Recorded on Wednesday, June 25, 2025
TRANSCRIPT
Jim Sailer ’90 All right, we have a busy evening tonight and a wonderful evening tonight. You are in for a real treat. So, I'm going to get us started. I want to welcome you. It's so great to have you with us. Thank you for joining this SwatTalk. Our talk is entitled “Mothers and Sons: Family and Politics in Contemporary Fiction” with Adam Haslett, class of 92. This evening's talk is sponsored, as all SwatTalks are sponsored, by the Swarthmore Alumni Council. And the Alumni Council is the leadership for the Alumni Association of Swarthmore College. And if you're an alum of the college, you're a member automatically of the alumni association. My name is Jim Sailer and I'm the president of the alumni council and I'm also a member of the class of 1990. Before we get to Adam's talk tonight and I turn it over to our moderator for the evening, Professor Phil Weinstein, I want to go over a few preliminary pieces of business. For the first 35 or so minutes, Phil and Adam will be in conversation. Then for the rest of the time, up until 9 pm Eastern Adam will answer your questions. You can ask your questions by using the Q&A feature at the bottom of the Zoom window. And please be sure to include your name and class year when you do so. Phil will collect those questions and will pose as many of them as he can to Adam during the Q&A session. We record these sessions, just so everyone knows and put them on the college's website after a short processing time.
Now I have the honor of introducing our moderator and our speaker. I'll start with our moderator. At Sworthmore we have many beloved institutions; McGill walk, Clothier Tower, the Amphitheater. We have traditions like the McCabe Mile, Collection and so on. As much as any of these are important to those of us who attended Swarthmore, Professor Phil Weinstein is an institution at Swarthmore. Thanks to Phil's teachings, generations of students have fallen in love with Faulkner, Franzen, Patchet, and maybe even Proust, although I have some doubts about that one. A little bit about Phil. Phil came to Swarthmore from Harvard in 1971. He joined the English department, taught a range of courses over his time and a very famous seminar in modern comparative literature for many decades. He retired from Swarthmore and moved to Martha's Vineyard in 2015. During his 40 plus years at Swarthmore, Phil wrote half a dozen scholarly books, many of them focused on William Faulkner. His ‘Becoming Faulkner’ received the Hugh Holman Award as the best book on southern literature published in the year 2010. Five years later, he wrote a book on another Swarthmore alum, Jonathan Franzen, and his latest book about old age and entitled ‘Times Bounty’ will appear this November. You can already pre-order it on Amazon. Phil and Adam go way back to when Adam was a student and Phil has served as an influence on Adam having taught him, has collaborated with Adam in particular leading sessions and seminars on one of Adam's books and is finally a fan of Adam both as a remarkable person and as a brilliant fiction writer that Adam is.
So let me talk about Adam now. Adam graduated from Swarthmore in 1992 as an English major, having studied Modernism with Phil, Renaissance Literature with Mark Brightenberg, Philosophy with Rick Eldridge, among many others. He went on to attend the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Yale Law School and has since published four books, ‘Mothers and Sons’, which is the subject of tonight's talk, ‘Imagine Me Gone’, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the short story collection, ‘You Were Not a Stranger Here’, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and ‘Union Atlantic’, which won the Lambda Lit award. His books have been translated into 30 languages and he's been given the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Penn Malamud Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Adam currently directs the MFA program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn. And as you can tell, we don't have any slouches who give SwatTalks. So, now I turn it over to Phil and Adam. Have at it, gentlemen.
Phil Weinstein Thank you. It is such a delight for me to return in this unprecedented way to Swarthmore College where the best years of my life were passed. And it was at a time when reading and teaching literature was a very popular thing to do at Swarthmore College. And you always treasure your greatest students. You like all of them, but some are unforgettable. Adam was unforgettable. And I taught him in 92 and we had one ritual that I just want for a moment to mention because I've never had anything like that since. Jonathan Franzen had come back to the college and was teaching creative writing and he was teaching Adam. Mark Brightenberg was my colleague in teaching Adam Critical Theory and Mark was also a great gourmet. And Mark would make these dinners outside his house where Jonathan and I and Mark and Adam, the young one in the group, would come together and eat and drink and talk for hours and hours about literature, about writing, about what it is to write, about what it is to respond to writing. They were fantastic evenings, and I've missed them ever since they stopped. Okay. The last thing about Adam is this. He was so wonderful as a student that I dreamed he would get a doctorate in English and would come back to Swarthmore College and in fact would take over my Modern Conflict seminar. It never happened. And it's arguable that what he's done has been more impressive than that would have been. So he has been remarkable. You have just heard from Jim the list of accomplishments. What I want to do is turn it over to Adam now for him to sort of introduce in what ways he wants this newest book. Adam told me eight years ago that he had put his all into ‘Imagine Me Gone', which is a searingly personal and yet serenely detached novel, unforgettable if you've read it. And he said, "This is what it's been all about." So that gives me all the more pleasure to turn to him now because it was never just about that. This new one has come out. I think it's marvelous. There will be more. So Adam, tell us a little bit about ‘Mothers and Sons’.
