The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: An interview with novelist Adam Haslett

My interest in fiction has always been about getting at the interior lives of my characters, and so much of that interiority consists of barely conscious thoughts, judgments, desires, aversions, etc. that together add up, as you say, to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—for better, or all too frequently, for ill.

—Adam Haslett

I’ve been an admirer of Adam Haslett’s work since I encountered one of his early short stories, “City Visit,” in 2005. “City Visit” details the trip that teenage Brendan and his conservative mom take to New York City. Brendan needs this trip to transform his life. He’s lonely, has been bullied for being gay, and he’s saved his money for an encounter with a prostitute. He’s in New York, finally! But he’s stuck with his embarrassing mom, who goes around New York wearing a fanny pack.

By story’s end, Brendan will be transformed, just not in the way he expects. Haslett beautifully and memorably depicts the relationship between Brendan and his mom, strained but loving, with his mom understanding more than he realizes.

Here’s the story’s opening, which beautifully, and slightly comically, sets up Brendan’s longing and his relationship with his mother:

As they rose onto the bridge, Brendan leaned against the taxi window, gazing into the towers lit against the night sky, just as they are in the beginning of all the Miramax films, or the shots from the blimp when they show evening games at the U.S. Open—only now he could see the red-and-white streams of car lights rushing along the river's edge, beacons on the prows of ships jetting the waterway, a helicopter's taillights cruising down the glittering shore. His hand tightened on the wallet in his pocket, the $300 he'd saved from afternoon shifts at OfficeMax secured in the inner fold. This must be what it's like, he thought, for diplomats and stars—Roddick returning from another victory at Flushing, an actor weary from a foreign shoot, night travelers longing for the comfort of lovers and apartments back in the gilded city.

“I hope this man doesn’t get us lost,” his mother whispered across the back seat.

“Jesus, Mom. Like he’s never been to the Plaza.”

“What do you know about the Plaza Hotel?”

Since then, two of Haslett’s works, his story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel Imagine Me Gone, have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In his new novel, Mothers and Sons, Haslett offers another mother-son story, although the strain between mother and son is a lot deeper, more frayed and fraught, than in “City Visit.”

In Mothers and Sons, main character Peter Fischer, a gay immigration lawyer in his forties, is haunted by a secret he carries from his teen years. His mother, Ann, left behind her life as an Episcopal priest to build a women’s retreat center in Vermont. Their struggle to reconnect after years of estrangement unfolds as a closely observed character study.

I recently interviewed Haslett for BookPage, about this new novel, how being a lawyer has impacted his writing, and what it was like to write about the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic, and I’m sharing the interview again here.

Though Mothers and Sons is set in 2011, both Peter’s work—the often-hopeless work of trying to help asylum seekers—and his isolation feel very timely. How did you decide to write about that moment in time?

I think I needed, for my own reasons, to describe in fiction the social isolation that is so common now, and which so many of us respond to by burying ourselves in work. Of course, the causality runs in the other direction, too: Capitalism and precarity force people to overwork, which creates isolation. But either way, it’s a defining fact of contemporary life, which was true before the COVID-19 pandemic and has only been exacerbated by it. And then, if you look around the world, you can’t help but see that mass migration caused by war and climate and oppression, and the demagoguery that enshrouds it, is controlling our politics. Rather than trying to chase headlines, it seemed right to set the novel at a time when these forces were beginning to emerge.

You have a law degree and have done legal volunteer work with asylum seekers. Many novelists are former lawyers, turning to fiction later in their careers, but you went to law school after you’d begun writing fiction, and after earning an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. How did going to law school affect your outlook as a writer?

I got into law school and then ended up deferring to go to Iowa, so going to law school wasn’t as much a swerve as just me in my twenties trying to figure out how to put together a life where I could write as well as support myself. As for the effect of law school on my writing, for a long time I thought it hadn’t had any, that it was simply learning a foreign language. But over time I realized it did instill a kind of hypervigilance about accuracy. When you write a contract, you’re trying to write impregnable sentences, ones that no one can disagree about the meaning of. There’s value in that for a fiction writer—to be precise—but also a danger: You tighten up when what you really need to do is be open.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Ann, Peter’s mother, is a former Episcopal priest who let her pastoral work take over her life when her kids were younger, and who now runs a spiritual retreat in Vermont with her longtime partner, Clare. When did you know that Ann was going to be a main character?

I knew Ann would be central from the beginning, but for a long while I thought she could be described and encountered through Peter’s point of view. Yet, however hard I tried to make those scenes work, they just didn’t, because there was so much Peter couldn’t see about his mother that I wanted the reader to see. So eventually I just started writing scenes from her point of view, which was a huge relief, and ultimately a pleasure.

There’s a lot of cargo on the ship of good intentions, and not all of it is aid to the people in need.

