Long before Emily V. Gordon ’01, ’03 MS/EdS stood on the red carpet, she stood before a group of her peers in a handmade T-shirt with a cartoon character sporting a cape and the words “Peer Counselor.”

“I wasn’t a popular kid in middle school whatsoever,” Emily says. “But people knew I wouldn't tell their secrets.”

These days, the UNC Greensboro alumna and Winston-Salem native flies a little less under the radar – Emily and husband, comedian Kumail Nanjiani, received an Oscar nod for their film, “The Big Sick,” when it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 2018. 

They didn’t take home the golden statue, but the exposure – and numerous other nominations and awards – catapulted Emily into the spotlight.

The therapist-turned-screenwriter took an unusual path to Hollywood, and she says her alma mater was a big part of that journey.

“I went into college expecting the world would tell me what to do, and it would be my job to rage against that. I left understanding my job was to control my destiny. It helped me understand, this is my job,” Emily says. “Once you realize it is your destiny, you get to control it, and you get to mess it up. I got that idea, I’m probably going to mess this up a few times, but I’m captain of this ship, and how cool is that? UNCG gave me that.”

Maybe that drive also played a role in Emily’s success, or maybe it was her methodical, authentic, if a bit subversive, nature. She chose UNCG for the psychology program, but also because it was close to home, and the campus was big, but not overwhelming – it seemed “manageable.”

“I’m sure I had some punk-rock reasons then, but I was scared,” she says. “It was a great combination of feeling really big and grown up and feeling not so huge that I would get lost.”

While earning her BA in psychology and MS/EdS in couples and family counseling, she had jobs in the Writing Center and Jackson Library. Among the stacks of books and paper copies, Emily would lose herself.

“I fell in love with it. I developed a real fondness for the hidden nooks and crannies.”

She had two different ways of sitting down and getting to know people: One through writing and one as a therapist. It was the latter she chose to pursue after graduation, continuing the natural role of confidant she had as a child, mediating arguments among the popular kids in her T-shirt and cape.

“Every person is endlessly fascinating,” she says. “Why people turn out the way they do, why they change or don’t change.”

Emily was a practicing therapist from 2004 to 2009, working in North Carolina, Chicago and Brooklyn before turning her passion for people into a second career.

“I realized loving other people and wanting to understand them can take a lot of forms,” Emily says. “I thought mine would be counseling, and then it became writing about people and digging into who they are.”

That realization first came in fall 2000, in an essay-writing class (ENG 223 Writing of Essays) at UNCG with Dr. Jackie Grutsch-McKinney.

“l always knew I wanted to do psychology. What surprised me was taking essay-writing and finding another way I could explore people, through writing,” Emily says. “When you write about yourself, you can write about yourself and that’s great, but other people are so much more interesting than I am.”

Super You

Emily began freelance writing for women’s magazines like Rookie, which eventually led to a book, “Super You,” published in 2015. She wanted to write a book about what she should have read as a teenage girl.

“I wanted to take everything I’d gotten from my experience as a therapist and write it in a way I wouldn’t have rolled my eyes at,” she says. “Self-help writing is wonderful, but it can be a bit saccharine.”

A self-described “nerdy girl,” Emily used superheroes as a premise for showing readers how to find inner strength, embracing their origins and flaws. As a therapist, she says she would meet people as clients who had a “Batman” origin story – one or more parents were taken away, or they were traumatized by an experience. She wanted to show how those experiences can become part of who we are rather than victimize us.

“I like this idea of superheroes being better versions of ourselves,” Emily says. “At one point in life, a better version of myself was someone I was afraid of and felt judged by. I realized it’s just a lighthouse to go toward, somewhere to aim myself.”

So which superhero is Emily Gordon?

“You know what’s crazy? No one has ever asked that question!” She laughs.

And then it comes to her: Snot Girl. 

Emily has Still’s Disease – a rare type of inflammatory arthritis with symptoms of fevers, rash and joint pain.