Adam Haslett ’92 I will and thank you Jim for introducing us and I just have to say one amendation, or addition I should say, that in the collaborations that one of them was left out was that I wrote or compiled the index for ‘Becoming Faulkner’, so I have also worked with Phil on his work and I remember being honored to be asked to do that and didn't really understand how hard it was to actually write an index until we did that together. But much more importantly than that it is an honor for me to be here in conversation with Phil because as Jim said the experience that I and so many others had I wouldn't be here without it. So it's an honor to be talking about this book with you. So ‘Mothers and Sons’, very just roughly across the, you know, the sort of headline is about an immigration lawyer, he lives in New York City. He works on asylum cases at a small nonprofit representing people who are fleeing countries where they've been through a huge amount and seeking asylum here in the United States. And he is someone who's thrown himself into his work to the point of really not having a great deal of a life of his own and is I would say detached from his own sort of emotional self. He's a classic overworker. And he is estranged from his mother who is a retired Episcopal priest who's gone to Vermont to start a spiritual retreat center for women. She did that some time ago as the book opens. And one of the questions of the book is really why are they estranged? And so while it's mostly Peter's book, it really does go back and forth between those two characters, those two points of view, and we move in and out of their consciousnesses. And Peter becomes, his sort of bargain with himself becomes disrupted in a way by this one particular client, Vasil, an Albanian guy who's making a claim based on sexual orientation, which since 1996 you could do, make a claim for asylum based on sexual orientation. We'll see if that remains the case. But for now it's still true to the extent that anybody's allowed to make a claim. So I just thought I would read briefly from one section of Peter's part of the book and then Phil and I will talk. So I think given the hour and the time we have I'm just going to read a really just a brief section here. So he's just interviewed Vasil and he's taking a walk into lower Manhattan. “The rest of that afternoon, no matter how I try, I can't focus. I begin emails and forget who I'm writing. Reading a report, I lose my place again and again. At six o'clock, I give up and wander out to the subway. At the clearing of ground zero, flags sway from the tops of giant cranes. A half-built tower looming over the half-filled hole. I haven't been down here in ages”. This is set in 2011. “Not since I left the firm where I worked to pay off my school law school loans. 70 odd hours a week that job was sorting through tens of thousands of business records and drafting memos about their airless content. All to prepare for trials between corporations that everyone understood would never occur. Years long litigation aimed at the inevitable settlement that had rendered the whole work null. I think very little about that time. It is itself a kind of void. Late each evening, I would come down into the lobby of the skyscraper, move past the line of town cars waiting to ferry the partners up town, cross Zuccotti Park, and head south past the American Stock Exchange, down on Rector Street, and into the lobby of my own building, the old headquarters of US Steel, where I'd nod good night to the concierge and ride up to the cubicle of my studio, and without turning the lights on, go to the big window and gaze for a while down to the darkened graveyard of Trinity Church. It was in my second year at the firm that I met Tesfe Kadane, my first real client, an Eritrean journalist, mid-50s, live and finefeatured. He dressed in a black turtleneck and black leather jacket, looking every bit the Marxist intellectual that he was. At the beginning of each of our meetings, he would remove a hand rolled cigarette from his pouch and hold it between his index finger and middle finger as we spoke, as if our conversations were a mere interruption in a single action that would conclude with him stepping back out onto the sidewalk and striking a match. He spoke about his mistreatment by the Afwerki regime as though it were a crime of taste, as if his captors had more than anything made an aesthetic error. 20 years fighting in the war for independence from Ethiopia and instead of the humanist democracy they dreamed of in the field they got dictatorship. The first time I asked him to detail what had been done to him he smiled. Don't worry he said I understand. I am to be the victim in this particular morality play begging mercy from the great power. We have been Christians far longer than you. So yes the righteousness of suffering in the eyes of a merciful God. I understand. I will do my best to play my part. His sarcasm so courtly it hardly seemed directed at me at all or at anyone other than himself as a kind of quiet entertainment still available to the completely disenchanted. His case was the only thing I wanted to work on. Three more years it took to pay off my loans and with the help of a lot of other lawyers I met in the process to win Kadane the right to remain. On the sidewalk now in front of Century 21, a few late night tourists still mill around the vendors hawking 911 memorabilia. Models of the Twin Towers and T-shirts with images of Bin Laden's head centered on a rifle's sight. I look around from cart to cart. The vendors are beginning to pack up their wares, hitching their wagons to the backs of vans. This is what I am curious about, Tesfe Kadane said to me once, standing out on the sidewalk after lighting his jointlike little cigarette. Why do you, who has comfort and a job and a place to live, why do you do this work? What am I to you?” Thank you.
