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1. www.theatricum.com and at kpfk.org.
2. Hi, this is Rikki Lee Jones. You're listening to KPFK 90.7 FM LA 98.7 Santa Barbara.
3. Hello, and welcome to the LARB Radio Hour, brought to you by reader-supported LA Review
4. Books. I'm your host, Kate Wolfe, and I'm joined by my co-host, LARB's editor-in-chief,
5. Medea Ocher. Hi, Kate. We're glad to be speaking with the writer Harriet Clark today.
6. She is the recipient of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for her short story,
7. Dissent, and has also been honored with fellowships from the Wallace Degner Program,
8. Iowa Writers Workshop and McDowell. She joins us from her home in Brooklyn. She's with us to speak
9. about her first novel, The Hill, which mirrors her own life story. It follows a young girl named
10. Susanna, whose mother is a political radical and was incarcerated for a bank robbery gone wrong
11. when her daughter was only a year old. Susanna is eight as the novel opens and being raised by
12. her grandparents. But after the death of her grandfather, her grandmother, a former radical
13. herself refuses to bring her to visit her mother and she must find other ways to see her. The book
14. charts Susanna's intertwined desire to both remain near her mother for the rest of her life
15. while also honoring her autonomy, her family history, and her own future. It's a very, very,
16. very moving book and I want to thank you, Harriet, for being here. Oh, I'm so grateful to be speaking
17. with you too. So I, I feel bad asking you this because I have seen other people reference it
18. in interviews, but I am just so curious because, uh, you know, the writing in this book is so
19. strong and the story is so strong that I was surprised to learn that it took you 20 years
20. to write this book. And so I was wondering if part of it was that you were writing other things,
21. or if there was some kind of like avoidance of, you know, like this giant story from your life
22. and not wanting to address that like in your first book or what the struggle was to complete this book.
23. I always say one of my favorite quotes about writing is from the poet Mary Ruffel, who says,
24. I used to think I kept writing because I had not yet said what I've come here to say.
25. but now I know I keep writing because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to
26. and I think it took me an incredibly long time to hear what I was listening to inside my own
27. material. I don't know if we get to control how long it takes to metabolize the material of our
28. life so I do think I was seemingly writing about this material while evading it at the same time
29. So I would spend many years writing, you know, a very panoramic version of the book from all different perspectives, guards and nuns and various children and mothers.
30. And then I would throw that book away because the entire thing had been an act of evasion.
31. You know I think the truth of the matter is I a very inarticulate person who has gone somewhat incognito as an articulate person meaning I appear to like to put things into language but actually most of what most meaningful to me feels pretty unsayable And so I think that I wrote a lot of books that were acts of evasion that appeared to be a story
32. but were still ways of slightly shielding myself from my own material, from figuring out what was
33. at stake for the character. And I think also I was overly prone to influence. I would read a
34. particular writer, I would love them so much. I would spend years writing a book in their style.
35. And then of course, that means you're writing terrible karaoke. And so it really did take me
36. 20 years to read enough different books and to fall in love with enough different voices and
37. styles that finally I could kind of call upon different modes and tones in different ways and
38. find what felt like the right voice for this book and not too much of an homage to any particular
39. book I loved. Can you give us some examples? Of the books that so affected me? Yeah,
40. or that you found sort of, you found yourself copying or emulating? I think the first book I
41. read, which did not, which I did not copy, but which was transformative for me was Philip Roth's
42. American Pastoral, in part because he's writing about the experience of being the parent of a
43. supposed domestic terrorist. And it really was striking for me to consider the differences
44. between being the parent versus the child of someone who's participated in an act of political
45. violence. And there was this way that he's so irreverent in that book, and he's so playful.
46. And I hadn't quite known you could be that irreverent and playful. So I do think actually
47. probably he influenced me to be kind of evasively playful and irreverent for a number of years.
