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The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it's never been clearer that writing matters'
Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: 'A stranger told me I was his mother.' The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. 'I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,' she tells me. 'I'm intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life … and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.' The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura's fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college student, Xavier, who claims he is her son. As the story unfolds, the truth of their entanglement becomes ever harder to discern – is he a liar or a fantasist, or is she mad? Audition deliberately sets itself apart from the recent spate of popular novels – such as Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch or Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor – that explore the viscerality and intensity of early motherhood. Kitamura wanted to write something that was 'temperature wise, on the opposite pole', a novel more concerned with maternal separation, the unavoidable and necessary estrangement that occurs as children grow up and away from their parents. Her fiction has always been interested in the moments when you look at a person you know well and they appear to you as a stranger, and it occurred to her that this happens often between parents and their children. Her own children, aged 12 and eight, are 'very surprising creatures', she says, and she marvels at how rapidly their relationship, and her experience of motherhood, changes as they change. When she speaks to friends whose grown-up children have moved back home, they tell her it's 'like living with a stranger'. 'You do not recognise large swathes of their personality and their way of being in the world,' she says. 'Talking with people, it doesn't seem like it's a reconstitution of the old family unit. It feels like a reorganisation of the family.' In Kitamura's books, the female protagonists are so reserved that they are often accused of being cold or arrogant, but she herself is disarmingly warm and unassuming. 'Is it OK if I get a cookie too?' she asks when we first meet, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. She is dressed elegantly, in a slouchy suit and big sunglasses, and she laughs a lot, generally at herself. At one point, she tells me that when a family friend said she was excited to read her book, Kitamura's daughter challenged her. 'She doesn't have a book coming out,' her daughter insisted, 'I've never seen her write!' 'And that,' Kitamura says, 'feels like a very accurate description of my life.' 'There's something very interesting about being a parent, because suddenly there is another person in the world who is telling you who you are to them. And that is, in a lot of ways, the most important identity that you have, but it is somehow othered. I know very much that the person my children think I am is not the person I always feel myself to be – that crack in being, or experience, is something I wanted to explore.' The actor in Audition struggles to piece together the different parts of herself, her overlapping roles, on stage and in real life, as an artist, a wife and possibly a mother. Kitamura can relate. 'Sometimes I feel like a teacher or a writer or a friend or a daughter or a wife or a mother, and there's something that does feel a bit incommensurate about those parts,' she says. She is married to the British novelist Hari Kunzru. Kunzru writes faster than her, she tells me, and he is better at sitting down to work after the children are in bed, or writing in 45-minute snatches during the day. Ah, I say, is that because of your role in the family: are you the one carrying the household's mental load? But it isn't. 'My friend said something like, 'Who does all the playdates and who books the appointments with the dentists?' – and Hari does all that,' she says, laughing. He also does all the cooking. Do they ever get jealous of one another, I ask, now openly stirring. No, she replies, because they write such different books: his are big and multistranded, hers are more compacted. Then she leans forward and says: 'What does happen is one of us will have an idea and we'll say to the other, 'That's something you should write'.' Her manner is confessional, as though this weren't the opposite of what jealous people would do. They are each other's first editors and always undertake a final read of one another's work before submission. On a day-to-day basis, Kitamura says, she appreciates her husband as the unloader of dishwasher and purchaser of laundry detergent, and then she'll read his new book and think: 'This is smart! You've had all this going on in your head as well!' In light of her family dynamic, it's interesting that her female characters in novels such as Intimacies and A Separation are often married to writers but themselves work as interpreters, translators or actors – mediums for other people's messages. Kitamura says she is uncomfortable with the idea of being a writer and sees her own role as closer to interpreting, to channelling other people's voices. The women she writes about are often passive in their professional and personal lives, which she believes is true to life. 