Phil Weinstein That is such a musing passage. I mean, it gives us the interiority of Peter as so many others do. And it's a moment though where he's reflecting on a crucial shift, isn't he, of what a question he hasn't asked or is only now fully emerged inside his mind, which is why do I do this? What is it about? I have a daughter who's a lawyer who makes a lot of money doing it. And that was sort of a premise from which this figure Peter has to move away. I was struck by the sophisticated awareness he's got about language. Peter himself and hearing this other figure understand exactly how he will be taken and read and used. So there's no sophomoric naivete here about what it will mean to argue these morally laden cases, they also come in narratives. I was wondering a couple of things; one is not limited to this passage, but it is - Peter speaks in the present tense again and again and again and no one else does narrate that way. Ann is in a past tense and as a she but Peter's an I in the present tense. Can you say something about that? This way this musing present tense mind works.
Adam Haslett ’92 Yes. Well, I mean, I think it to me one of Peter's qualities, as I said at the beginning, is that he's in a way dissociated from some core part of himself. And I think of the present tense, first person present tense as the kind of tense of dissociation. It is not a viewpoint from which you can move easily from a narrative point of view as a writer, you're kind of very constricted. You can't say and then six days later he went here or you know what I mean? You have to always be accounting for time in a way. And it's being stuck in a present moment is, I think, one of the characteristics of not being able to look at other things, right? You are in a frozen permanent present. And the thing that's bubbling under the surface in him is this past that is going to emerge over the course of the book. And so that tense and that choice to write it in that way was deliberate in that way. Ann on the other hand, is someone who is much more emotionally available to herself, is as a profession a pastor and then a kind of spiritual counselor. She is a kind of past tense sort of person like she looks at people's histories. She thinks about the emotional interchange. And Peter thinks about events and facts, but not the emotion that's connecting them.
Phil Weinstein I want you to say a little more, if you would, about your project of presenting this figure as caught, as you say, in a kind of ongoing present. And I say caught, but also sort of deliberately there. How do you work with your readers to let them know about this thing that's bubbling and how do you set that up? In what ways might that let's say the first sentence, the first piece of the book so different from this contribute to that? What part of Peter's gradual discovery?
Adam Haslett ’92 Yeah. Well, even before chapter one, I kind of prelude a brief section that you're referring to. It's a fragment that's in the language it's written in, it's clearly freighted. There's something of emotional weight that's occurred, but the reader isn't really let in on what it is. And in a sense what I wanted to do was to the extent I could reproduce in the reading of the book the experience of forgetting of having an intense experience and forgetting and the reader doesn't have the capacity to understand what it is in a way with remembering a sort of something traumatic. You have an image but not the narrative that weaves it into something. And so in a way, you almost have to forget that first passage as you read the book because there's nothing to hold on to. It disappears. At least my hope. And so then eventually as Peter meets Vasil and Vasil's own story about escaping Albania and the violence that he's threatened with by his own family, Peter begins to realize that he needs to tell Vasil's story like many of other clients almost as much as they do, right? He he's turned his own disattended past into other people's stories, the energy into telling other people's stories. And that's one of the things that fascinated me about immigration law is that it is like other helping professions, being a social worker or a priest or a therapist, you're dealing with some of people's most difficult experiences. But unlike those other things, it's in a system that requires you to kind of extract that information from people and deliver it to a court where it's a very, you know, different proposition.
