Growing Up with a Mother in Prison
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Harriet Clark's novel called The Hill is one of the most anticipated works of fiction of this year and has won some extraordinary reviews, including by James Wood and The New Yorker. It's a story of a girl growing up
visiting her mother in prison, where the mother is serving a life sentence. And although The Hill is a work of fiction, it follows the contours of Harriet Clark's own life quite closely. One of the book's enthusiastic readers is Rachel Aviv, a staff writer at The New Yorker. When I was reading Harriet Clark's The Hill, I felt almost this kind of sickness that I remember feeling as a kid when I read a book where like being apart from the book, it was like a vacuum.
Like I just there was something about it that felt like I was doing the wrong thing if I was not reading the book. Um, and one of the things that I found so compelling was the way that she captured the internal life and clock of a child. There's that sense of of being a creature who can sense things but not comprehend. And the book really focuses on the relationship between a mother and daughter. One is inside of prison, one is outside of prison, and they're kind of trying to figure out who the other one is as they both age.
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