Elissa Schappell

Elissa Schappell works across fiction, essays, and literary editing, examining friendship, family, ambition, and the pressures placed on women. Use Me, her first book, is a collection of ten linked stories issued in 2000. The recurring character Evie Wakefield connects episodes that move through adolescence, marriage, parenthood, and her relationship with her father, allowing the volume to accumulate the shape of a novel without abandoning the short-story form. Use Me earned finalist recognition from the PEN/Hemingway Award. Schappell later published Blueprints for Building Better Girls and coedited the essay anthologies The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. Her editorial career is equally central to her profile: she co-founded Tin House and served as an editor at Vanity Fair and The Paris Review. Use Me introduces the combination that continues across her work, pairing unsparing observations about intimate relationships with an editor’s attention to how separate voices and moments can be arranged into a larger, connected narrative.