48. And then luckily, you know, I came upon my urtext, my everything book, which is Marilyn
49. Robinson's Housekeeping. And she says that, you know, it's a terrible thing to break up a family.
50. If you understand that, you'll understand everything that follows. And there was something
51. about the fundamental gravitas with which Marilyn approaches family separation that helped to kind
52. of counterpoint something a little too playful and irreverent I had been doing. But even then,
53. I still spent many years. I think next I did my bad Sebald karaoke, overly influenced by Austerlitz.
54. And then you have to flush out your system, you know. So then like for two years, I couldn't let
55. myself read any lonely writers. Or I could only read like Grace Paley and Leonard Michaels and
56. something livelier. I had to kind of rouse myself back up in those ways. And I think the truth also
57. is that I didn't really have a story until I had come upon The Hero's Journey as my framework.
58. And so I think that that framework was what finally moved me from nearly two decades of
59. just playing with material into actually writing a book? I think something that's so effective is
60. that, you know, there's not, she, because the book starts when she's eight and her mother went
61. into prison when I, when she was around one, is that about right? That she hasn't really known
62. anything else so that we don't have a sense of her betrayal at the system. You know, she doesn't
63. rail against how unfair it is, how much she misses her mother.
64. There's a lot of, I would say, almost an emotional repression happening.
65. And she is very just accepting and kind of compliant with how things are But the power of the book is that because you do capture a long period of time you know after a while it the reader that starts to feel
66. how stuck things are in place. And just the kind of real depression for me that came about midway
67. through and just this feeling of like, oh, my God, this is like her mother is never getting
68. out of prison. And I it's not something that she commented on exactly, but just through the
69. duration of the book, you really start to feel that as the reader. And it's just really sad and
70. sinking. And I was curious if these were things you were aware of and kind of like pumping up
71. volume, turning it down, like if you had to attend to any of that, or was that just like
72. naturally the way you write? The first thing you said about what does it mean that these
73. circumstances have been the case since before she can remember. When I was in grad school,
74. the poet Robert Haas said in a lecture that he thought the history of poetry could be split
75. between those poets whose experience of loss was within the event horizon. They knew what they had
76. lost and how they had lost it. And those whose experiences of loss were beyond the event horizon.
77. So they couldn't narrativize it. It was a feeling. It was an atmosphere of a certain kind of grief
78. and yearning, but couldn't exactly detail the what and the when of it. And I certainly think
79. that's the case for Susanna. She doesn't have a state before this state to compare things to,
80. and she doesn't have one other than this. And so I do think you're inside the atmosphere of,
81. to some extent, something that has slightly stunned her, which I think that's one of the
82. things grief does is it stuns your mind. And so I don't think of her as withholding. I think of her
83. as somewhat bewildered. I don't feel that she has emotions and she's not delivering them to the
84. reader, I think that in some ways, there's something a little dazed about how she moves
85. through things, about the quality of her attention, which is a certain kind of combination of
86. attention and inattention that's running throughout the book. But I definitely think that what you're
87. saying about how to show time as a punishment in regards to the prison, and how to show how
88. truly extraordinary it is to ask people to spend their entire lives locked in a cage or locked on
89. top of a hill. On the one hand, it was incredibly important to me that that come through. And on the
90. other hand, I did not want reading the book to feel like a punishment. And I think that was one
91. of the hardest challenges of the book was to look at an experience of punishment and yet still try
92. as much as possible for the book itself to insist on certain forms of buoyancy and delight.