This novel is in part about the stories we tell ourselves, the secrets we keep and how those narratives can keep us apart from others. Can you talk about those stories we tell ourselves, often about ourselves?

My interest in fiction has always been about getting at the interior lives of my characters, and so much of that interiority consists of barely conscious thoughts, judgments, desires, aversions, etc. that together add up, as you say, to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—for better, or all too frequently, for ill. No doubt, this “interest” was driven by my own need to make peace with some of the less than charitable stories I told myself about myself. In that, I’ve been immeasurably helped by meditation, something I’ve done a lot of over the last 25 years, which has become integral to my writing practice.

Both Peter and Ann are ministering to the world, in their own ways. But both have failed each other, and they’ve failed others. As a parent, I couldn’t help but think about the ways we fail our children even as we’re trying hard to help them. Can you talk about this paradox?

The more I wrote each of Peter’s and Ann’s scenes, the more I came to realize I was trying to get at what you might call the psychic economy of liberalism—the way helping others can so often involve a kind of condescension and distance, and also be a place for the person helping to avoid themselves. Which is just to say that there’s a lot of cargo on the ship of good intentions, and not all of it is aid to the people in need. That’s the paradox.

While Peter’s sections are written in first-person present tense, which seems suited to his stalled place in his life, Ann’s sections are in a different mode: third-person past tense. How did you arrive at these two styles for these two characters?

I’m usually suspicious of first-person present tense because it’s a straitjacket for the writer in terms of moving the narrative forward, but in this case it was the only tense and point of view that made sense for Peter. Precisely because he is so buried in his work, and in many ways doesn’t even realize that he is, he can’t see into the future, or much into the past either. He spends his days assembling other people’s narratives—his clients’—but is inattentive to his own. His mother, Ann, is in many ways the opposite. She prizes intimacy, fellowship and spiritual discernment, and so has the kind of settled quality that lends itself to the more knowing voice of third-person past tense.

Ann and Peter are the novel’s main mother and son. But there are others, as the title suggests, like the young Albanian immigrant Vasel and his mother. Can you talk about them?

Vasel is the client of Peter’s who features most prominently in the novel, and his mother’s actions and decisions are central to him getting to the U.S. in the first place. Like a lot of asylum seekers, he feels guilt about his mother still being caught in the situation he fled. Peter has another client, Sandra Moya, whose son Felipe is very anxious at the prospect of his mother being deported. Finally, there is Peter’s sister, Liz, whose son Charlie is just a toddler. To be honest, I didn’t realize just how many sets of mothers and sons I was writing about until about halfway through the novel, but once I saw the pattern that was apparently drawing me forward, I got to play with the patterning more consciously.

I’m a very slow writer. Ideas take a long time to germinate and develop. So mostly what I’m doing is allowing that process to unfold by reading widely, taking notes and paying attention to the world.

The novel’s scenes of Peter’s teen years in the late ’80s vividly evoke teenage uncertainty, and Peter’s anxiety and shame about his sexuality. How did you access the young Peter and that time period?

That’s simple! I lived it—not in the details of this particular plot, but in the sense of having been a teenager at that time, when the virulence of homophobia and the specter of AIDS were so deeply ingrained in American culture that it was next to impossible for a young person to experience desire without fear and loathing. In my first two books, You Are Not a Stranger Here and Union Atlantic, I wrote about some of this, but Mothers and Sons is the first time I’ve allowed myself to write about its long term sequela, as it were. Its effects on adult life.

You’ve written both short stories and novels. Are you continuing to write in both forms? What do you like and dislike about each?

I enjoy them both, and admire anyone who does either of them well. Of late—as in a couple of decades—I’ve been mostly drawn to novels because they let me explore characters and the worlds they inhabit at length. But I have missed the lyric concision short stories allow, and in writing Mothers and Sons, part of me was aiming for that tightness of construction, that close holding of the reader’s anticipatory attention, which made it harder to write but in the end more satisfying to complete.

Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

Alas, I’m a very slow writer. Ideas take a long time to germinate and develop. So mostly what I’m doing is allowing that process to unfold by reading widely, taking notes and paying attention to the world. Technology companies have quite deliberately addicted us to speed in nearly every aspect of our lives, so for me the first real task is to disenchant myself from that forced distraction regularly enough to sense my own intuitions.

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Now a question for you, readers! What books are you finding comfort in right now? I’m feeling weighed down by our current political situation, and the news is pretty despair-inducing. I’ve decided to compile a list of comfort reads. I’d love to know your suggestions—please share what books you’re finding comfort in right now. (To comment, click on the speech bubble below or above.)

I happen to be in the middle of just such a novel: Niall Williams’ latest novel Time of the Child. Escaping to Time of the Child’s small Irish town of Faha in the early 1960s is just what I need.

Thanks for reading! I’ll leave you with this view of Otto perched on one of his snow mountains in the driveway.