to go viral, as Anna’s profile did. The subject of a profile rarely gets to confront its writer and ask, “What were you thinking?” or “Why did you do that?” But in this episode Anna and I finally have an opportunity to compare memories of our conversations, confess what each of us thought the other was after, and debate whether a profile of a woman can ever avoid reproducing the misogyny it aims to critique. 

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Merve Emre: The last event that of our speaker series is always a special one; it involves someone who I have a very particular relationship with and often means doing something a bit uncomfortable. Anna is here because she wrote a profile of me for Business Insider, which ran with the headline—

Anna Silman: I didn’t pick the headline. I wanted to go with something more nuanced, but I think it was “How Merve Emre became the hottest—and most reviled—name in literary criticism.”

Together we lived through the virality of that profile. Since it came out, we’ve been talking about what it means to profile someone and what it means to try to present a coherent and controversial image of a person to the world. I have questions that I’ve been dying to ask you about that profile, so I thought that you would be the perfect guest to end our series. Do you feel nervous?

A little bit now, with that preamble.

We’ll start with a softball question. How did you get from college student at McGill University to where you are today, in my hot seat?

I studied English at McGill. Then, I received my Master’s in journalism at NYU in a program called Magazine and Digital Storytelling. I interned at TheNew York Observer and at New York magazine and started getting bylines. From there, I was at The Cut for six years, and then I went to Business Insider. I was there for four years doing long-form and investigative pieces, and now I am freelance.

I first read your profiles in The Cut when you asked me if I wanted to be your subject. I remember thinking that you always chose subjects that were a little bit spiky. Was this a correct read of what you were trying to do? How were you thinking of the first profiles you wrote?

Yeah, I think that is accurate. I did some garden-variety celebrity profiles, but I also profiled Anna Wiener, who wrote a book about Silicon Valley. I profiled Lauren Oyler, a critic who has written some viral pieces. Because The Cut was a general interest publication, the pieces had to have a larger takeaway that would be interesting to people who hadn’t read the books or didn’t know these writers. I look for subjects that can get into bigger questions and themes. It makes things more interesting if there’s a little bit of friction.

Friction between you and the person, or friction between that person and the world that they inhabit?

Friction between that person and the world. There was more friction in our interview than is typical for me in a profile. A bit of friction in an interview is always good. In fact, if there isn’t, sometimes I will try to create it, because that’s when the most interesting stuff comes up.

Did you feel there was friction between us?

Not in a bad way, but you were pushing back. We got into a meta conversation about the nature of profiling itself. We only went there because you asked me questions.

I want to touch on what you said about finding people who represent larger themes. How do you find those people, or do you first look for an interesting person and then elicit from that person a larger theme?

It depends. Sometimes a person is just clearly interesting; other times, they occupy an interesting space in the culture that is emblematic of a time or social shifts. I profiled a woman named Marissa Ross, who was a wine critic and part of the early wave of food social media. She dealt with a lot of online harassment. She has a big personality, and has been through many phases of her career. She was also an emblematic figure of early Instagram, when people were really self-promotional, and only later realized what a psychological toll it took. I felt like not only was she interesting, but by profiling her, I could touch on bigger questions about what it means to be a woman online.

Okay, so now tell me why my profile was a hard sell to your editor at Business Insider.

It felt like I was pitching a Cut story, but I had to convince the team that it was going to talk about business. In a way, it did: developing this writing program at Wesleyan, building a brand.

Did you come in with the “hot and reviled” angle?

I didn’t know you were reviled. I just knew that people at literary functions kept talking about you. There seemed to be a buzz around you, but you hadn’t been written about. That is always when my spidey senses prick up.

Before we decided to do this, we went for a Coca-Cola in the bar at Grand Central Terminal, and we talked on the phone another time.

Do you remember what I said to you to convince you?

Yes, I do remember. I think it shaped the personae that we adopt in the profile. You stressed to me that you had gone to McGill, where I had taught, and that your friends had been my students. The angle that really worked on me was you saying, I’m coming to you as a student, can you speak to me? I’m a complete sucker for that approach. I’m curious to know if that’s something you were doing deliberately.

If I’m trying to get someone to talk to me, I’ll lead with something we have in common. Once, I was reporting for a difficult story, and I found out that the woman I was talking to lived in the same small town as my aunt. We bonded over that. If I can find something that will make me feel more relatable to the person, I bring it up. When you’re trying to convince someone to do a profile, you’re asking them to give you a lot of trust and be vulnerable with you, and they don’t know what they’re going to come out of that experience with, so it’s a hard sell.