93. And I think that getting that balance of heaviness and lightness and of inertia and movement was so
94. key to how important it felt to me that the book be enjoyable. I think in relationship to what
95. you're saying, one of the texts that was truly transformative to me was Italo Calvino's
96. essay on lightness, in which he says that the existential function of literature is the search
97. for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living. And everything he calls for in that essay,
98. in terms of nimbleness and precision and liveliness, and this question of how can we
99. companion each other through great darkness and difficulty without further weighing each other
100. down I really felt like that was the technical challenge for me in the book was to figure out how do I walk with you through dark and heavy realms but still be good company One of the things I wanted to ask you about is that the mother and
101. the grandmother and the grandfather, they all have a history of political action. Obviously,
102. the mother has been jailed because she drove a getaway car. And one of the things that I think
103. they do and the grandmother does extremely well is like this sort of an unexpected way
104. that the grandmother has of balancing like the lightness and the heaviness
105. because she will say one very very big sort of heavy thing like you know everybody's dead
106. like when she looks at that picture of the little boy yeah um but um but then she sort of counters
107. it often with something like a little bit more light. Like, I wonder how you approach
108. sort of thinking about like the larger sort of like heaviness of like political action,
109. the larger heaviness of like taking on sort of broader responsibility in this world,
110. and then the lightness of approaching it, of being good company. Because like,
111. if one were to take all of that on and to never let it go, it would be a nightmare to hang out
112. with. I mean, I feel very lucky to have forebearers who had figured out some of these issues of how to
113. address politics in ways that still allow for some degree of playfulness. I think that what was
114. useful to me in having American Pastoral as an early example is that on the one hand, I think
115. the irreverence he brings is delightful. And on the other hand, um, you know, the,
116. the radical woman in that book is a shallow idiot. The irreverence to me goes too far. Um,
117. and so I, I do think it has to do, um, fundamentally with this, this entire book
118. takes place in the afterlife. It's looking at what happens after the worst has happened,
119. for people with political commitments.
120. And so I think one of the things that happens
121. after the worst has happened in my experience
122. is that people are still in community.
123. You know, my grandparents,
124. after they left the Communist Party,
125. they still spent the last years of their lives
126. for the most part with the people
127. that they had been in the party with.
128. My mother still spends her life
129. with the women that she was political with and with the women that she was inside with.
130. And so part of how to keep things lively when looking at the consequences of political fallout
131. was to show the sense of community that can continue to exist.
132. And also, I think it was important to me that the characters in the book have a good sense
133. of humor, which in general, I actually do think people who have to put up with a lot,
134. they often do have a good, if you're lucky.
135. They have a good sense of humor.
136. And so for me, the book has to take seriously, if you're writing about politics, you have
137. to take seriously suffering, which was what I felt like to some extent Roth didn't do
138. with the radical terrorists.
139. In his book, he slightly made it a joke, her concern with other people's suffering, whereas
140. the people I know who have devoted themselves to true political change, suffering is not
141. a joke to them.
142. and so there was a way that you needed to sense
143. how much these characters care about people. You know, even the grandmother, she's perpetually
144. delivering a kind of diatribe about the need to, you know, save your own life, be independent.
145. She appears to be delivering a certain kind of individualistic spiel, but we're perpetually
146. seeing her take care of people. That's true for all the characters in the book. And so I do think
147. also that showing that kind of continuing ethos of care and concern is how you don't make it feel
148. too bleak to be in the aftermath of great fallout.
149. You're listening to the LARP Radio Hour on KPFK 90.7 FM. We've been speaking with Harriet Clark,
150. Author of The Hill.
151. I'm curious, I mean, I'm interested in what you said about privacy and what you think about,
152. what do you think the relationship is between surveillance, observation, and understanding?
153. Because I think those three things are all happening in this book. I think there's ways
154. in which people are constantly resisting the connection between those things.
155. But also you're a writer and you wrote a book.
156. And so, and maybe how you also navigate the relation.
157. I mean, it seems like you're wary of what the boundary is
158. between observation and understanding, right?
159. That one does not necessarily equate to the other.
160. But yeah, I'm wondering how you navigate that relationship
161. and how you think the characters here navigate that.
162. Yes, I think that in conditions of constant surveillance,
163. I think it's both a form of self-protection
164. and also a certain form of dignity
165. to make the self somewhat illegible.
166. I do think that there are ways that the characters here
167. are slightly removing themselves from sight
168. in the environments they're in.
169. Every single thing Susanna says or does with her mother
170. occurs in an observed condition.
