This spring, I read Harriet Clark’s novel, The Hill, about a girl named Suzanna who grows up visiting her mother in a prison on a hill. I had just published a long Mother’s Day essay in Esquire, grappling with having spent the past twenty-five years in prison, unable to show up for my mother as she grew old. It struck me that Harriet’s novel dealt with a kind of inverse of my situation, and I was surprised to see some of myself in Suzanna—her abandonment, shame, helplessness.
Suzanna’s mother was part of a revolutionary group, the getaway driver in a bank robbery, which left one guard dead, and she was sentenced to life in prison. Suzanna’s grandmother, who raises her, antagonizes the situation and tells Suzanna that her mother chose a political cause over her responsibilities as a mother.
The Hill is the kind of fiction that rhymes with real life. In 1981, Harriet Clark’s mother, Judith Clark, drove one of the getaway cars in the notorious Brinks armored truck heist. By the end of the doomed plot, a Brinks guard and two police offers were shot and killed. Judith wound up with 75 years to life. Harriet was eleven months old when the robbery went down, and, like Suzanna, grew up visiting her mother in prison. Harriet was raised by her grandmother, but unlike Suzanna, she was also raised and mentored by people in her mother’s collective. I served time with one of Judith’s codefendants and I know their ilk: kind, educated, idealistic, and always of service to the people around them.
Harriet went to Stanford, got an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, received a Stegner Fellowship in fiction. She taught creative writing at Stanford for twelve years, and edited fiction at The Paris Review. Harriet lives in New York with her wife and son. She likes helping people develop their projects, books and sometimes films, but she told me that The Hill was “the one story I had to tell.”
“I hope that one can feel the truth and necessity of personal responsibility in the book—the mother has contributed to loss of life, the mother has left her child,” she added, “but the greatest source of suffering in the book, the suffering that impacts the most people, is the prison.”
I called Harriet from Sing Sing, and exchanged emails with her through my publicist. Below is our conversation, about mothers, writing, abandonment, and prison.
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John J. Lennon: In The Hill, the narrator Suzanna’s mother takes part in a bank robbery, winds up with life in prison, and leaves her daughter without a mother, at least in the traditional sense. Suzanna visiting her mother in prison fills the space of abandonment. With your fiction, which rhymes with your own life, I wonder if it’s cathartic to create these alternative characters who experience these feelings and ideas and dialogues adjacent to your own.
Fiction exposes my unlived life, which feels just as intimate as my lived one.
Fiction, I imagine, offers a kind of literary immunity—that’s Suzanna, not me!—right? Not nonfiction. In a recent essay about my mom, I wrote this: “Oddly, I felt most loved by mom, felt closest to her, after I went away.” That essay helped me figure out how I felt about my mother. What did writing The Hill help you figure out?
Harriet Clark: Catharsis and immunity—I would enjoy both of these, I think, but I don’t know if the book provided either. In terms of immunity, my hope was that setting the book in an imagined realm would protect my family’s privacy and the privacy of the women at my mother’s prison, but the truth is that sharing what I’ve imagined feels as exposing as sharing what I’ve experienced. In life, I was never brought to the scene of my mother’s crime, but in fiction, I brought my narrator there. So fiction exposes my unlived life, which feels just as intimate as my lived one.
It’s harder for me to answer your question about catharsis. There’s a set of feelings the book allowed me to access—forced me, even, to return to, day after day, year after year. That I chose to work on a project that made me return to those feelings for twenty years suggests that something in me needed to feel those things. I’m referencing here not only the loneliness and bewilderment that run through the book, but also the feelings the actual writing brought up, which were: incompetence, helplessness, overwhelm, shame. I must have needed to keep wringing those out of me, but I don’t think I did wring them out. I’m not free or purged of those feelings now, but on a good day I feel more at peace with them; we’ve become longtime companions.
In your book, The Tragedy of True Crime, you write, in reference to a beating your mother gave you, “the first people who introduced us to fear and pain and violence were the ones who were supposed to love and protect and nurture us the most.” The portrait of your mother that comes through in “Happy Mother’s Day, from Prison,” is tender and harrowing and incredibly powerful; it feels very brave to me that you wrote it. I’m curious what your biggest concerns were when writing about your mother. Were there things you decided to take out or add as you went along? How did it feel after the piece was published?