'Who of us has that much agency? I mean, what kind of a fantasy world are we living in? We have the illusion of agency,' she says. 'I'm interested in passivity in part because it's the condition most of us live in. But I'm also interested in passivity because it is itself a kind of action.' She's fascinated by the point at which passivity becomes complicity. Her characters often find themselves in ethically unsustainable positions: working for institutions they disapprove of, for instance, or accepting an inheritance although it isn't rightfully theirs. We meet in late February, and it seems everyone I've passed today in New York has been discussing politics. Kitamura has not been sleeping well. She never sleeps well during a Trump presidency, she half jokes. She teaches on New York University's graduate creative writing programme and says that the day after the 2024 election her students asked her what the point was of fiction: did they not have an obligation to resist Trump more directly? She had struggled with that question herself in 2016, but the second Trump administration has been so extreme that she can now see with greater clarity the urgent importance of writing, art and education. This is, she says, 'in part because they are being targeted so fiercely, but also because [Trump and his allies] are trying to take away everything I love and care about. It's never been clearer to me that writing actually does matter. It's not a frivolous or useless task.' In an immediate way, she continues, writers are well placed to respond to Trump's attacks on language, the obfuscation and doublespeak, the moral panic over pronouns or the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. 'In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person's mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.' And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction's job is, as always, to remind people that there are 'other ways of being'. Before Kitamura wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a ballerina. She was raised in California, where her parents had moved from Japan for her father's job as a professor of engineering at the University of California. Throughout school, she left class at noon to dance, and she planned to go professional. But she got injured and says that was 'the nail in the coffin' because it was becoming clear that she wasn't quite good enough to make it. Having never thought she'd go to college, she won a place at Princeton University, where she studied English. Kitamura sees similarities between dance and writing. Both require discipline: 'It's doing the same thing over and over again, reworking and reworking.' It strikes me too that if ballerinas excel at masking the pain and physical effort required for their art, Kitamura's writing shows similar restraint and contrast, between the streamlined, exacting prose and its roiling undercurrents. In 1999, after Princeton, Kitamura moved to the UK to study for a PhD in literature at the London Consortium. She worked part time at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (where she met Kunzru) in the early 00s, and found London's art and cultural scene vibrant and exciting. 'People were taking incredible risks with their work, and that was interesting to see,' she recalls. In 2009, she published her first novel, The Longshot, about a mixed martial arts fighter preparing for his comeback match. She has retained a keen interest in performance, 'both the pressures and incredible freedom of it'. In Audition, the actor believes that 'a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience' and Kitamura believes the same to be true of books. She wanted Audition to be open to multiple, mutually exclusive interpretations, so that a reader could form their own conclusions. She's curious about what it may say about a reader that they settle for one reading over another, concluding ultimately that the 'son', Xavier, is a con artist, perhaps, or that the actor is a 'bad' mother. Audition forms a loose trilogy with her two preceding books, A Separation and Intimacies, novels that similarly have a keen eye for the sinister, for the subtle and yet threatening shifts in power between people, for the moments when closeness becomes dangerous or suffocating. 'We have such a tendency to think of intimacy as something desirable, something we seek out with other people,' she says, 'but it can also be an imposition.' In Audition, the narrator is almost pathologically attuned to the power renegotiations in the family. The person who is most desired holds the upper hand, the actor observes. Money also shapes how the characters relate to one another, sometimes in unexpected ways: at points, characters try to buy power, but their generosity only weakens them, exposing the extent of their need. Kitamura says she is both fascinated and horrified by the occasions when she has exerted power over her children. 