Transcript

Arielle Angel 00:10

Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m your host, Arielle Angel, editor at large of Jewish Currents. I’m here today to talk to my new favorite writer, Harriet Clark, about this amazing book, The Hill. It’s coming out May 5th. I really don’t feel like I’m overstating things, and listeners to this podcast know that I’m not usually this effusive with praise, but this book is a masterpiece.

Harriet Clark 00:35

Arielle, that was like the most thrilling introduction of my life. Thank you so much. I feel like, “Let’s wrap it up.” That was perfect.

AA 00:43

Maybe the way to start is to say a little bit, Harriet, about where you come from in real life. So, Harriet Clark, your mother was Judy Clark. She was a member of the Weather Underground and the May 19th organization that was infamously involved in the Brink’s robbery, for which your mother was the getaway driver. It resulted in the deaths of three people: one security guard at the bank that they were robbing, and two police officers. She was imprisoned for 37 years, is that right?

HC 01:14

Yeah. Almost 38.

AA 01:15

Yep, almost 38, and released in 2019. And this book draws on your experience visiting her every week in the prison in upstate New York, a train ride or a car ride away from New York City. But it is not—you made a point of telling me, it’s not autofiction, and it definitely is a novel, and yet, it is so deeply lived. Like the detail of this book—it’s very hard to imagine that anyone who hadn’t grown up in this close proximity to the prison system would have been able to write it. So, maybe you could start just by talking about how you conceive of the genre of the book, and also its relationship to life, and how you worked that through in the writing of the book.

HC 01:59

Yes, as you said, I visited my mother for 38 years. And so, I definitely think it was the intensity of almost 40 years visiting her that, for one thing, made me feel like the experience was enough mine that I could be a little irreverent with it, in a way that I don’t think I would have ever felt as free to bring a lot of humor or different forms of buoyancy to this experience if it hadn’t felt like mine. But the truth of the matter is, while the experience of visiting a mother inside feels like mine, there was no way that I could write a memoir because my story is very entangled in other people’s stories, and their experiences aren’t mine to portray, or expose, or possibly misrepresent. And I felt that very intensely about the women in my mother’s prison—that their stories were not mine to tell. And so, I always knew the book could not be set at my mother’s actual prison.

HC 02:57

One of the truths of my life is that the things we do affect other people, and I had no desire to write a book that was going to expose (or possibly misrepresent) or even just upset other people. I felt that in particular about the women at my mother’s prison. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t tread on any stories that weren’t mine. I wanted the prison to be an imagined realm, but I also felt, about my mother’s crime, that that also wasn’t for me to represent, primarily out of a respectful and protective impulse toward the survivors of her crime, who did not consent to be in a book. And so, it felt very necessary to me that things occur in a more imagined realm.

HC 03:39

And also, I love novels. I always say: Novels are where I learned I was like other people. For me, they’re the art of shared resonance and a certain very intimate companionship, because I think the characters in novels—they don’t exactly belong to the world; they belong to us. I really wanted people to have that sense of closeness with the narrator of my book, and I really wanted people to be able to project and imagine their own experiences into the book, in a certain way. Because even though Suzanna has very particular conditions for her life, I think the fundamental conditions of her life are quite universal. I think our beginnings are always the aftermath of other people’s decisions and difficulties, and that’s what it means to have a family. And this question of: Is her fate her own? Does she have free will? What does it even mean to have your quote, own life? I think those are the questions of most people’s lives. And so, for me, letting it be a novel lets it feel more about childhood and family more generally.

AA 04:44

I feel like there’s a way in which the whole question of morality, freedom, and justice is playing out, actually not in the realm of the criminal justice system, but is playing out in the family. So, in the book, she’s being raised by her grandparents. Her grandfather dies—sorry, spoiler alert, although it happens very early in the book, so I don’t feel like I’m giving anything away. And her grandmother, who is a very difficult, also very funny character—one of the most memorable characters that I’ve read in a long time—her grandmother is this incredible foil to Suzanna herself. Like, Suzanna is all about returning to the prison—this kind of devotion—that the coordinates of her life are almost fixed when she comes into them, and she accepts that fixedness. Whereas the grandmother is always struggling toward a certain articulation of freedom. It almost seems like she’s constantly being rebuked—that her own ideas of freedom are not possible. Like, she wants total disentanglement from other people.

AA 05:48

I feel like, in the book, you entangle this imperfect desire for freedom with the idea of justice. you say: “Justice, my grandmother called it, her refusal to go to the prison. Freedom or justice, depending on her mood.” You also entangle it with the idea of punishment. Like obviously, there is this punishment that the mother character is enduring in serving out her life sentence, but there is also the punishment inflicted by the grandmother, this banishment, her refusal to visit her daughter. And so, I wanted to talk about this transposition of these big ideas of justice, punishment, and freedom from the justice system to the family, and to talk about what it means about the politics of the book, on some level. We’ll talk a lot more about this, but maybe we could start here.

HC 06:39

Definitely. I think you’re absolutely right. The grandmother is standing in for a certain version of justice that is more vengeful and that believes in forever punishment.

AA 06:50

You relate her to the Hebrew God.