There are also moments in the Esquire essay that were painful for me to read, like when your mother starts leaving you alone in the apartment at night when you’re only four or five. Reading that, I thought of young-you waking up alone in the night. And I thought of grown-you, returning to those nights in order to write the piece. It made me wonder about your writing routines—where you are when you write, what you do after writing an upsetting scene like that. To write inside prison means you can’t just take a walk or easily do something to lift your spirits after immersing in painful material. Reading the essay, I encountered a child who, like so many children, did not get all the care he needed and I wondered how that child, now grown, took care of himself while writing this.
JJL: Seeing the prison world through Suzanna’s little girl’s point of view gives a kind of fantastical quality to this brutal environment. She is a perfectly innocent protagonist narrator. The reader adores Suzanna. I know I did. Her wit, her toughness, her loyalty. She kept returning to the prison for visits with her mother “by choice, not by curse.”
“Happy Mother’s Day, from Prison” might be more complicated for readers because Mom and I aren’t that sympathetic, perhaps not in the typical sense. In terms of my concerns with writing about my mother, I’ll say this. All my life, people have always talked shit about her, telling me she wasn’t a good mother. And I know you can relate to that, too. That’s what made me want to write Mom’s story.
It was hard for me to hear what my mother endured as a little girl, the rejection from her mother, the sexual abuse. I interviewed my aunt who told me that my mom did sex work when I was one or two years old. I never knew that. When I told my brother, he wasn’t happy. “Why do you have to put that in there about mom?” He told me to take his name out of the piece, and so I just used an initial for him. But I knew I had to include this because it shows her struggle, and I think this allows for some grace from the reader when we learn how she later fails at motherhood, and I fail at being a decent son. I’d like to think my mother redeems herself because she stood by me when I went away, which provided the foundation for my comeback.
As for my routine, I’ve never been a writer on the outside. I thumb-tapped this response to you on my 6-inch tablet, lying flat on my back on the floor of my cell. None of the options are great; sitting on the overturned milk crate makes my back burn by midday and the hard concrete actually feels good when my body is sore. But to answer your question, after writing a tough scene like the one you mentioned, I stand up, stretch for a few minutes, and pace in my cell.
I’ve been told my writing causes the family of the man I murdered more suffering. When I think through how I feel about this, I’m all over the place: angry, defensive, prideful, ashamed. I think it’s fair to say we both write about tragedy, though neither you (nor Suzanna) have any direct culpability. You speak very delicately about the family members of the three officers killed in your mother’s case.
Selfishly, I wonder if you have any advice for me.
HC: I’m struck by your use of the word “innocent” to describe Suzanna and confess that I bristle at the word. It seems to me that innocence exists—as a word and an idea, as a class of people—in order to delineate and create the other class of people: the guilty. And do children actually feel innocent? I certainly didn’t. My grandfather died when I was eight and I know that I felt personally responsible for his death; I thought that my difficulties sleeping at night—I’ve always been afraid of the dark—had undermined his own sleep and somehow caused his heart attack. I think children often feel guilty and are often made to feel guilty by the people around them.
In early versions of my book it was very important to me that we understand Suzanna as someone with her own sense of guilt. There used to be a chapter in the book where a woman is run over in front of Suzanna and Suzanna is convinced that she’s to blame for the accident. (The chapter did not make clear if she was or wasn’t). In earlier versions of the book the mother was also “guiltier”: she had blood directly on her hands, not in the more indirect way a getaway driver does. My hope, in showing the dehumanizing conditions in prison, was not to suggest that anyone should be spared this because they’re innocent, but spared this because they’re a living being.
My feeling is that mothers, like prisoners, are a class of people we blame for sufferings—very real sufferings—that are often structural and social in origin. This is part of the power of your piece: the limitations of your mother’s mothering do come through, and yet we understand that she is parenting inside the profound constraints of poverty and misogyny and her own abandonments. We want mothers to provide a safe and happy life for children, but in practice, as a society, we make this nearly impossible. This is one of the reasons, I think, that it’s so painful when people talk shit about our mothers. I believe that children are aware, however vaguely, of the immense pressures our mothers are under, so when someone insults our mother, it’s a way of gaslighting us about how violence and difficulty are really working in our lives, and in the world.
I think children often feel guilty and are often made to feel guilty by the people around them.