Phil Weinstein You know, I'm struck as you speak about the centrality of the narrative act itself because in some ways Peter has to be a ventriloquist. He has to speak what they cannot speak. Vazel is actually articulate, pretty articulate, but you have other clients there who are not that Peter deals with who are not. And so that the value of the narrative act is so intense because if Peter fails to tell the story of these figures and that's what that first reading also was about that there's a story there and he knows how it's going to be taken and what categories it'll be placed into. The sophistication here is that narration is really an artful construct, it’s not the truth of a life. How do you feel about that? What feels to me like a tension on the one hand, it will be lifesaving or at least keep them out of prison or keep them from being sent back if the narrative works. And on the other hand, it can be an issue of omissions, logical insistences that might not otherwise be necessary, things that are skewed in such a way as to try and get the power, the judge to make the call when the figure himself can't make that case. So I was struck by how you chose, this is a form of law where you have to speak that other case in a way that the character who needs the help cannot.
Adam Haslett ’92 Yes. Well, I mean, and this is the, you know, to bring it to its obvious contemporary relevance, why the denial of counsel to people seeking asylum, I mean, the rates are just if you have counsel, your chances of getting asylum are exponentially larger than if you don't have counsel. And there are plenty of people who are thrust into court and have no lawyer, you know, not in New York City. There they get representation because of New York. But in most, you know, many parts of the country, there's no representation. and it's almost impossible, right? You know, months of research and country conditions and all the things that go into it. I mean, I think the thing that Peter realizes as he's doing this is that yes, as you say, for the system, he has to put the facts in a certain order which are factual. They're not lies in the context of the pleadings but there is a way in which a full life can't be represented, right? I mean it's a short form and it also needs to fulfill certain requirements of categories, you know, of reasons that you would qualify for asylum or not. So, I think that over the course of the book, he becomes more and more aware of the ways that, as with so many people in the helping professions, the help he gives is very mixed up with things that he doesn't recognize about himself.
Phil Weinstein Adam, I have to ask this too because reading your book today is such an uncanny moment. you wrote it without Trump two having begun yet, although you had Trump one in front of you. What do you think about that? In what ways does your book inform us more about this presidency? In what ways is that just a misleading present preoccupied in the story of your book?
Adam Haslett ’92 Well, I mean I obviously had to make a decision. I mean once I knew I was going to be writing about an immigration lawyer that was sort of the elephant in the room. I started the book in 2018. Do I set it after Trump or before? And I decided for two reasons to set it before. I mean, one is that you don't need Trump to write about a sort of cruel and difficult and broken immigration system, right? It's been with us far longer than Trump. Trump rose to power largely because of that, you know, the dysfunction in it. And I just sort of didn't want him to swallow the book. I mean, there's a sort of way in which to try to wrestle with that, you know. As an image and a force just didn't interest me. I mean there are enough words written about Donald Trump, I think. So in that sense I guess what I wanted to do and I did myself in doing the research for the book is sitting in immigration court years ago before I knew I was going to write this. I'd also done some intake work for the legal aid society at an immigration detention facility. But in a way I was doing the same thing that I've tried to do in ‘Union Atlantic’ with financiers is just to put readers in the circumstance of these situ you know these institutional work settings where these things are actually happening and I'm not advocating a position one or the other unless you happen to be human and empathetic in which case you may have a certain position, but I'm saying the job the the job of the novelist to put someone in another person's shoes and live a while, live a passage of experience in these you know the the title of the talk right Contemporary Fiction and Politics like we live political lives a lot of contemporary fiction can kind of hive politics off as like something that just isn't happening within the you know four corners of the of the book. But I'm such a political person myself, I want to put this stuff in there, but just kind of phenomenologically, you know, like live inside this issue for a while. So that's, you know, I mean, live inside these people's heads who are caught in a world where this is how life is defined.