HC 06:52

Exactly, and in that instance, I think, is meant to actually be somewhat generous—this idea that actually, sometimes, punishment is someone’s attempt to protect you and transform you. That it’s a shaping power, and I think her grandmother really believes in the shaping power of punishment. That in the end, it’s less about punishing you for any particular transgression and more about shaping you toward someone who might be safer in an unsafe world. I think, fundamentally, as an example of a vengeful forever punisher, I think you can sense what it cost the grandmother to live like that. And it was important to me to show a certain fury, which I think, especially when we’re suffering, one way to rouse and scaffold yourself is to stay angry, to stay profoundly aggrieved. And I think that one way the grandmother handles her own inevitable vulnerability is to keep re-rousing herself around what has aggrieved her. But I think that actually, my hope is that one also sees that, of course, the grandmother does feel profound responsibilities to other people. She’s giving a rhetoric of freedom, but fundamentally, she knows that we do owe things to each other, and she’s, for that reason, incredibly critical of people who abdicate their responsibilities to each other.

HC 08:20

Your question makes me think in part about a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay I love about Kanye West, in which he talks about Kanye West wanting white freedom, which is freedom from responsibility to other people, and he’s describing why that wouldn’t be a value in the Black community. I think I was raised to understand that my responsibilities to other people are responsibilities to each other—to experience them less as an anchor and more as a grounding and guiding force. That it tends to disturb you to respond to the inconvenience of other people by wanting to be free of them. Better to just complain, and gossip, and say no, and then rise up and do yes. All of that. And so, I think that again and again, all the characters in the book—even including the grandmother—are fundamentally living according to that ethos. It’s just that the grandmother has this rhetoric, which wants to put forth a more individualistic notion of how you save your own life.

AA 09:23

I think there’s a lot of wonderful models of care in this book that are just not the kind of touchy-feely models that we’re used to being associated with some of this rhetoric. I mean, you have the grandmother’s old friend from the Communist Party, Jean, who is checking on all the neighbors in her building, knocking to make sure they’re still alive, but fundamentally wants nothing to do with them, and if they try to stop and talk, she’s like: Nope, already gone.

HC 09:53

For me, I think one of the real truths of my life is that by virtue of falling out of certain, more conventionalized nuclear care structures, I was lucky enough to fall into a very vast network of care and fellowship with other people, including near strangers. The two truths of my life are that some part of me has, at times, felt quite orphaned and lonely, and also, I have been profoundly cared for. I have seen that people do want to help each other, and people in particular really do want to help children. I do feel that, for instance, the people who rode the train when I was riding the train to visit my mother—they were strangers to me. We never knew each other’s names, but they were my literal and spiritual fellow travelers. They are the people I shared my life with. I tend to think it’s very important to register experiences of fellowship and all of these acts of care and connection people offer to each other. In that sense, I feel like I wanted people to sense that Suzanna is inside a vast network of people who are all trying to make their own way through difficult situations and who are still finding moments to reach out to each other. Even if it’s a tiny moment of kindness from a train conductor she sees every week, or if it is the knocking on doors she does with Jean. I believe very much—I mean, I was raised in part by the nuns at my mom’s prison—and so, I take very seriously the sacrament of fellowship.

AA 11:31

Yeah, I think that something that goes along with that is that there’s a profound non-judgmentalness in the book. That is curious to me, and actually, sometimes, I almost had a hard time with it. The fellowship, for example, extends also to some of the corrections officers at the prison. You have one character that Suzanna is very interested in, who’s nice to her, and they have a rapport. And not that I think that the child protagonist should come down on this guy or whatever, but there is a lack of judgmentalness almost throughout. Like, one infers a chafing against the grandmother’s assertion of individuality, against some of this ethos of care, even as she reluctantly does some of it, but it’s never stated. And even with her mother, there’s sometimes a teenage annoyance, but there’s never a judgment for having been left or a judgment for her own crime. And so, I’m curious about that, about what it means to write a protagonist with a profound lack of judgment, who is not passive, because she’s made this very strong decision to continue to return to the prison—this vow. I’m just wondering about that—how you relate to that, and how that fits into the broader abolitionist ethos of the book or not.

HC 12:58

I mean, you’ll be relieved to know that in life, I am a profoundly judgmental person. We could do a separate conversation about all my judgments. I think a few things. One is that I will say that, in terms of her relationship with prison officers, it’s not a great life to be a prison officer. I don’t think it feels good to people’s spirits to spend their days ordering and shuffling other people around. I lived through many different eras at my mother’s prison. The one where the women and the officers were both alert to the reality, which was that they were in community with each other—that these were the people who were spending their days together, and that the more they could figure out how to make that community work on both sides, the easier everyone’s day was going to be. That was some part, at least, my external experience as a child in the ’80s. And then, as we went into the ramped-up criminal justice initiatives of the ’90s, and then definitely once we were in the terrorism era of the early ’00s, the prison itself really instituted an attempt to profoundly separate the women and the officers and to suggest that you could never be in community with these incarcerated people. This was also, I think, a time where things got worse for the officers, too. It was a form of everyone being put under increasingly fascistic conditions. And so, I will say that it’s not hard for me to have empathy for a character whose job is to be a prison officer.

AA 14:34

No, and I didn’t mean to be too facile about it, but it’s just like the lack of judgment throughout—even less so for the prison officer than for the grandmother, I would say—is profound.