171. and so that dramatically limits or shapes the ways they can interact with each other
172. and yet my hope is that you can still see they are meaningfully companioning each other within
173. this that it's not that they've been degraded into some false realm where they can't be real
174. with each other they are still finding ways to connect to enjoy each other even though they're
175. not in a space where they can bring whatever we might call our full selves. And I think to some
176. extent, it was growing up inside conditions of surveillance that were why I love some of the
177. eligibility of fiction. Not just the notion that it somehow is a way to withhold or to obfuscate,
178. but that there's a way that it insists on something vaster than can be said.
179. You know, I think nonfiction often has a certain kind of clarifying drive.
180. And I think fiction is more about being with people than understanding them.
181. And in general, I think I'm very interested in the ways we can companion each other without comprehending each other.
182. I think both the prison aspect of the book and the aging aspect of the book have to do with
183. how we handle the limitations around how well we can know the people we love So Susanna can never see her mother room her mother days her mother can never see hers Susanna will not have ever seen the majority of
184. her grandmother's life. Her grandmother will not see the majority of her life. There are
185. these intense limitations around their relationships, and yet you experience them
186. in profound relationship, I hope. And I think that is what interests me because I don't think
187. it's specific to the conditions of Susanna's life. I do think that all of us are navigating how to
188. handle the limitations, the inherent limitations with our loved ones, with how well we can know
189. them, with how well we can understand them, with how much access we get to them. And so I did want
190. simultaneously a certain sense of these characters' apartness from each other to come through,
191. something about them that is separate and kept apart from each other, and also how moving it is
192. that that relationship persists. I would argue that a relationship persists between the grandmother
193. and the mother, even though we never see them talking or seeing each other. And so that was
194. the balance I was trying to strike between taking very seriously the limitations on what these
195. characters can access about each other while also showing how vast their relationships are with each
196. other. I was wondering about, you know, this character does not spend a lot of time feeling
197. sorry for herself. That's something that I noticed probably because, you know, that's not,
198. that would not be my tendency if this were me, you know, that I'm sure that I would be a lot
199. more aware of like, God, it's so unfair. It's so unfair what's happened to me. And she doesn't
200. have that almost in the least, I would say. And I'm wondering if you like, and if that's, you know,
201. kind of an effect of her being stunned, bewildered, as you mentioned before, that she's just so
202. confused kind of how she's landed where she is that she doesn't even know to kind of say like,
203. But what you exclude here is also like a lot of her experience with other kids.
204. Like in a different novel, there would be a scene of her going to someone's house and seeing, oh, both mom and dad are home.
205. How unfair.
206. But she's so deeply in this world that that kind of comparison doesn't happen very much at all.
207. At the same time, she has to conceive of a future.
208. you know and like you were saying I think it's one that is being really influenced by her
209. grandmother's bleak vision and it's also one in which her mother doesn't have a promise of ever
210. leaving prison so how someone would start to carve out their own future from that equation I think is
211. really hard to grasp so both for the daughter in this book and for yourself it's like how out of
212. that arrangement position can you conceive of a future where you, you know, could go on to more,
213. better, and, you know, in your case, go on to great achievement and success? It's like,
214. how did you even know that was possible? I mean, one thing I will say is that
215. Susanna doesn't believe she's having a degraded life. And it was very important to me
216. that the book not believe she's having a degraded life either.
217. You know, that is why it's written as a hero's journey,
218. because I think we do have pretty degraded ways of seeing people in difficult conditions.
219. And we do tend to contrast them to some notion of a normative life that would be better more fuller And I think it a really disrespectful way of orienting ourselves towards people who are making their way in a difficult way
220. and so it felt very important to me that we understand that she is not relegated to tragedy
221. that this is a hero story though I would probably suggest she's a tragic or doomed hero
222. in so much as her her vow is to attempt to stay with her mother forever and no one can stay with
223. their mother forever and so I think that to me part of what's so heroic about her is that she
224. has found a way to build a meaningful life for herself without needing to believe it will change
225. from this particular life. And so it actually was important to me that it not appear that
226. everything is just lesser than for her and that what we want for her is to get out of here.