Phil Weinstein Adam, I remember thinking many years ago that when you made the call to go to Yale Law School, you were saying no to a career in fiction. And then when you went to Iowa School of Fiction Writers, it was clear that you had turned that around and were saying yes to a career in fiction. That's how I saw it. You went one way and then you went the other way. But I wonder how would you, I mean I would love to hear what you have to say about how these two very different worlds, the world of writing fiction and the world of legal theory and legal reality where you were did develop a certain proficiency. How did they start to move on you? At what point or when did they start to seem that they could cohabit a universe and that you might actually use the one for the other?
Adam Haslett ’92 Yeah. Well, it really wasn't until this book. I mean, I actually went to Iowa first and then to law school and I think for a long time I used them as a kind of shell game. So that when writing was going poorly, I'm like, I'm not going to do this, I'm going to become a lawyer. And when law was boring me, I'm like, I'm not going to do this. But that shell game kind of ran out of its course at a certain point. But I had never written about a lawyer before and I wanted to. The language the law uses is itself. I'm actually right now on a grand jury. I got selected for the first time in my life to a grand jury. So I just yesterday was in a setting again where people's quite a violent felony act is suddenly brought down to the most prosaic kind of clinical and legalistic obviously legalistic language. So that conundrum of people's lives having to be put through this sort of linguistic siphon you know or kind of narrow you know like the bigness of life gets squeezed down into the tightness of legal language and people live in that every day. They traffic in that every day and but I want to know what is it what is the emotional cost of trafficking in that.
Phil Weinstein I wanted to bring up another topic which seems to me to run well, run through much of your work and it's so important here. And that would be sexual energy itself as a kind of a troublemaking reality. I mean in mythic terms it would be desire versus the law and that the law is what will constrain and normalize an energy that doesn't automatically move into constraint or normality. Could you just muse on that tension in your work and the role of sexual trouble in this book?
Adam Haslett ’92 Yeah, I mean it's pretty central. I mean, Peter, you know, as a gay man living in New York who came of age as I did in the 1990s, the cost of certain repressions at a young age, I think are part of what feed into the person that he became. And I think, you know, so part of the past that we've been talking about that bubbles up is, his beginning to remember with more texture, an obsession, crush, love that he had for one of his classmates in high school. And I think the thing that disturbs him most about it is the violence of the desire. I mean in the literal sense of the extremity, the kind of the unruliness as you're talking about, particularly strong obviously in adolescence where the super ego hasn't done all of its work yet. And so I think that is in the sort of normal, quote unquote ‘normal’ now perhaps more and more dated kind of marriage narrative that all gets that energy all gets housed at a certain point in a social form and then you get novels about having affairs and divorces and so on. With Peter, that energy is still in a sense caught in a place that he needs to revisit before it can move through him. And I think that's why he's been as dissociated from his desire as he was in the book.
Phil Weinstein Yes, I mean, we had this conversation earlier that there's a part of him that thinks of earlier violence in his life as a kind of murder that he's in the business of bringing justice to people and yet somewhere inside his mind is a sense that he has done awful things or an awful thing and he's made a life by not thinking further about that. I think one of the most artful things in your book is how you keep that percolating. Not so much in the form of that past moment as in an instability in Peter, a character who can forget his keys, who might lose his way, who will forget papers he must have in order to make an argument, who will faint. You show a kind of continuous low-level trouble in Peter and when so that when we learn more the grounding is there the seating has been has been has been laid for us. I guess I would like to maybe go to some questions now and see what and I have more questions if we run out of those but let's see what we have in the Q&A first.
Adam Haslett ’92 Sure.
Phil Weinstein So this is from Barry Skolnick. He says he would like to know, I think you've sort of answered that your detour to Yale Law and what impact it's had on your practice and on your writing. I think you've sort of answered that one unless you have more you want to say about it.
Adam Haslett ’92 No, no, I think that's fine.
Phil Weinstein And this one I don't understand, but you might. And if you don't, we will just go past it. Hi, Adam, please tell us a short version of your accordion story.
Adam Haslett ’92 [Laughs] Well, the accordion is in the back of my image. So, they're referring to this [points to accordion]. The short version of my accordion story is that it is not mine, but rather my partner Dan who is a composer and in fact I'm sitting at a piano, which is also not mine and I can play neither instrument so that question is easily dispatched.