HC 14:45

I think for me, the truth is that my favorite books tend to make the reader somewhat complicit in misseeing something so they can eventually re-see it. I did want the reader to have this experience of Suzanna seeming to bear the conditions of her life quite well. I do consider one of the really heroic adaptations of childhood that children will go to great lengths to make enough out of not enough. I have seen this with kids in all different circumstances. And so, there is a way that I needed the reader to be both inside Suzanna’s making enough out of each of these things—enough out of that these officers are the men she grows up around, enough out of the fact that these crotchety old ladies are who she grows up around—to let it be enough. But my hope is that fundamentally, by the end, you’re also somewhat in relationship to the truth that it has not been enough. One of the defining truths of my life is that something being bearable is not mutually exclusive from it being unbearable. And so, for me, an emotional and structural decision in the book was to figure out when, finally, is the book going to let in or acknowledge that actually also, this has been unbearable.

AA 16:08

I did want to ask you about the way that you portray the changes in the prison system. It’s pretty profound the way that through the timeline of the book, you just keep seeing things taken away, and taken away, and taken away, in very arbitrary ways. Suddenly, you can’t use the microwave in visiting, but they still sell the popcorn kernels. There’s always a lack of privacy, and there’s always an overall denial of access to time and one’s own time. But it gets so extreme. I mean, toward the end, it’s like they’re even taking away the view from the windows because the walls are getting so high. I just wanted to talk about that shift. What’s amazing about the book is that it is so in the protagonist’s viewpoint that it’s not like we live in that reality, in all of it. Like, the relationships with the protagonist’s mother and the grandmother are very primary, but it is charting something. I was wondering if you could talk about what it’s charting.

HC 17:11

I will say three things led me to write the book. One was, I’m sure, something in me that did need to metabolize my own life through 20 years of working on a book. Another thing I imagine was that due to my great love of novels, some part of me wanted to be inside a conversation that had been so formative to me. But the other thing was actually coming to understand that many people, I think, don’t fully understand what the experience of prison is doing in this country. For most of my writing life, I only wrote for myself. And then, in 2017—not long after Trump took power the first time—two things happened. One was the beginning of the family separation policy at the border and the immense outcry against it. And obviously, I shared everyone’s outrage to see these kids being ripped from their mothers’ arms. But it was also a somewhat bewildering experience for me because I thought: Wait a minute, everyone. Do you know that every day, at prisons and in jails across this entire country, children are ripped out of their mothers’ arms? All detention is family separation. The vast majority of women inside are mothers. Most were the primary caregivers for their kids before they went in. And so, that was when I began to understand that things that I knew—not just about the experience, but also about how massive it was. at that point. About 5 million children in America are going to have a parent in prison during their childhood, which is one in 14 American children or one in four black children. So, these are staggeringly high numbers. And now, if you include immigration, detention, the expansion of parole, supervision, we’re talking about 7 million children.

HC 19:01

And so, I think I began to understand that actually, there did maybe need to be more public-facing writing to talk about what prisons do to families. But I did not have a story to tell, it felt like to me, in part because I didn’t think that my protagonist was a protagonist—the kind of girl and woman I had been writing through. I didn’t really think she did anything, and so, how could she in any way center an actual novel that was supposed to engage and entertain other people? But the other thing that happened in 2017, if you remember, was that there were these caravans of migrants coming up from Central America, and Trump was referring to them as “marauding hordes,” and this idea that somehow they were about to infiltrate the country—right-wing media was really vilifying this, and left-wing media was showing how tragic it was. And I would see these images of parents carrying children hundreds of miles, like walking hundreds of miles with three children in their arms and on their backs, and I thought: This is absolutely heroic. I mean, the extraordinary reserves people are calling upon in order to try to keep their families together and keep their families safe, and we’re not even calling this heroism for what it is. There was one night where on the news, there was footage of a group of families carrying children up this hill, and it was like I finally understood that the thing I had been listening to, but not letting myself hear, was that my narrator was heroic. That actually, not only was she not doing nothing, she was doing something incredibly difficult. She was trying to keep her family together in the face of the great forces of separation: prison and death. Once I knew that, then I thought: I’m going to write a book about prison, and I’m going to structure it around the hero’s journey. And so, in that sense, I did write the book in order to communicate that we can never normalize how extraordinary prisons are, and we can never normalize that the original and ongoing sin of our nation is family separation, not just as our primary form of punishment, but fundamentally, as our primary form of controlling and disempowering communities. And so, it was like I had to work that in while still always trying to write a book that people would want to read.

AA 21:31

I want to talk about that. Maybe I could ask you to read from the bottom of 14 to the end of that section on 15, and we could talk about return.

HC 21:41

“At the prison, considerable fanfare surrounded departures, but to not depart, it struck me then, was as great a feat as any. To stay by choice, not by curse. To return each week and rise again. To do this forever and ever. This was a feat I saw nowhere applauded, and this was the challenge I set now for myself. However heralded the leavers, I would become a great stayer. Every descent twinned with an ascent, a life of perpetual return. Even my grandfather had been so easily swayed. But me, already, I’d outlasted the trees. What was clear as I completed my ascent—and by clear, I mean entirely unclear—was what it took to last forever. Whatever it took, it took great amounts. I crested the hill and came upon a view unlike all the views I’d seen before. Spread across the hilltop were small silver tunnels to nowhere. Coils of barbed wire waiting to top the new fence. Barbs caught the sun in bright flashes, and the whole hill seemed to wink. I straightened and strengthened, and standing there between the flag and grave, I took the vow that seemed the greatest vow I knew: To stay right where I was, to stay no matter what. Coils glinting, flags smacking. A squirrel ran down the flagpole to offer me applause. Call this the call to adventure, or call it what it was, choosing the life I had, which strikes me still as wise a choice as any. To commemorate my chosen challenge, I waved to the men in the tower, whose rule or preference kept them from offering response. Inside, I showed my stamp. And then, like a bride, I made my way down visiting’s long aisle.”