“She’s badass, really cool, with a mysterious past. And she has allergies. She sneezes all the time, so she’s always kinda snotty. I’m going to be really, really sick sometimes and people will have to be OK with it.”

The Big Sick

Emily is deeply self-reflective and articulate, positive and gracious, punctuating sentences with words like “lovely” and “wonderful.”   

Actress Zoe Kazan captures it all to a T in Emily and Nanjiani’s film, which they co-executive produced. “The Big Sick” is based on the couple’s unconventional courtship, beginning with Emily heckling her now-husband as he performed at a comedy show in Chicago. A romance sparks between Emily and Nanjiani, a Pakistani-American stand-up comedian, actor and writer, and they begin to navigate cultural barriers early on. When Emily unexpectedly becomes sick due to Still’s Disease and is put into a medically induced coma, Nanjiani and Emily’s parents bond through the experience.

“Overall, the entire experience of making a movie of your life, with an actress playing you, recreating the hospital, I definitely fell back on my training,” Emily says. “It was super intense. I had to manage the stress and intensity and find outlets for my emotions.”

But seeing your relationship played out on screen can be sweet, too.

“One of the first dates Emily and Kumail go on, they’re watching a movie at his house. It’s ripped right from our lives,” Emily says. “There’s a moment when Kumail makes a joke, and Emily laughs. It’s this beautiful laugh. It feels so lovely and easy and kind of wonderful. I love that entire scene.”

Before writing the screenplay, the couple would talk about their “crazy” story every now and then, and how they should share it. For a while, it was just too intense. Five years after it all unfolded, they thought it was
time. The couple approached producer and
director Judd Apatow, whom they knew
from the comedy scene.

“It became obvious that this is the story we need to tell and no one else can tell the story – we wanted to see what a movie of this would look like. We thought for both of us it was step in, let’s write this, get it out of us so we can keep moving.”

The Academy 

The entire experience – from Amazon purchasing the film from FilmNation at Sundance to the Oscar nomination and awards ceremony – was educational and “quite special,” she says.

The nomination process itself took about five months, with Emily and Nanjiani making the rounds each night, thrown together with other potential nominees at panels and events. The experience created a bond with the other nominees.

“You go through this intense experience with these people often you’re huge fans of. It becomes this lovely camp experience.”

Between the reporters and photographers, the day of the Oscars was a chaotic blur. The couple left their house at lunchtime and didn’t return until 5 a.m. the next morning.

“Then when you get in, the most famous people you’ve seen in your whole life are sitting there like it’s a school play,” she says. “And you have to be cool about it because you can’t freak out about it. It was really lovely to go through this with my husband – I would look at him and say, ‘This is bonkers!’ He’d be like, ‘I know. Let’s remember to enjoy it, experience it, and not be over it.’ It was a very magical, lovely experience.”

Now that the golden dust has settled, how does Emily stay grounded? Having good friends and a good support system, and feeling like a fraud most of the time.

“That’s actually not at all hard,” she says. “I feel like I’m pretending the whole time in this world. What I’m blessed with is a wonderful family I’m close with ... and really good friends who are mostly comedians, and they would never let me become a jerk.”

Her counseling background doesn’t hurt.
If she ever needs to run away from the glitz and glamour, she has those UNCG degrees to fall back on.

“I love it, and it fuels me. It’s a wonderful career, but I know I would be OK if I walked away from it,” Emily says. “I already walked away from one, and it didn’t kill me.”

And that’s a Wrap?

Not for Emily. She’s working on a screenplay adaptation of the novel “The Nest” for Amazon and an anthology TV series with her husband for Apple.

“I like working. I like staying busy. I’m doing my best. When you go through an experience like this, it becomes a huge storm and wave and you have to keep your head on straight,” she says. “What is the main thing I want to do? I have this platform now. I get to tell stories – so what kind of stories do I want to tell?”

We can’t wait to find out.