Phil Weinstein [Laughs] That's good. Adam let me ask you a question or two about others in the book, you told me once when you were trying to make the transition from short story writer, which you have enormous mastery over to novel, that one of the things you needed to do was to be able to make a second voice live with equal resonance in the book. And so I wanted to ask you about and I think you've demonstrated that here with Ann as the counterpoint contrapuntal voice in this book. Although again it strikes me as resonant that Ann's narrative is not first personal present tense narrative, it's gathered thinking. Which I think is also, a sort of, can be a kind of fortress. It can be a protective arena where you've gathered yourself and you have the past to draw on. Poor Peter is falling into the present as he moves and that stumbling is the drama. But what would you say about the ways in which despite this linguistic protectedness of a past tense voice and a figure who's figured out so much 0 desire gives her trouble too. There’s a remarkable moment later where she tells a secondary character but a lovely woman and a very different woman from her that she loves her and it’s out. Yes. The other woman says, "Well, what the fuck do you want me to do with that?" Say more about Ann.
Adam Haslett ’92 Yeah. I mean, she's a meditator. If I had read a passage from her, I would have read the first passage where she meditates. And she's someone who probably I wouldn't say married in error, but married before she knew her own actual desires. And so she doesn't regret it because she has two kids, but she is someone who, like Peter in a parallel sense, is helping others and she has much less of a blind spot than Peter. And as much as she's thinking constantly about the emotional interchange between people and their spiritual lives, nonetheless, her own role in why the two of them are strange, she and her son, she's just more or less glossed over. She basically ascribes to Peter the reasons for their having such distance. And it's Peter having to confront her that really changes that dynamic by the end of the book. It takes Peter coming back to kind of put it to her that she's forgetting a fair bit herself despite being someone who's in the business of helping people remember in a lot of ways.
Phil Weinstein That has a nice echo with Peter who's in a certain business that allows him not to know certain things about himself. You know the opening passage, that violent passage which is then forgotten by the reader is a kind of statue of not responding and Peter is frantically trying to get her to respond to this crisis he is in. I wondered, I mean it made me think that to some extent this is a mother who has abandoned this or who is too frightened by the possibilities in her child to acknowledge it. She will be the one who will protect him that way.
Adam Haslett ’92 Well, that that actually ties in with something you were saying earlier because I think you know, as much as there are some particularities in the sexual energy, Peter being a gay man, it's also really just male sexuality, the thing that I was interested in in the sometimes what I think of as a certain violence in male sexuality and desire and that that is the thing that in a way when his mother both when he's younger and she come he comes to her saying I've you know done this terrible thing with my friend and then later she's just in a sense doesn't want to really deal with that extremity of desire and part of that's also again her because she has a desire that's for another woman. And this is the 1980s and she's living in the suburbs and you know that itself is a kind of push outside of a norm. So I think this it's a book about people who are in some ways avoiding themselves by helping other people and what the longer term costs of that are.
Phil Weinstein You know, the role of the mother, as I recall it in ‘Imagine Me Gone’, is a heterosexual mother rather than lesbian. And did you think a lot about what it would mean to have her make that turn? What did it say also about her earlier commitment to the marriage? Because you don't spend a lot of time with her discovery. We meet Ann as already having made that move. It's only through backtracking that we get a failing marriage.
Adam Haslett ’92 Yes. I think to me, and there's a line later in the book where Peter sort of confronting Ann where Ann says “You've got to understand I was more than just a mother”, right? Like I am more than solely a mother and part of that was owning her own desire, which for a variety of reasons historical and otherwise she didn't have access to or couldn't actualize when she was, you know, a younger woman. So I think it does crystallize maybe in a sense what you're saying that maybe Peter thinks she's been abandoned because the feeling is well if you left this, you know, if you left our father, if you broke up to be with someone else, then you've left us. And she's sort of insisting on the idea that I can be your mother and yet be other things.
Should we revisit the Q&A? I feel like maybe we're shutting out the
Phil Weinstein Well, I'm looking. Oh, I've got some [pause]. This is a question about the element of forgetting in your book living with truths that are only later come to consciousness reminds Ames Kim of nachträglichkeit of this urban concept of later discovering what was going on earlier, realizing it only afterwards. Would you like to speak about the role of this after discovery?