AA 23:16

Thank you for reading that for me. I hope that wasn’t too painful.

HC 23:21

It is. It makes me realize I have to get better at reading it.

AA 23:23

I wanted to talk about this question of return. You’ve already talked a little bit about what it means and the importance of realizing the heroics of what Suzanna is trying to do. I will say it’s a little bit of an awkward comparison, and yet, it’s very hard not to make it—that on some level, I really hear these principles that you hear a lot in Palestinian political discourse around return, and also samuds. That steadfastness, the commitment, no matter what. And also, this desire for return in the character’s trajectory is a little bit fanatic. I mean, it’s totally fanatical. She, in some ways, doesn’t fully allow a life to seep in, at some point. She has to be forced into greater engagement with the rest of the world. And I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to talk about both the honorable piece of this return and also its folly, and whether there was a greater political principle at work behind it. Because in the book, it really is just this character’s decision. It’s so personal and idiosyncratic, and yet, the echoes with Palestinian politics make me wonder if it is connected to a larger politics.

HC 24:44

The writer and psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, has this line: The wish to return seals the hero’s fate. I guess one of the things I got from that is that there are many ways to be a hero in this life. There are many forms of hero’s journeys, and some are a venturing out, and some are a venturing back. I personally don’t believe one is more meaningful or more ethical than the other, but I do think there are particular difficulties and fates that are accorded to whichever one you’re inside. If you’re in what are called nostos narratives—narratives about people trying to get home, where the heroism is to get home—then of course, there is something seemingly, perhaps, more backward-facing than the narratives that are about going out. I think that was part of why I did have a pretty degraded opinion of Suzanna for so long. The part of me that thought she wasn’t a protagonist, that thought she didn’t do anything, was because she was venturing out. I think that it’s a great resource and privilege to have a home from which you would venture out, and she doesn’t exactly have that resource or privilege. Her home is where her mother lives, and it’s a prison.

HC 26:06

I will say it’s tricky for me to call Suzanna a fanatic because, fundamentally, all that’s happening is she wants to see her mother, and she has absolutely no way to see her mother except to lock herself in prison. And even though our narratives around prison usually focus on people trying to get out, the far more common story is people trying to get in. People want to see their loved ones inside. For years, many, many years that I was working on the book, the title of the book was a line from a Maria Hummel poem: You won’t go alone if you go. Because when I read it, it did so capture how I felt about both prison and death, which is that when our loved ones go to prison, we go with them. And to some extent, when our loved ones pass away, some part of us goes with them.

HC 26:53

And so, I do think that one of the things we learn from books is what makes a meaningful life. I think if we act like a life is only meaningful if it has certain forms of action and adventure, then that disqualifies huge acts of bravery, and care, and forbearance that people undertake every day. And so, to me, it was more trying to figure out how to write a book that did dignify, rather than degrade, a life that involves a lot of repetition and a non-triumphant, non-progressive view of what a life is or what time is.

HC 27:34

I think, also, one of the things that took me a very long time to understand, and that let me finally be able to write the book—or be able to write a book for other people, not just for myself—was to realize that Suzanna’s story is not going to be delivered in a progressive way. Because if your parent has a life sentence, then what time does for you is very confusing. She’s not going to get any closer toward being with her mother. There is no freedom on the horizon, and because she’s raised by the elderly, like many children with parents in prison are, the passage of time really only gets her closer toward other forms of precarity and loss. And so, the accumulation of time is not this hopeful life trajectory I think we often want to impose on children and even on adults. But I think that Suzanna—her life is made up of repetitions, and for me, what was important was understanding that part of what’s happened here is that she has ritualized her life. Every week, if she takes these certain steps—if she empties her pockets, if she walks up this hill, if she walks down this aisle—she’s returned to her mother. Meaning the time in the present is meaningful. She doesn’t need meaning to exist on a future event horizon.

HC 28:54

I think that it took me a very long time to not think of the time one spends in prison as lost time, or wasted time. I don’t think I had a lot of futurity in my own sense of the future. To some extent, I think spending 20 years writing the book was also a way to live in a suspended, non-progressive experience of time that was also, by virtue of writing, an attempt to just get to ritualize time.

AA 29:21

But there is something fanatical in that. I mean, you have to admit that that’s the piece of it that’s fanatical. Not the piece about wanting to return to the family, but almost by necessity, you’ve had to internalize this closing off of a sense of futurity. But then, you’ve ritualized it, or pathologized it, or something—it’s like the most intense way of making lemonade out of it. I mean, it’s very beautiful, but it is also imposed.

HC 29:49

One-hundred percent. You know, a word that’s in the book a number of times and that I often think of in terms of Suzanna—I believe she’s somewhat deranged. That’s my experience of her. She’s deranged because the two shaping forces of her life are prison and death, and they’re somewhat pitted against each other because death says loss is permanent. And to some extent, the prison counters this because, for Suzanna, it is a somewhat miraculous place where the disappeared reappear, what’s been lost can be found, what’s been done can be undone—at least when it comes to losing your mother. And so, she does have an experience of the prison as this almost heaven-or-hell kind of place that she must return to again and again. I think that makes her both lucid, because the reason she is, as you’re saying, fanatical, is because she understands something I think is true, which is that we’re all going to lose each other. And that means it’s incredibly precious—the times when we can still return to each other. She does not take for granted that she can see her mother because she has people she loves she can never see again. And so, she’s very willing to take the steps to see her mother. On the other hand, she’s totally deranged because, for one thing, she thinks she’s going to be the first person in history to never leave anyone. She really believes somehow, she’s going to have trumped the forces of separation.