It’s funny because I was just rereading the beginning of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, and I was thinking about her meditation on how any journalist knows that what they’re doing is an act of great betrayal. In trying to interview another journalist, you speak to each other as colleagues, but even the person who knows better still gets seduced by the idea of having someone who will listen to them. I could have always said no, but I didn’t. I’m wondering if you have thoughts on why I didn’t.

I was not expecting you to say yes. I’ve put in a lot of legwork with people where it hasn’t worked out. It’s part of the process. I did get the sense that for you to do this, you would have to trust me, which is why we got to know each other a bit beforehand.

Okay, let’s talk about the interview. Do you remember coming to my house?

Yes.

Do you remember the first thing that we did?

I think we went and got a sandwich.

Then I remember sitting on my white couch in the living room, and you started asking questionsabout my family history. You said, Did you ever get in trouble as a teenager? Does that ring any bells?

It’s interesting that the parts that stood out for you, or where you thought I was angling at something, weren’t anomalies for me. I would always ask someone who’s very successful in their career if they ever had a rebellious phase.

Okay, so what do you remember? I have such a clear sequence of events in my mind, but, of course, you and I have completely different sequences in our minds.

I remember it was really hot that day. I was sweating, and you were not, which was freaking me out. I immediately realized that this was going to be fun. There was some good rapport. And you made me analyze these poems, which was like a nightmare.

It was one poem! You were an English major.

I didn’t do poetry.

I think I was explaining this class I was teaching, and I showed you the first poem, which is always the extraordinary poet Nicole Sealey, ventriloquizing the drag queen Pepper LaBeija. I always give it to my students because I think it’s fun and sassy. But tell me what you remember.

You know the dream where you are in school, and you’re about to go onstage and do a play, but you don’t know your lines, or you have a math test but you haven’t studied? I think it evoked that, this professor putting me on the spot about something I knew nothing about.

I think one of my flaws is that I always assume that people are as comfortable with me as I am with them. It’s really surprising for me to hear that you actually felt nervous.

I was nervous because when you’re interviewing someone who you respect, and who knows the game, that is always challenging. I didn’t feel like I could go toe-to-toe with you about the stuff that you write about, and that was intimidating. What if you felt that I didn’t understand your work, or wasn’t reading you right?

I thought we were fully equal. I just find myself so unintimidating.

We’re in the same industry, but you’re very successful in that industry. You were also a professor at a college that I went to. Obviously, I had the power in the sense that I was the one writing the piece, but there were other power dynamics there too.

How does that scene end up playing into the profile? When it came out, people really latched on to that scene.

While I really didn’t want to analyze a poem, I knew that it was good for the story. Any time there is a push-pull interplay between you and the person you’re interviewing, that’s good material. I’ve done interviews where you’re striving for any bit of color, any detail that will elevate it beyond that person’s talking points. So already, I knew that you were giving me material.

There is something interesting afoot when you’re writing about someone who knows the game you’re playing; they’re willing to play that game with you.

I find it way more intimidating to interview fellow writers or people whose work I admire. I’ve interviewed a lot of celebrities, and I never get as nervous as I do when it’s a peer.

I am not “media trained” in the way that we use that term today. I’m curious, what is your experience interviewing people who are exceptionally well trained to not give you anything?

Interviewing celebrities can be a slog, because they have prepared talking points. Their work may be interesting, but they themselves aren’t that interesting. I always prefer to interview someone who isn’t likely to have canned responses prepared.

So, back to the interview. My children came in, and one of my sons makes an appearance because he looks at you and says, “Literature is doomed.”

Yeah, that was also great color. When I’m writing a profile, I’m not just thinking about the thrust of the piece, but also what details will bring it to life. From the beginning, there were so many scenes that I knew would be vivid. It’s so rare that you get to meet a subject in their home, with their family, and that tells you so much about a person.

I should have been smarter and not let you in my home and not let you see my family.

I don’t know what you mean by smarter. It depends on what your goal would be. I don’t know what the reception was like for you, or if the stressful stuff was outweighed by positive attention that you got. I hope that it was the latter, but I don’t know if you regret doing the piece.