Adam Haslett ’92 Yeah. Well, I think it's a kind of belatedness in life itself, you know what I mean? It's as though you can live a belated life because certain things have not happened or not been acknowledged along the time, you know, of a sort of quote unquote standard or normal maturation. And I think one of the ways that that happens is that you have strong images from the past, but they're not associated with each other. They're like islands that come in and out of the fog. And a lot of the sections in the book are written short sections of Peter's that are really like little islands, little like a discrete memory of his mother reading books or his mother giving sermons or you know later things with the friend that he has the crush on. And it really isn't… the pattern of the book is in a way these islands becoming more and more associated with each other. And you and I talked about that a bit when we spoke about the book before, that it's a little bit of a puzzle in the literal sense of not all these pieces seem to go together until you read all the way through hopefully that they kind of bounce off each other. And that's my desire to put the reader in the place of consciousness. I mean this is something I learned from you in reading all the you know the modernist that we read that the the centrality of syntax and diction and to affect right I mean that that that affect gets into the music of the pros and you're not just learning about something by a factual statement or by a simple plot statement but you're learning about it via the rhythm of the prose it's being written in. So that's always been my high watermark I got in your class to which I've always aspired, but that's why I think so much about rhythm in language to try to... in different books different rhythms, right? I mean in ‘Imagine Me Gone’ the older brother is a very anxious guy and his sections are written in a kind of manic anxious rhythm so that's you know that's something I'm always trying to do.
Phil Weinstein You know I was thinking you've had these two careers: the legal career, the writing career. Some of the things you're talking about now indicate a kind of writerly version of a psychoanalytic career where nachträglichkeit is the name of the game that the thing has happened. It's not going to happen, it has happened. It's shaping you everywhere, but that's what you won't know about yourself. And this book is really feline in the way it moves around that so that the reader's conscious that there's more I'm going to have to find out about what has already happened.
Adam Haslett ’92 Well, that is in a sense one of my other, I will admit in public, one of my other sort of careers as it were, which is having been in analysis for a long time and then actually crossing over the line and training for a year at a psychoanalytic institute. For a variety of reasons I found it intolerable to do that training but the ideas you're talking about yes, very very central.
Phil Weinstein Well it's also part of what I called earlier the musing quality of this book. I mean this is not a book for every reader you need to be a thinking person that's the beauty of this because it's in the the the texture of and the possible duplicity of thinking itself there where the mystery lies and there are things to discover that will have occurred as I say you pass that on to your reader but it's a very inward book in that respect of powerful things/violent things. You talk about the wild heart, violent things happen when you desire violent things to happen, but they are also concealed, they lie out of sight and they percolate up. Maybe for me most powerfully in Peter's offbalance. Here's another question that Bill Garin asks and I would have asked it myself, but he's got it. Says he's intrigued by Liz's character, especially the contrast of her colorful personality and aliveness to that of Peter, who's I think more cautious. Could you comment on your development of her in the broader context of the novel? And I will add to that, this - there is a considerable amount of angry energy in that character. She is full of anger, almost rage it seems to me. And tell us about what you were doing with her and what roles she's playing in the book.
Adam Haslett ’92 Yes. So this is Peter's older sister Liz. And, she I mean I guess I get this from, I mean she's not based on my sister, it's actually more based on my best friend's sister to be honest. But the part that is from my family I would say is that I just always grew up with a certain amount of humor, aggression done in humor like or rather like jousting, you know, verbal jousting between family members, siblings kind of rivalry done with humor and so she is that kind of somewhat jabbing mocking older sibling who can get under the serious Peter's skin right away by just saying well, you know, “What are you talking about? You're crazy. You sound like a mad person”, you know, “Come and see your mother. What's the problem?”. Whereas he's got some whole elaborate, you know, thing about it and she's just like this is ridiculous. So I mean it's always any writer will tell you it's always helpful to have comic relief, you know, especially in a book where there's a lot of kind of seriousness. Having someone walk on stage who cracks a joke is a good thing to have. And so I think of her on the one hand as comic relief, but also as the carrier of a different memory in the book, which is the family history, not local nuclear family history, but kind of ancestral history, because she's looking into all the the the number of soldiers and kind of people in the military that were in the family past on the mother's side, sort of old colonial people. And she wants to sort of bring up the violence in that history and the mother's like I don't give a darn about it. You know what I mean? It doesn't have anything to do with me. And she's sort of wanting to point out that maybe it does have something to do with how we've lived our lives more broadly. So, yeah, I had fun writing her scenes because she undoes people's pretensions, which is also to say she undid some of mine, right? I mean, in a way, because I'm invested in these pretensions that I'm playing out.
