In Many Ways (Winter Editions, 2023) describes a self in process, at odds, and enthralled, in search of the origins of her unsatisfiable pursuit of meaning. The writerly drive to fix the fleeting moment comes up against a contradictory impulse to escape—through writing—the binds of formal codes and conventions. Simon’s shifts and disjunctions map the unsteady flow of pandemic time, observing the clash of interior experience with the social world.

“Embarrassment is a lesson in size.” Emily Simon’s In Many Ways pursues the tributaries of embarrassment through daily life and discovers ways to walk beside them. “Ecstasy,” she reminds us, is “a condition of standing beside oneself.” Her candor moves us and moves, I think, herself—in this book we feel the writer is taking herself into confidence. We listen, lucky, like a trinket on the desk, like someone who too must survive and think the quotidian, its pulsing dulling sharpening depleting soaring never-arrivingness. A lovely work of writing at the pace of living.
—Hilary Plum

Shifts and starts, slippages; something is always about to happen. “Pain, pleasure, I don’t know.” And who has time for all that? The trains keep moving, or not, charting their sinuous, menacing tracks under and around the city. There’s sad news, but we won’t learn what it is. Mothers and daughters. Lovers. The bravado and loneliness of youth, its embarrassments and abandons. Emily Simon’s body remains in the wind tunnel. Her brain takes pictures for us—and how.
—Claudia La Rocco

Reminiscent of a personal journal kept by a brilliant writer, Emily Simon’s debut is a stunning compendium of intriguing and astute observations, rich musings on literature, and anecdotal fragments of memories of love and life. Sharp, witty, heartfelt, and alarmingly thought-provoking, In Many Ways is unique in form, profound of mind, fiercely intelligent, and the prose is jaw-droppingly exquisite.
—Binnie Kirshenbaum

Emily Simon’s In Many Ways doubles down on the horizons of possibility when we take non-sequitur as method: to index the devotional, mundane, shamanic thought patterns of contemporary love, politics, and selfhood. Reclaiming the practice of free association from the analysts’ office, Simon maps scattered genres of desire with a wink—leveling an exegesis of Yeats with a manifesto on the myth of threesomes. Hunkering down in the crisis of romance, this book is an “anatomy lesson in coming apart” in the face of any context that demands we “make the self legible.”  Like Bernadette Mayer’s emotional science project, nothing slips through the cracks, not even the crack itself. In Many Ways shows us that, like love, truth isn’t a fact, but rather it is a willingness to become disoriented. Unafraid to tack with the wind, these fragments unfold asymptotically “as they perform the kind of politics they urgently call for.”
—Rosie Stockton

Through vignettes and monologues, Emily Simon’s debut book investigates time, language, embarrassment, photography, and desire in our changing, unstable reality. Simon applies her acute observations and intelligence to the daily life of someone teased by questions of what living is like at this moment, finding and showing us beauty throughout the contradictions.
—Ben Fama

What kicks off as a meditation on time and writing swerves into a disquisition into the nature of embarrassment, then widens to accommodate questions of identity, embodiment, familial history, dreamlife, romantic life, and life in NYC amid the pandemic, to name a few. Readers everywhere, make room in your agenda for the wild excursion of Emily Simon’s first full-length book, In Many Ways. Always turning and overturning, never settling into complacency or letting rest be rest (“I like to think of rest,” she writes, “as a form of getting ready”) or even ending at the end, Simon reminds me, in the character and quality of her thinking, of Montaigne’s “generous spirit,” who, if she doesn’t “press, settle, shock, turn, wind, and front (herself)” will be “but half alive.” Simon is entirely alive, and to read In Many Ways is to surrender oneself to the perpetual motion of another human being’s exemplary thoughts—intimate, nourishing, salty, buoying—the way Simon herself is forever in deep conversation with the otherness of the sea. “I am always having a private moment with the water,” she writes, in that wryly stylish, loopy rhapsodical tone of hers, which is just as infectious as it is uniquely her own. Witty, worried, sad, ecstatic, philosophical, lyrical, and often keenly aphoristic (“I finished the thought in my head: I live in my mind, not my house”), In Many Ways is a thrilling accomplishment by one of the most compellingly distinctive minds of her generation.
—Timothy Donnelly