AA 31:18

Right. There’s a lot of talk about immortality in the book.

HC 31:20

Exactly. She really thinks maybe she and Jean are going to live forever, and they’re going to be the first people who don’t have to leave each other. I actually think, in general, our experiences of lucidity and our derangements are quite entangled. And so, there are some things I think she’s seeing very clearly, but I also do think deranging conditions derange us. And sometimes, when people make certain comments about Suzanna, I think, “Yeah, because she’s deranged.”

AA 31:47

Something that you just said reminded me of something that I really wanted to ask you about. I think it’s very hard for writers not to, in some way, write a book about writing, which you didn’t do, but it’s there, actually.

HC 32:03

Oh, no. How.

AA 32:04

No, I think it’s actually beautiful, the way that it’s in there, because I think that there’s something about the way that watching the mother in prison also becomes a way of learning how to not take things for granted. It’s exactly what you just said. There are tons of scenes throughout the book, but I think the one that comes to mind most vividly is when Suzanna goes and stays in a trailer on the prison grounds for a two-night overnight with her mother in the trailer. And the mother is saying: Wow, I’ve never opened and closed these doors before. Like, oh, my God, can you believe using a knife? She’s like: I wish it were raining because we’ve never closed the door on the rain together. Or the mother trains service dogs, and she says: I got to hear the dog breathe. And these are heartbreaking moments—these ways of recognizing life and freedom within confinement that also teach us how to see and teach us about the magic of every moment, and the magic of will. Just the incredible miracle of the small things. And I think as a writer, you’re always trying to rescue these small moments from just sheer banality and meaninglessness, and the mother’s ability to renew that wonder and to restore life to all of these moments feels, to me, very reminiscent of writing. I don’t know how that lands with you, but that was something that I thought about. And considering how long you worked on this book and considering the practice of it, that feels like part of the practice—the practice of observation and bestowing value.

HC 33:49

I mean, definitely. I think that for me, it has been incredibly important to not let a difficult life feel like a degraded life. I think that in various ways in my life, people have sometimes implied that I’ve had almost like a second-class experience of being mothered, or that these things are lesser than some essential, full, positive version of an experience. And it’s very important to me—and maybe I’m deranged like Suzanna—but it does not serve me to believe that my life has been degraded by its difficulties. I know that I’ve had a meaningful life. I know that my mother has had a meaningful life. I don’t say any of that to undercut the incredible deprivations that I think people experience in prison.

AA 34:38

And the heartbreak of those lines are twinned with the wonder of them, just to say. It’s not that you’re like, “Oh, this is amazing.” It’s like the deprivation is so present, and yet.

HC 34:48

And I think I do consider it one of the great honors of my life that I got to grow up with people in prison, because I think that one of the reasons the hero’s journey was my framework here. Obviously, if you grew up in prison, you’re not going to believe in a victim/perpetrator binary or other forms of: How do you make sense out of things or construct a story? And for me, the heart of the hero’s journey is that it’s a story about death and rebirth, and that the actual heroic thing people do is to resurrect themselves after total devastation. I think that one of the great privileges of growing up in prison is that you are in a space and in a community where absolutely everyone has to do that. Especially in a women’s facility, because the majority of women in there are children.

AA 35:39

Sorry, the majority of women have children?

HC 35:42

Yes. Sorry, yes. Did I say they were children? And they are in the wake of—and in the midst of—unbelievable catastrophe for them and their children. And they have to find a way to rebirth themselves inside this new situation to still be responsible to their children, to some extent, to still be responsible to the other women who are now their community. And it’s almost impossible to do this if you only believe that now, your life is ruined, or over, or if you only stay alert to its deprivations. There is some way that a person has to know that they are still able to create and be gifted experiences of meaning in order to rise up and be a member of a family and a community they’re still in.

HC 36:35

I think in a mothering that included many heroic acts, my mother’s mothering, I think the most heroic thing she ever did was to initially present herself as—and then, eventually, truly become—a very joyful person. The vast majority of the time that she developed that temperament, she was never going to get out, and it was partially a gift to me, as much as, obviously, to some extent, something for herself, to say: You don’t have to worry that I’m utterly destroyed in here. I think that’s one of the very heroic things that, in general, women inside have to do, is they have to be undestroyed by prison. I never wanted to do this spectacle of horror that we’re accustomed to with prison, but to just let it be extraordinary—what it means to put people inside these conditions, sometimes for their whole life. And sometimes, I almost think that the spectacle and the horror, they do a disservice, because they do take away from just how strange this is. That a child looks at the top of a hill and knows her mother will never leave that hill. That’s extraordinary. That’s such a strange thing for us to do to people. She’s in a room with her mother. She’s looking around the room, and she knows that for the rest of her life, everything she will ever do or say with her mother will occur in that room. In some ways, you want to let that be extraordinary again, not just horrifying. And so, that was a key part of trying to show how strange this environment is and how people adapt.

AA 38:07

Yeah, I mean, I hope I wasn’t making too much light of it. I don’t mean to say that these are moments that are moments of beauty when they are moments of deprivation, but they are moments that have to be noted and rescued and are not taken for granted. And I feel like that was the feeling that I was having, especially at the end with the plane. She’s being transferred to another prison. It could not be more in a state of unfreedom, and yet, the feeling of being in the clouds, sitting close to another person, feels to her like freedom. She’s able to access some freedom in that, and there’s something, like you said, so extraordinary in that duality.