I don’t regret doing the piece. My barometer of everything is my friend Maggie Doherty, and she said, This does exactly what a profile should do. You have an interesting writer and an interesting subject, and you have tension. It’s not a hit piece, but it’s not a puff piece. There’s a productive ambivalence throughout. If that’s your standard for a profile, then I think it succeeds.

We had that conversation when we left my house, and I walked you to your hotel. We were walking across the New Haven Green near Yale, and that was when I turned to you with “a smile frozen on my face” and asked, “What are you doing here?”

Yeah, I expected you to just leave me at my hotel, but then you suggested we get a drink. I didn’t know how at the end of your rope you were. Often, when you think there’s a good interplay between you and the subject, you can leave it out. Way too many profiles have the “I” of the author when we don’t need it, but here it was clear that I was going to have to put myself in the story too.

Why was that so clear to you?

Because there was so much good dialogue. I didn’t know how I would capture a scene or you without including that.

I don’t remember feeling irritated. I really wanted to understand what you thought I would be representative of. That was the moment in our conversation when we started talking about misogyny, specifically the misogyny that women face in institutions like academia. I remember thinking clearly, I do not want to be representative of a neoliberal brand builder, nor do I want to be representative of a victim of institutional misogyny.

I think if I was earlier in my career and less experienced, there would have been a risk of the profile being like that. But I wanted to give the reader a sense of what an interesting person you were, which is divorced from what themes the piece might have explored. Of course, we had to talk about brand building, because Business Insider needed that. I knew we were going to talk about being a woman in academia, and misogyny, because it’s important and interesting to me, but I never come in knowing what a piece is going to say. I just had a sense of the bigger themes the piece might touch on. I didn’t think we would talk so much about the misogyny you’d faced at institutions, but I found that really fascinating, and it ended up becoming a big part of the piece.

It ends up becoming a big portion of it in part because of a different aspect of profiling, which is interviewing other people about me. How does asking other people about your subject change how you see your subject?

It can be really helpful. When you’re interviewing someone, you’re enmeshed in the story that they’re telling. When you hear from other people, you see if your intuitions about a person from this meeting are confirmed by other aspects of their lives. Talking to people confirmed some of the intuitions that I’d had while chatting with you, and that made me feel like it was okay to lean into them, because you can’t really know a person from hanging out with them for a day or two.

It’s funny because Doherty tells you, She’s really focused on her work, she doesn’t have many hobbies. I follow basketball, and she got hate mail from people that were like, “Fuck the Celtics” and from people defending me, saying, What are you talking about? She has a family, and what do you even know? It was wild to me that people were pulled into the orbit of the response in the way that they were.

I thought it would get like ten readers, because it’s a Business Insider piece about an academic, but the piece went viral. Our business model at the time had long features paywalled, so if you wanted to read the piece, you had to pay to subscribe to Business Insider. I remember we got hundreds of new signups. I could see from our behind-the-scenes metrics that it was doing very well, and it ignited a lot of chatter about things that hadn’t even occurred to me.

What hadn’t occurred to you?

I didn’t understand how academia worked, so I didn’t know it was going to prompt all these debates. It was a self-fulfilling thing, there are these examples of academics being crazy in the piece and the response to the piece was crazy.

I remember talking to Wesleyan’s president, Michael Roth, about this after it went viral and we had a good conversation about if the piece could get out of the misogyny that it’s setting itself up to critique. Did you feel like there were aspects of the piece, even inadvertently or subconsciously, that were feeding misogyny as opposed to pushing back against it?

I think any time you’re talking about a woman and her reception, you risk being part of the problem. It’s always hard to write about a woman’s appearance, especially because you’re a writer and academic. It’s unfair to you to talk about your appearance—and not the substance of your work. But at the same time, I felt like it didn’t make sense not to observe that there was a conversation about your appearance. It’s a fine line to walk, and I agonized about it.

Do you think it provoked the misogyny that it was critiquing?

Yeah, and unfortunately almost anything you write will provoke misogyny online right now. When I started to see the piece go viral, I got worried, because I didn’t want you, me, or any of the sources to get blowback. It’s always a risk when you put something into the public eye that it will be interpreted uncharitably and lead to all this ugly stuff.

Especially if it’s about a woman. I would say my real life, nondigital experience of the profile was very good. Basically, it was like, She’s an extremely hard worker who wants to build things. Who wouldn’t want that?

And now that you’re not in the thick of the drama, in hindsight, the piece just made you look iconic and cool.