'Those moments make me very uncomfortable. It's really simple things, like when you send them to their room or you lose your temper, or when they are little, you pick them up against their will. It's really a brutal exertion of power over another person, but it's also just parenting,' she says, revealing her ability to identify the disquieting elements in everyday interactions. At the same time, she observes, parenthood can make you feel powerless. She often feels powerless to protect her children from the world. She has already started on her next novel, which she says will be very different from her previous books. She checks herself: 'Well, it's not a maximalist … it's a difference that will be significant to me and nobody else.' She is itching to write, but there's the book tour, her teaching and, of course, family life. Like any working parent, the fact that she has so little time to herself, so little solitude, could make her unhappy, but she's come to accept that 'work comes from the mess of life', creativity doesn't come from a vacuum. 'I have to write from the middle of my life, that's all I can do,' she says. 'I'm not going to wait for a decade to pass until I have more time.' Audition by Katie Kitamura will be published by Fern on 17 April. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Raw Content by Naomi Booth review – those difficult newborn days
Nine months is not long enough to grow a physiologically robust human being. Newborns enter the world vulnerable in ways that might be avoided if the gestation period were longer. Scientists long held the belief that this foreshortening was due to an evolutionary trade-off between the brain size of the child and hip-width of the mother. More recently, research has suggested that the explanation lies in energy, not geometry. When the energy demands of a foetus reach roughly double those expended by a mother at rest, a threshold is passed and the upper limit of a pregnancy is reached. As a result, we humans meet our children ahead of time, their bodies assailable and exposed, ours exhausted and hypervigilant. Raw Content, the latest novel by author and academic Naomi Booth, exists in the psychological and social hinterlands of new motherhood; heart ablaze, nerves frayed, a mind willing itself to do the impossible, namely, to make the world safe. The book centres on Grace, a legal editor who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. She denies the impending reality of her situation until the last moment, before hastily setting up house and playing families with her boyfriend and her newborn baby. At which point, the stage is set; Grace, alternately brittle and open-hearted, is thrust into a new unreality of alien bodies, uncomfortable proximities, needs, flesh, insatiable hungers. What follows is a stylistically elegant, emotionally astute, but ultimately somewhat limited exploration of Grace's descent into postpartum psychological distress, most notably OCD. It's an important topic that Booth treats with due care and seriousness, but there remains a challenge in how to effectively render the associative, hypnogogic quality of a mind in the process of glitching and fixating, grappling with a love so intense that it begins to edge toward psychosis. Booth is excellent on the anatomical uncanniness of the newborn, the peril incumbent in a body so small and exposed: 'Skin so thin … tiny veins rising close to the surface … the soft spot on her head, pulsing.' Where the novel is less successful, however, is in its attempts to portray the existential otherworldliness of new life, the ways in which it seems to have emerged from an eternity of nonexistence, to remind us of our own fleeting finitude. In this regard, it is hard not to draw unfavourable comparison with Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor, a recent novel that more successfully captures the ways in which the quotidian and social demands of early motherhood can coexist with the preternatural. There are issues, too, with the framing devices Booth deploys. Grace's work as a legal editor requires her to skim read criminal cases without fully apprehending the gruesome details, while at the same time demarcating the content into discrete and comprehensible sections. As a metaphor for how we so often compartmentalise the combinatorially infinite and chaotic risks of being alive, it is both fair enough and also quite heavy-handed. Similarly, the evocation of Grace's Colne valley childhood, replete with ghosts of the Yorkshire Ripper and the traumatic child protection cases witnessed by her police officer father, are functionally evocative of the role social violence plays in shaping our individual psyches, but come across as fuzzy and ill-defined, the mechanisms of transmission undertheorised. Raw Content is most successful when it is most rooted. Booth observes the hundreds of small, repetitive actions that are required when caring for a newborn with admirable precision and wry detachment. There are moments of acerbic and witty insight. The novel is also rightly critical of the ways in which we have individualised and privatised the task of parenthood, building a social model that is increasingly atomised and isolated and then acting shocked when there is no mythical village left to help raise the child. Booth knows that too much is asked of too few, in spaces that are too small, and in lives that have too little headroom for care and community. She also raises the idea that in having a child, one often unwittingly jump-starts the process