227. You know, the way I experience it, the two shaping forces of Susanna's life are prison and death,
228. And they're somewhat pitted against each other in the book because, you know, death says loss is permanent. Whereas the prison shows, you know, that loss can be undone. You know, every week Susanna returns to this place and what's been disappeared reappears. You know, what's been done can be undone in so much as her mother has returned to her.
229. And so I think that she takes very seriously that she has something very special happening at the prison. She has this kind of heaven or hell where you get to reunite to some extent with your departed. And it's because she has so many experiences of death and loss that she takes very seriously what the living can do, which is they can still return to each other.
230. you know and so actually my experience of Susanna is that she is both incredibly lucid because she
231. knows something that's true for all of us that we're all going to lose each other that it's
232. incredibly precious this time when we can still return to each other when we can be in relationship
233. to each other she doesn't take that for granted and on the other hand she's very deranged because
234. she thinks she's going to be the first person in life who never has to leave anyone you know that
235. somehow through her own will and vow, she will find a way to stay in relationship.
236. Did you ever feel sorry for yourself? Did you ever feel hopeless? Did you ever feel like,
237. God, I can't go on like this? Because I feel like, yes, those things can make reality very
238. immediate, but they can also be crushing. So it's like how to not be crushed by them. Or I don't
239. know if it's a choice or just a temperament or if you have an idea of what kind of saved you from
240. being crushed. I think I was destroyed by it. You know, when I was young, my grandparents and
241. their friends were my entire life because I was a very tight knit community. And, you know,
242. my grandparents saw their friends many nights a week and we spent the weekends together.
243. And these were really the people I grew up around. And by the time I was 19, every single one of them had passed, you know, so there would be no one to remember, you know, this Thanksgiving, this Hanukkah. And so I think I did feel very exiled from my own life. And I think that it was crushing.
244. And to some extent I thought that it was going to be a very lonely life ahead because I would never be able to share with other people the sources of my being And I thought I would never be able to well communicate with other people a lot about
245. myself and my upbringing. And I think what saved me from some sense of isolation was books, was
246. novels. A year after my grandmother died, when I was 17, I read James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.
247. and the sense of being exiled from your own life that he conjures in that book, it was me. I mean,
248. I felt it so intensely. It was such an extreme experience of communion. And I think that bit
249. by bit, it was books that made me feel like I was still somehow in conversation with the world,
250. that those things I didn't yet have language for, other people had come up with language for.
251. And so I think to some extent, other people's novels brought me back into a belief in the
252. sayable, you know, and I actually think, I think this is true for many of us when it
253. comes to childhood, that, you know, so much of childhood occurs before we have good language
254. for what we're thinking or feeling.
255. And so childhood as a whole kind of exists beyond the realm of language, can be very
256. hard to put into language.
257. And then you're saved by those writers who have found a way to do it.
258. You know, I remember reading Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.
259. And there's a way that he communicates through those clones that to some extent we're all orphans in our interior lives, that there's some place inside us that can't be protected or guided by parents, where we are lost and bewildered.
260. And he captured that so meaningfully to me that it made me know like, oh, there are people who understand how I feel.
261. And there is language that can bring me back into conversation with people.
262. And so I think books have been a huge part of what has made my life feel livable and that has helped to transform my past into what feels like a livable present and a hopeful future.
263. What a lovely place to end.
264. Yeah.
265. Before I start bawling.
266. Yeah.
267. Oh, my God.
268. Harriet, thank you so much for speaking with us.
269. I'm so honored and delighted.
270. That was Harriet Clark.
271. Her debut novel is called The Hill.
272. Thanks for listening to the LARP Radio Hour.
273. The producers of the LARP Radio Hour are Medea Ocher, Kate Wolfe, Eric Newman, and Mary Knopf and Jonathan Shiflett, who also mixed and edited our show.
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