Phil Weinstein She also says one of the remarkable things or you have I think you have Peter recognized something remarkable about her which is that late in the book that her aggression toward him and toward the mother are both signs of someone who has not gotten adequate attention and love from either of them. Is in some way still demanding to be let inside the door and a lot of fuss to get there. That strikes me as… there was sadness to her. At the same time, there's a comic dismissal in a way of her family life. I mean, the child who does nothing but shit, the husband whose name is Norman and she calls Nore-person instead of Norman. Is there something to say about why they are sort of kept at this distance?
Adam Haslett ’92 I mean, I just think it's like a change of tone. The book needed different, like a piece of music it needs different modes in order to move through. And so she is both more satirized but also more satirizing, you know, and that's not an energy that either Ann or Peter bring.
Phil Weinstein Here's another question from Julian Levinson. This is to hear a little more about the role of faith in the book given the mother's career. Does Peter have faith in the law? How does his mother's religious life live in and for him?
Adam Haslett ’92 That's a very good question, Julian. I'm not surprised. I mean I will say that it was central to me because I gave Ann in a sense the meditation because I myself am effectively at this point a Buddhist and have been meditating for 25 years and that experience of the ability to settle and ground oneself in a way is something that I take seriously and that in Ann's practice of is important to what she's able to do in the world. And there is a lot she she sort of thinks on what the continuities are between that and having been an Episcopal priest and what the discontinuities are what the ways in which the restrictions of the Christian narratives onto a broader, to a broader kind of spiritual narrative that or spiritual life that she has sought and now kind of cultivates with this center. I don't know that Peter believes in the law. I don't know that he's able to actually conceive of it as religion, because in a sense he's so caught up in this story lines that it's just become a means. And I think in some ways he feels one of the reasons he feels estranged from his mother is because he sees her and understands her to have access to a spiritual life that he doesn't. And that's in its own focus that she has this other life that's not him. It was God, it now maybe it is something more diffuse. But it's as important as children. And of course to a child nothing should be as important to a parent as the child, right? So it's a it's a competitor in a way to his role in her life.
Phil Weinstein As you talk about this, that strikes me as one of the ambitions of this book which is to articulate the need for space between people where things are not shared. It's not the need for the inevitability of it and that that that's okay too, but that there will be… Peter and Liz are never going to be on the same page and that doesn't mean this is a dysfunctional family. It's that these oppositions remain and that Ann had to go on a trip, her children didn't want. I think it seems to me significant that Peter has not yet made a trip to that communal space that she founded that's crucial to her present identity and therefore it's charged when he does finally go there. But he has not wanted to make that trip. Here's a very different kind of question and a simpler one probably but maybe not. The writer of this Kate Stanton read the piece I read too about celebrating Edmund White and reading your piece about Edmund White and the question was would you share more about the influence of Edmund White's work on yours?
Adam Haslett ’92 Sure. So it was very early when I was a teenager and then early 20s I would say it was substantial for two reasons; one probably his best known book ‘A Boy's Own Story’ which was a seminal coming of age story about a gay teenager in the Midwest and I mean now it would probably seem not explicit at all but at the time explicitness of the of the sexuality in that book was a kind of permission as I think I said in my piece to understand the literary, you know, there's plenty of and I read it and we talked about it I'm sure when I was at Swarthmore, there's there's plenty of homoerotic desire threaded in all sorts of literature but that doesn't speak its name right so but this was like oh wait you can still be doing literature and it can state itself, you know, and so that was one thing but the other was that two of his early books ‘Forgetting Elena’ and ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’ were very impressionistic, very different from the rest of his work and more I would say I guess modernist elusive. And just that very range the fact that he was doing both of those things ‘A Boy's Own Story’ is quite realist kind of novel, but the other things were, they were using beauty and almost you know in a kind of peterish kind of way like you know a lot of filigree and sentences that were beautiful for their own sake. And so somehow between those two things, there was a range there that I found was formative. This is all before I met him, but before we became friends.
Phil Weinstein All right, listen Adam, we have run out of time though not out of things to say. It has been a great pleasure for me to be with you in this and I hope it has worked for other people too. Thank you all and we'll continue on our ways.
Adam Haslett ’92 Thank you. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you all.