of 're-parenting' a version of one's younger self. This means that far from the healing, cathartic experience some new parents might imagine, what actually happens is that older, unmet needs and traumas can begin to reassert themselves. A complex and often life-altering experience, it is one of many that Raw Content touches on but stops short of truly exploring or presenting to the reader in new or striking ways. In this sense, it is emblematic of the book as a whole. It's a strong, well-written novel, but one that attempts to take on a clutch of the heaviest, most psychospiritually and socioculturally freighted things a human can experience. In doing so, it inevitably sacrifices the depth of its insights for the breadth of its gestures. Raw Content by Naomi Booth is published by Corsair (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Maternity Service by Emma Barnett review – a tour of duty in early motherhood
'It's a bloody weird experience, maternity leave, and it's OK to acknowledge that,' Emma Barnett writes in Maternity Service, her short, no-nonsense guide to surviving this curious – and relatively recent – phenomenon that can feel, in the thick of it, like a temporary exile from the outside world. For many new mothers, the abrupt severance from their professional lives and previous identities can leave them flailing in a strange and destabilising limbo where it seems almost taboo to voice any feelings of dislocation, in case these come across as a lack of maternal devotion. Barnett proposes that the whole business should be rebranded – rather than 'maternity leave', which suggests a nice relaxing break, it should be styled 'maternity service', with all the latter term's connotations of a military tour of duty. Words such as 'duty' and 'service' are unfashionable these days, she says, but it can help to reframe this strange, formless, sleep-deprived time as a finite period in which you are performing a series of tasks in the service of keeping your newborn alive. There are echoes here of Claire Kilroy's brutally honest novel of early motherhood, Soldier Sailor, in which the narrator is the soldier of the title; Barnett mentions that she and a new mother comrade still greet each oother as 'soldier'. This may sound rather a grim and brutal depiction of what is widely supposed to be a joyful time, but Barnett's mission is to separate maternity leave as an experience from the new mother's feelings about her baby. Even when the child is adored and longed-for (both Barnett's children were born after gruelling rounds of IVF), these early months can leave women feeling cut off from the wider world, their partner and their former selves, and her aim is to offer ways to navigate this rupture. By her own admission, she is not the first writer to attempt a warts-and-all rendition of the physical and psychological demands of this life-stage. Over the past decade or so, an increasing number of women have articulated, in fiction and memoir, the ambivalence, drudgery and isolation that attend new motherhood and were once considered unsayable. For this freedom to be candid, Barnett says, 'we owe a debt to those who initially transgressed and sometimes paid a price for it. First mention goes to the important writing of Rachel Cusk, starting with her searing A Life's Work.' If Barnett's book lacks the poetry of Cusk's 2001 memoir (my life raft during my own maternity leave, 23 years ago), it is written with a different purpose: less a literary and philosophical inquiry into the inequalities and conflicting emotions inherent in motherhood, and more of a practical how-to guide. Barnett explains that she is writing in real time, during her second tour of duty – thoughts jotted down in snatched moments between feeds or while her infant daughter naps. In an encouragingly breezy tone, she offers advice on how to adopt a practical uniform or build a semblance of a daily routine, as well as the importance of connecting with other 'sisters-in-arms' and being honest when you are struggling, to relieve one another of the pressure to look as if everything is under control. This frankness is also essential for future generations of mothers, she explains: 'And when they do ask us, the women who have gone before them, for an honest account of maternity leave and beyond, we struggle to explain it. We partly gloss over the truth out of loyalty to and love of our own beautiful babies.' There are, inevitably, limits to the applicability of these lessons. Barnett is careful to check her privilege at every step, but she is writing principally for women from a similar demographic to her own – middle-class professionals, who find their work stimulating (more so than wiping up poo, anyway) and who miss their autonomy and the previous sense of equality in their relationship. These caveats aside, Barnett is a sympathetic and cheerful companion, and in writing this book she has provided valuable dispatches from the front line, the better to enable a more honest transmission of hard-won wisdom to her own daughter and all the mothers yet to embark on this bloody weird journey. Maternity Service: A Love Letter to Mothers from the Front Line of Maternity Leave by Emma Barnett is published by Fig Tree (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