HC 38:46

Yes. I think that it’s not in the book, but for the purposes of this conversation, what I will also say is that I do think in prison, that attention to small, transcendent moments, or small moments of connection, actually is also part of structural change. So, for instance, my mother was put in solitary for two years, which, at that point, was one of the longest times a woman in America had been in solitary. And some of what had to occur was just talking, trying to comfort women through the walls—women just trying to keep each other sane through talking or through listening to each other. These very small acts of trying to not transcend their environment, but to stay alive and human inside it. And she did that—she did a lot of talking and listening through walls—but she also brought a lawsuit against the prison for what was, fundamentally, the torture of mentally ill women who were being disciplined in solitary. And that lawsuit profoundly changed conditions for people there. And so, I do think that one is using those small moments of connection or care or transcendence to stay alive so that you can also have some of the fortitude to make the larger structural changes on behalf of yourself and others.

HC 40:07

Which is why, obviously, in these times of escalating fascism, I do think that the organizing and care people do in prisons is such a model, because they have always had to figure out how to fight for their dignity and the dignity of each other under conditions of total fascism, and to some extent, under conditions of defeat. And yet, again and again, people put themselves on the line to try to take care of each other inside or to fight for small things that make real differences. I think, again, in terms of being able to register meaning, that’s a big part of being able to dignify and continue those battles. Because even, for instance, the nun who was incredibly meaningful to me growing up, Sister Elaine Roulet—she developed the children’s center at my mother’s prison, she helped develop the nursery and the parenting program. She was incredibly transformative at helping women reclaim their identities as mothers, even though, in instances, they had seemed to have abdicated their responsibilities to their children in such intense ways. She did that for decades and decades and decades, and of course, the prison is now systematically dismantling so much of what she built. I often have to remind myself: That doesn’t discount what she did. The thousands of us whose lives she made better—it still matters. We remember what those programs and experiences were like, and that’s part of what makes it possible to attempt to rebuild them. And so, I do find that the model of fortitude you see in prisons is really useful and inspiring for us at this moment in time.

AA 41:49

I hate that I’ve left this group of questions to the end because I feel like that would be a very nice place to end. And yet, I think we have to go back to the wreckage of left history. I mean, your family history, which is represented in this book, is the greatest hits of left-wing disillusionment. And also very connected to the history of Jewish Currents. I mean, this is Jewish, Communist Party USA people. Your grandparents, in real life and in the book, went to Moscow. Your grandfather was a journalist for the Daily Worker in Moscow, and they both became anti-communists, very disillusioned by the crimes of the Soviet Union. And of course, your mother’s radicalism ended with many, if not all of them, in prison and, I think, at least from your mother’s own telling, a profound regret about her own crime. I was wondering if you could read a part that I really love. Starts on the bottom of 175 until the end of the section.

HC 42:52

Yes. I’ll just set it up to say this takes place in the chapter where the grandmother is dying. The grandmother’s refrain throughout the book has been, “What’s done is done and can never be undone, which is what’s being referenced here. And she also has this piece of wisdom, if you will, where she thinks everything you need to know about a person, you find out in a single moment. All right, so the section begins:

HC 43:16

These moments were not defining moments. They were intractable moments. Moments that, once done, could never be undone. Such moments could not be changed, but they did exist in relation to each other. They could be combined into different patterns, as my grandmother began to do. Her only pair of shoes—my grandmother blew on her hands and went on. We had this cat in Moscow that lived in the office. Your grandfather brought him home because your mother and I were so lonely. Your mother loved that cat, and the cat loved your mother. Two peas in a pod, really, your mom and this dumb old cat. But the cat fell out our window and died. What could I tell her? When she came home from school and looked for the cat, I had to say something. I told her that the cat missed her so much that he’d gone searching for her, and she didn’t ask again. Flash of fingers, and the cat was gone before I understood what he had to do with anything. That’s why I made us leave. Because one day I was cleaning the apartment. Your mother was in the courtyard, and one of the neighbor boys came up to her and asked where her little cat had gone. I could hear them from where I was two floors up, and I was watching because sometimes the boys were rough and would push her around. But he only asked about the cat. She told him that the cat had fallen out the window and died, but to please not tell her mother, because her mother thought the cat was out looking for her. Your grandfather thought I made us leave because the Yiddish writers had just been murdered, and my own husband was writing lies about it, but really, it was because of that day in the courtyard. The cat realizing she understood what was actually going on.

AA 44:41

I love that. It really floored me when I read it, and it relates to an earlier scene where she passes a photograph to Suzanna, the grandmother of a child who—it’s unclear what has happened to him, but all the horrors of the time. That maybe he wasn’t eating, or his parents were dead, or everyone he knows is dead. And the grandmother says about her and her grandfather: We killed him. Me and your grandfather and everyone else. We should look at this and feel ashamed. And she tells Suzanna: You should burn every photo in the house. You should burn everything when I’m gone. But not this photo. This is the one you should keep. It’s really an enduring message about: What did our movements amount to? And we’ve talked about the profound unjudgmentalness of the book—t’s never quite refuted. Not that we need to defend the Soviet Union or whatever. I’m just curious how you thought about that wreckage in writing this book, and that legacy, and what we should do with it at this point.

