The Neighborhood of Women in my Brain: Musings on Elaine May by Emma Garner

This was supposed to be an essay about Elaine May. A clean, reverent ode – something tidy and declarative about innate genius and legacy and all that jazz. But somewhere along the way, in crept self-awareness – how can I make this about me?, my subconscious uttered – and it became something much larger than a discussion of May’s body of work. It stopped being just about her and became about the strange, crowded village of people I’ve built inside my head; about what it means to love an artist so much they stop feeling like a person and start feeling like a presence. A roommate. This is my not-so-humble attempt to make sense of that slippage. 

I had just finished reading Carrie Courogen’s biography Miss May Does Not Exist, a work brought to life by Courogen’s borderline stalking of the notoriously secretive, silently genius, bold-faced liar that is Elaine May. Described by most as brilliant, seductive, and extraordinarily difficult, May is known primarily for her improvisational collaborations with fellow genius Mike Nichols as well as her directorial efforts and work as Hollywood’s premier script savior and and and and and. Celebrating her 94th birthday this month, the word "multihyphenate" doesn’t even begin to cover the corners of the industry May conquered over the course of her 70-some-odd-year career. Despite her justifiable reputability, May prefers to live her life in hiding. When she occasionally emerges from the shadows for the occasional post-screening talkback of one of her films, she straight-up lies about the events of her past, creating truth-adjacent fairytales as though it were an improv show. Courogen is the first of her generation to attempt the Herculean task of delving into every nook and cranny of May’s life, and does so with utmost respect. It felt amiss to speak of my affection for Ms. May and exclude Ms. Courogen’s impeccable research – without her amorous digging, the rest of us youthful admirers of May would be left exclusively with her beautiful yet blatantly inaccurate retellings of her own stories.

As I started unpacking what exactly it was about this particular woman that made me tick, I found myself drifting back to the dog-eared, highlighter-laden copy of Miss May Does Not Exist that’s been attached to my hip since the beginning of the year. Instead of dialing in on the chapters describing May’s escapades stealing rolls of film on the set of her gangster two-hander, Mikey and Nicky, or her uncredited work doctoring the dialogue of Tootsie and The Birdcage, I kept returning to the prologue. You know, the author’s foreword containing their personal thoughts on the matter of the book and absolutely zero trivial information regarding its subject? Courogen describes her experience sitting outside Elaine May’s apartment building on the Upper West Side in full disguise, hoping for a single wayward glance from the reclusive woman. Or not. In fact, it seems she does not know what she’s looking for – she’s spent so long painting a portrait of Elaine in her head that she has absolutely no idea what she would do if she actually met her in person, if her presence was acknowledged by this character of sorts she’s been writing a book about for three years. What would this do to the Elaine May that’s taken residence in her brain? 

In the wake of writer Joan Didion’s death, singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers wrote a piece for Vanity Fair in which she states that “the artists who turn us into artists are like family”. The quote has stuck with me for years – it’s entirely true, sometimes to a scary degree. The artists whose work I idolize so deeply have each built homes in different crevices of my brain, unconsciously categorized by profession, identity, and overlap in interest. Ms. May resides in a penthouse apartment in my frontal lobe in the Building of Witty Women, often spotted smoking cigarettes on her fire escape with her neighbors Nora Ephron and Catherine O’Hara. She attends a weekly canasta night with Mary-Louise Parker and Anna Deavere Smith across the street in the Condos for Recurring Characters on The West Wing. Occasionally, she’ll take the neural pathway train to my right temporal lobe to visit her friends Bob Fosse and Billy Wilder in the Department of Noteworthy Men. Here, Elaine can be seen reuniting with her writing partner, Mike Nichols, eternally spitballing, even in my head.

Is this normal? To house your idols in your brain? To hear Christopher Guest and Allison Janney chatter about the outfits they’re wearing to Stephen Sondheim’s dinner party behind your internal monologue? To listen out for Julie Andrews discussing the 1964 Oscars with Sidney Poitier while writing my to-do list? The simple answer is absolutely fucking not. Much like Ms. Courogen writes, sometimes I feel I am losing my damn mind. It is difficult to remember, especially as a young artist who loves consuming art, that these people we deify are not angels walking amongst men but rather men themselves (or, in my case, women, unless of course you’re one of the lucky few living in my Department of Noteworthy Men). 

In her prologue, Courogen writes, “‘They don’t make them like her very often’’ is a refrain I heard often when speaking to people about Elaine. It’s true, they don’t. But they do, indeed, make them.” And that, I think, is the part I keep circling back to – the quiet, almost inconvenient but necessary truth buried beneath all the worship. They do make them. Not often, not easily, not without contradiction or mess or mythmaking, but they do. Elaine May is not an apparition conjured out of improvisation and perfect punchlines; she is a person who made choices, who told stories (some truer than others), who built a body of work brick by brick and then, occasionally, gleefully rearranged those bricks just to see what would happen. Courogen is able to acknowledge this all while still identifying with us, with me, the aspiring artist who’s kept May housed in her head for years. She reminds us that Ms. May does, in fact, exist.

So maybe the goal is not eviction – of Elaine from the penthouse in my brain, of Nora and Catherine from the fire escape, of all the others cohabiting in their carefully zoned neighborhoods – but a gentle redecoration. A shifting of scale. To keep them there, yes, but not as untouchable gods dictating taste and ambition from above. To see them instead as my neighbors: brilliant, complicated, sometimes infuriating people who remind me that the distance between admiration and creation is not as vast as it feels. Because if they do make them, then there must be a way in. Maybe that’s where I meet Elaine May at last: not on a stoop outside her building, waiting for a glimpse, but somewhere in the work itself, in the act of making something messy and true and a little bit unbelievable, and resisting the urge to lie about it later.