page

“A generation ago, midlife might have been a bit of a snore, right? You have your job you’re going to be in for your whole career. You have your house in the suburbs … I don’t think established adulthood is that established anymore,” author Emily Nemens told me from her home in Princeton, N.J., before heading out on a cross-country book tour. “It’s much more pressurized and uncertain.”

This is the foundation of the former Paris Review editor’s sweeping and exquisite sophomore novel, “Clutch,” which features an ensemble cast of five women — all 40, give or take, and longtime friends — who reunite in Palm Springs, each at their own trying crossroads.

Nemens is no stranger to writing group dynamics; her critically acclaimed debut novel, “The Cactus League,” is structured in interlinked stories. She wrote it while juggling a distinguished career at literary quarterlies and making a name for herself as an artist. In the 2010s, her watercolor portraits of U.S. congresswomen went viral for their commentary on political portraiture and the “power suit.” At the time, women made up only 17% of Congress. Her new work also draws on politics — “Clutch” is set in an era shaped by the Dobbs decision and the state of women’s health in America.

The Times talked to Nemens about favoring friendship on the page, bodily autonomy and her influences including California artist Wayne Thiebaud — whose painting “Supine Woman” is featured on the cover of her novel.

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

When did the idea for “Clutch” first come to you?

I went to Palm Springs with my girlfriends. The dynamics, the friction of getting people together who love each other a lot but haven’t seen each other for quite a long time was eventful and felt like something to write about.

On your inspiration for the novel: You’ve previously mentioned Mary McCarthy’s novel “The Group,” which has also been cited as a precursor to “Sex and the City.” How far have we come since “The Group” was published in 1963? How about “Sex and the City” in the late ‘90s? “

McCarthy was writing in the ‘50s and ‘60s about the ‘30s and “The Group” was meant to highlight all the progress women had (and hadn’t) made in this new society, new economy, new technologies, birth controls coming on. There’s a certain amount of new liberation that came purportedly in the ‘30s, purportedly in the ‘60s, purportedly in the ‘90s. I mean, progress is certainly being made. You and I can get birth control and have our own credit cards, but there’s also a lot of things that don’t feel great. A reigning plotline in “Clutch” is about reproductive freedom in Texas in the 2020s and just how devastating that was for so many people who care about bodily autonomy, and that doesn’t feel very different than it did in the 1930s.

“Clutch” puts a cast of millennial girlfriends front and center.

Yeah, I’ve read a lot of books I admire about singular protagonists. A woman rebelling from a marriage or striking out from the role of motherhood or otherwise trying to find meaning. These novels about a singular quest. And I just kept coming up against that and thought: What happens when you try to build the infrastructure of friendships on the page?

We get intimate access to each of these five women — a writer, litigator, ENT physician, an actor turned politician and a consultant turned caretaker. All of them live in various parts of the country, including California, Texas and New York. It must have been hard to balance so many perspectives, plotlines and an omniscient narrator on top of it all.

I broke a lot of rules with that third ping-ponging perspective. Sometimes perspectives shift within a page, within a scene, moving rapidly and gleefully between points of view, and using that omniscient voice to steer us around — that was fun. I was cognizant of balance and understanding the lazy-Susan of it. Making sure I was spinning all the way around the table and touching each piece in each storyline.

Why midlife?

I love a bildungsroman as a novel conceit and as a framing device. But, sometimes, moving beyond that realization of the adult you want to be and actually being that adult is harder and more complicated and maybe more interesting, at least as I am and perceive it right now.

You’ve worked as an editor in some of the literary world’s most prestigious posts, notably at the Paris Review. Do you miss it since pivoting toward your own writing and teaching?

Making magazines was a thrill and a gift and exhausting. In that order. Not every editor is quite as catholic with a little c, as ecumenical, as excited about such a range of writing as I am. I wanted to see not one style of writing, but a broad range of writing that I felt had both ambition and execution.

One of the things that’s hard about being an editor, particularly an acquiring editor, is how often you have to say no. As a teacher now, I never say no. I say “yes.” Instead, I ask: What else can this be doing? That attitude adjustment is glorious.

Back to “Clutch,” what does female friendship mean to you? Do you see your friends’ qualities in these five women?

Female friendship has been such a gift. I don’t have children, I have a really supportive partner and I have this wonderful, creative professional life, but I can’t imagine it without my friends. There are certainly flints of autobiography and different friends in different characters — they’ve read it and liked it, and if they saw themselves, they were pleasant about it.

Tell me about the painting on the cover of the book. It really speaks to what these women are going through.

Getting the rights to the painting was a real coup! It’s called “Supine Woman” by Wayne Thiebaud. It was painted in 1963 — its own little Easter egg is that it came out the same year as “The Group.”

It depicts a woman dressed all in white who is lying on the floor. You’d assume from the pose that she’s sleeping, except her eyes are wide open, and in this frightened or startled expression. To me, it’s indicative of what the women in “Clutch” are going through. This is that moment right after you get knocked down, right before you get up again and that emotional tenor proceeds for a lot of the novel.

Lancaster is a London-based writer of fiction, fashion editorial and screenplays.

NEW YORK — The Justice Department on Friday released many more records from its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, resuming disclosures under a law intended to reveal what the government knew about the millionaire financier’s sexual abuse of young girls and his interactions with the rich and powerful.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department was releasing more than 3 million pages of documents in the latest Epstein disclosure, as well as more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The files, posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release of documents in December.

They were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted after months of public and political pressure that requires the government to open its files on the late financier and his accomplice, confidant and longtime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance with the act,” Blanche said at a news conference announcing the disclosure.

After missing a Dec. 19 deadline set by Congress to release all of the files, the Justice Department said it tasked hundreds of lawyers with reviewing the records to determine what needs to be redacted, or blacked out, to protect the identities of victims of sexual abuse.

Among the materials being withheld is information that could jeopardize any ongoing investigation or expose the identities of personal details about potential victims. All women other than Maxwell have been redacted from videos and images being released Friday, Blanche said.

The number of documents subject to review has ballooned to roughly six million, including duplicates, the department said.

The Justice Department released tens of thousands of pages of documents just before Christmas, including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs and court records. Many of them were either already public or heavily blacked out.

Those records included previously released flight logs showing that President Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet in the 1990s, before they had a falling out, and several photographs of former President Clinton. Neither Trump, a Republican, nor Clinton, a Democrat, has been publicly accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and both have said they had no knowledge he was abusing underage girls.

Also released last month were transcripts of grand jury testimony from FBI agents who described interviews they had with several girls and young women who said they were paid to perform sex acts for Epstein.

Epstein killed himself in a New York jail cell in August 2019, a month after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.

In 2008 and 2009, Epstein served jail time in Florida after pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18. At the time, investigators had gathered evidence that Epstein had sexually abused underage girls at his home in Palm Beach, but the U.S. attorney’s office agreed not to prosecute him in exchange for his guilty plea to lesser state charges.

In 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Maxwell, a British socialite, of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of his underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence at a prison camp in Texas, after being moved there from a higher-security federal prison in Florida. She denies any wrongdoing.

U.S. prosecutors never charged anyone else in connection with Epstein’s abuse of girls, but one of his victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, accused him in lawsuits of having arranged for her to have sexual encounters at age 17 and 18 with numerous politicians, business titans, noted academics and others, all of whom denied her allegations.

Among the people she accused was Britain’s Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after the scandal led to him being stripped of his royal titles. Andrew denied having sex with Giuffre but settled her lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.

Giuffre died by suicide at her farm in Western Australia last year at age 41.

Tucker, Sisak and Richer write for the Associated Press. Tucker and Richer reported from Washington.