HC 45:43

Yeah. My family has been radical for many, many generations, even preceding my grandparents. They were gunrunners and organizers back in Minsk a long time ago. And so, there is a radical tradition. And my father—though there’s no father in the book—my father was also a radical, a very committed radical doctor. At one point, when he was imprisoned for providing medical care to someone, he was interviewed, and in the interview, he says that he continues to believe that it can’t just be the people who are suffering the most under oppressive conditions who have to sacrifice to change those conditions—that it has to be people with power and resources who make sacrifices for those conditions to change. And yet, he now understands better that sacrifices hurt. I think that, fundamentally, what my family and many people learn is not only that sacrifices hurt, but that, in general, the tragedy is that you’re not the only one sacrificing. Like everything else, sacrifice is a collective experience, and other people end up having to bear the weight with you, and people who didn’t consent to bear the weight with you. I think that’s what makes it so hard to figure out what we do in the wake of harm and to reconsider whatever strategies and calculations we’re making about the relationship between harm and our aims.

HC 47:12

But sometimes, I do worry—when you said that thing about how it’s the greatest hits of our left disillusionment, I was cracking up about that and thought: That’s going to be our Hanukkah card—I realized that I had a slight worry about the word disillusionment, because I sometimes think that it suggests something more deflated and static than is my actual experience of people in the wake of profound disappointment and harm. As I think I already said, the benefit of growing up in prison is that after the worst happens, more happens. That’s just the truth. And my family—different versions of them, different generations of them—participated in actions that caused great harm and, obviously, contended with (and continue to contend with) great amounts of guilt and regret. But the truth is, they never stopped believing in our collective responsibility to each other.

HC 48:14

My mother was an organizer before she went to prison, and she was an organizer in prison. She knew she was responsible to the people around her. She continues to believe we rise and fall together, and she organized and built a huge amount in the prison, and her life is still devoted to helping families impacted by incarceration. Almost all the elders in my family spend their retirements organizing on behalf of Palestine and prisoner rights. And so, I guess sometimes it feels important to me that we not tell a story that seems to be a story of inflation and deflation. That doesn’t speak to what I think is far more true. And I feel very grateful. I was thinking: Oh, the reason “the greatest hits of far-left disillusionment” shouldn’t be our Hanukkah card is that really, what I do think my family teaches me is about the profound fortitude of the left, and the fact that I do think that even when we want to give up, the truth is we usually don’t have the option.

HC 49:18

I think that my mother’s sense of guilt and regret was nearly unbearable. I think it really could have, and in some ways did eat her alive, and she still had a child she had to show up for, and she was surrounded by women who were in conditions of great suffering, and she had to respond to that. And so, I think, in general, to me, I often am—and maybe this is me being too much like my narrator and seeming unjudgmental—but I do think we’re very lucky when we have intergenerational organizing, because I think we need some of the radicalism of the young and some of a certain kind of inflated certainty. We need that, and we need what our elders have learned after their own forms of being embattled or their understandings of factionalism. I think in general, we need to make sure that we’re not telling a version of how history or change works that suggests only victory and defeat, and therefore, that somehow, the repetition of defeat or the repetition of strategic mistakes makes it only a tragedy. I do think that the truth, alongside tragedy, tends to also be stories of heroism, meaning people who keep going after tragedy, including politically. And so, I think that was partially also what I had wanted the book to suggest.

AA 50:45

I love that. It’s really interesting how interested you are in heroism and what that means. It’s a word that I would never use, or I never think about that word, like heroism or hero. But it’s interesting how, because of the hero’s journey, I think it’s made its way into your—

HC 51:05

Totally. I think my mother, while she was inside, did a lot of Jewish study, and I think one of our great heroes—complicated heroes, of course—is Moses, and it’s always meaningful that Moses is an orphan, is a murderer, is a stutterer, consistently says no. I do think that when you begin studying hero stories, you do understand that they’re stories about people who’ve usually caused harm, or who are in experiences of great loss, and who basically still have work to do. Which is why they are, to some extent, stories about a certain form of resurrection.

AA 51:40

Well, I mean, in the Times in 2012, there was a piece about your mother that you figure in, and you said something like: The one character that will never appear in anything I write is a stubborn, passionate, rebellious brunette woman in an army jacket and a bandana.

HC 51:57

Oh, my God, I hate my younger self.

AA 51:59

What? No, don’t hate your younger self. But I don’t know. I mean, I do think that there’s something that you’re saying that’s in tension with some of the romanticism of the way that this stuff shows up. We talked a little bit, off this call, about One Battle After Another and the representation of the left that is on display there. French 75, I think, very much based on May 19th and Black Liberation Army and whatever.

HC 52:24

May 19th would never have let Leonardo DiCaprio in, but go on.

AA 52:30

But I think there is some way that what you’re saying actually challenges some of the romanticism of that, and also some of the certainty of that, and really grounds us in an evolving process, which I think is very useful, and also brings the reality of it into focus—the nature of that sacrifice, as you were saying, in your father’s words. And I think that’s a real gift to all of us.

HC 52:58

I just want to say one thing, although this will be the one time I go on the record saying anything about One Battle After Another, which, you can imagine, many people did ask me about. But the comment I made that you quoted from the Times, it was about having a reaction to what felt like a trope, like a very scripted, culturally created, familiar trope about a certain form of female revolutionary. I think that for me, for a very long time in my life, I did look to literature to try to understand my life better. I read a lot of books about communists in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. I read a lot of books about radicals in the ’60s and ’70s, and no book I read told me the truth of my life more than Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.