In terms of personal responsibility, you raise the harm our writing can cause other people, especially the survivors of a crime. It’s hard for me to deliver my thoughts on that within the compressed public format of this exchange. But briefly: it is an inescapable truth of my life that the things we do affect other people. My preference is to treat this as an opportunity, not just a hindrance. Does the fact that other people exist constrain me? Yes, every day in myriad ways. Are there things I can’t—or more to the point, won’t—write or say because of how they might impact other people? Definitely. But this pushes me to discover what I can write and say that still feels meaningful and true to me. If I focus too much on the constraint, it can get in the way of my thinking through the dilemma more creatively and humanely. I don’t mean this at all glibly, but I do wonder how the reality of your survivors, your ability to fully register them as real and to adapt a caring and protective stance towards them—can enable your development as a writer, rather than inhibit it. How can their presence push you to write in ways you wouldn’t have otherwise?
I was very moved by the piece you wrote on this topic, “The Apology Letter,” and it made me think about the many thresholds we cross in the process of becoming more aware and alive and responsible people. Sometimes folks refer to my book as a “coming of age” story and I am always bewildered by this term. What age are we coming to? I have never well understood what distinguishes an adult from a child. The process you describe in “The Apology Letter” feels like one more form of growing up. Can I ask what “coming of age” means to you? When did you stop being a child? When did you start being an adult? Was there a stretch of time between the two?
JJL: How I see Suzanna or how other readers see her may be different than how you hoped to present her. It’s always difficult to let our work have a life of its own. Now that The Hill is out in the world, Suzanna belongs to the reader, right?
I appreciate that, with The Hill, you wanted to show that even the guilty should be spared the indignities of prison. But I wonder if that really was the takeaway for most readers. It’s tough to know what will stick for people. People always ask me how to fix our prison problem, but there are much smarter people than me—like your mother, Judith!—who are doing that work. I feel like I’m doing my best work when I’m offering an experience of prison, with narrative and first-person reporting, instead of prescribing solutions for problems in prison. And this is exactly what The Hill does so beautifully.
I hadn’t ever thought of the constraints I face as a writer—that my writing can cause more pain to the people I’ve already hurt—as something that could actually push me creatively. I have to sit with that. Maybe we can talk more about that sometime.
To answer your question, I don’t really know what “coming of age” means, either. It’s funny, as a child I was made to experience adult things, like the abandonment when my mother didn’t come home or her instructions not to answer a knock on the door from the feds. And yet, for much of my adulthood, I’ve behaved like a child. In prison, there’s a lot of immature behavior. We clique up, we make fun of the marginalized. It’s all peer pressure and groupthink, right? I think I started to become an adult when I started to see myself as something more than a murderer or a convict. Journalism helped me grow up. I suppose I’ve come of age in prison.
The Hill’s ending made me sad, but the real ending of your experience with prison is happier. In 2016, then Governor Andrew Cuomo commuted your mother Judith’s sentence, and she was later paroled. She has continued to be a mentor and hero to many people both inside and outside. As the Director of the Survivors Justice Project, she advocates for incarcerated people who are the victims of domestic violence. You must be so proud of her.
I get the sense that you are very protective of your life with your mother, but can I ask you to share one of your favorite memories together, in freedom?
HC: Contrary to my previous suggestion that I didn’t want to overplay Suzanna’s innocence, the truth is that focusing on what prison does to “innocent children” was indeed my agenda. The problem is that I lost faith in that agenda along the way. I began this version of the book in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s family separation policy at the border, when people seemed to care what happened to children, when it seemed—now this feels very naïve to me—that if people understood what prisons did to millions of innocent children then maybe that would ignite more outrage and resistance. But I finished the book amidst the genocide in Gaza, when it’s clear that everyone knows exactly what is happening to children there and it is not rousing the majority to stop the assault or protect the young. So my approach and agenda have come to feel much shakier to me. Maybe that’s part of why I bristled at the word “innocent.”
In terms of what we carry with us from prison, I’ve come to feel about prison the way I feel about childhood: that just because we bore it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t unbearable. So we carry with us both the ways we bore it and the truth that it was unbearable.
One of my favorite memories of my mother in freedom is from her first day out. Our extended family took a walk together—a big group of us wandering above Marcus Garvey Park—and my mother was beaming to everyone she passed. Not only because she was so happy but because she had spent the last 38 years in a place where she knew almost everyone; she was used to acknowledging each person she passed. (“No strangers in prison,” my mother used to tell me, though that’s because she was in a much smaller facility than the ones you’ve been in.) She kept smiling and saying hi to people and she also kept saying, “I just got out of prison!” She walked by a woman carrying a big bouquet of flowers and said, “What beautiful flowers. I just got out of forty years in prison!” And the woman, sort of shocked, handed the flowers right over to my mother. So for the rest of our walk my mother was carrying this beautiful bouquet.