AA 53:49

Oh, I’m so glad, because I wanted to talk to you about it.

HC 53:51

For me, what was important was that it released me from believing that the truth of my experience had to be constricted to certain aspects of my identity—that I had to be reading books about radicals, that I had to see: Did I see my life in American Pastoral? Did I see my life in Doctorow’s Book of Daniel? It welcomed me into the larger human fold, which is one of the feelings I wanted my book to have, in terms of not fitting into certain tropes around radical families—although other ones, possibly, it does. I say that because I think for me, personally, the best part of one battle after another is the Benicio del Toro character, who is modeling a form of change and heroism that isn’t the romantic, radical version of it, that isn’t the glamorous version, that is doing the work. I think part of what’s meaningful to me—and the reason I go to this very vast framework of the hero’s journey, and something that can extend from Moses to those families that were carrying their children hundreds of miles—is because, in general, I think it serves us. It gives us more options for how to be, and how to be of use to each other, and how to return to ourselves and each other, and how to be brave, to give ourselves as large a framework and identity as possible. And so, I think when I made that slightly obnoxious comment to the Times, what I was actually resisting was forms of identifying me, or my mother, or my grandparents that felt too constrictive, that were too inside predetermined cultural scripts and were going to block our ability to be the real, vast people we are.

AA 55:33

Could you say even just a little bit more about what about Housekeeping attracted you? I mean, I know there’s tons of homages to Housekeeping in the book. The names of the book are largely ones that appear in that book. There’s also references to train hopping and stuff like that. I mean, there’s a bunch of little Easter eggs.

HC 55:52

The poet Diane De Prima, she has this line about how poems are angels come to deliver the letter you once signed for earlier when it was delivered by your life. And that’s how I feel about Housekeeping—that some part of me just did not really feel what I had lived through until I read that book. I think that there are books that read us; they reveal you to yourselves. And there was something about the tone of loneliness in that book that revealed me to myself in a way that was incredibly moving. When I say that my feeling about novels is that they invite us into the human fold, I think that, like anyone, it’s often hard for me to know what about my life is like or unlike other people. And so, it wasn’t just something incredibly transcendent and liberatory to see my life on a lakeside in Idaho under conditions totally different—the way in which I felt invited to be able to identify across a lot of difference—but also, I think that it was hard for me to know. The conditions of my life were a particularly unstable holding container, with my parents in prison and my grandparents’ mortality, and I did experience that as a fairly unstable holding container, but I didn’t know if that was just me. And there was something about when I read Housekeeping, where Marilyn knows we all make our way through life in unstable holding conditions. She knows that we will all be left by people we can’t bear to be left with, that we will all do things we can’t bear to do, and that in the end, we will all have to leave people we can’t bear to leave. And there was something about the confidence with which Marilyn asserts “this is universal” that was a truly profound experience of communion and, in its way, comfort for me. It changed my life. It was the most intense experience of call and response I ever had, where I feel like that book called something out of me, and I literally spent the next 20 years writing my response.

AA 58:01

We are almost out of time. I’ve kept you longer than I intended. I just wanted to ask you one last question, which is a huge question that is totally unanswerable in some way, but I thought I would try anyway. What is the alternative vision of justice that you are reaching for in the book, and also that you would have wanted in your own life?

HC 58:25

I will say that I do identify as an abolitionist, in terms of making sure I never adapt to prisons as any normalized component of our society. And I, in particular, mean abolitionism that identifies as less about the dismantling of any one thing and more about the envisioning of a new society. I don’t think I’m a great visionary. And so, in general, I come to this usually as a reader and liking to hear how other people are thinking about what’s possible. But I think that one of the things I really learned in my life is that people can vary their behavior and their temperament dramatically according to conditions—that when you make people feel incredibly embattled and threatened, they will lash out. It will bring out the fighter in them. It will bring out something less caring in them. And that, when we create conditions where people are treated with some degree of respect, and trust, and responsibility, that the versions of them that can rise to that occasion can come up. And so, my basic feeling is that our fundamental responsibility in life, whether it’s in our most personal or our largest structural lives, is to envision and create the conditions that allow us to be our better selves, that allow us to be in relationship.

HC 59:52

My feeling is one of the many derangements of prison, in terms of this myth of removal and exile, is it suggests that you can take people out of relationship, and of course, you can’t. That’s what my whole book is about—that actually, the people you send away are in relationship, and so, there are ways that you’re exiling or tearing apart whole families and communities. And so, I think that whatever vision I have, it’s one that is considering: Under what kind of conditions can people figure out how to be together, and what kind of conditions can people be the version of themselves that can be responsible to the collective good? Because I’ve seen the exact same people act out quite selfishly and even violently, and I’ve seen those same people intensely show up to take care of others. I don’t think I have the answers. I think, in general, it’s for impacted communities to say what conditions they need in order to be the most responsible, relational versions of themselves. But in my own life, I’m always trying to figure out: Under what conditions can I turn toward this person rather than away?

AA 01:01:05

Well, I think that’s a good place to stop, Harriet—I mean, continually profound. This book, The Hill, comes out May 5th. Cannot recommend it enough. Thank you so much for joining me on this conversation.

HC 01:01:20

Arielle, thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure and an honor, and I’m so moved that you read the book and very grateful that you wanted to talk about it.

AA 01:01:29

This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. If you like this episode, share it, like it, buy The Hill, and as always, subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. See you next time.