Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

Ron Chernow had already written multiple award-winning biographies of figures like George Washington and J.P. Morgan when he decided to take up the life of the Founding Father least understood today. One bestselling book and one world-famous musical adaptation by Lin-Manuel Miranda later, the subject of his biography Alexander Hamilton has been reborn as the fascinating, dynamic figure whose career inspires schoolchildren and captivates millions. What historian could be prouder? But rather than sit on his Broadway laurels, the author has returned with an epic-scale life of another American whose misunderstood genius transformed his country. This week on the podcast, Ron Chernow talks with Bill Tipper about his sweeping new book, Grant (and — yes — about Hamilton, too).

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Ulysses S. Grant’s life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don’t come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing. His business ventures had ended dismally, and despite distinguished service in the Mexican War he ended up resigning from the army in disgrace amid recurring accusations of drunkenness. But in war, Grant began to realize his remarkable potential, soaring through the ranks of the Union army, prevailing at the battle of Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign, and ultimately defeating the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Along the way, Grant endeared himself to President Lincoln and became his most trusted general and the strategic genius of the war effort. Grant’s military fame translated into a two-term presidency, but one plagued by corruption scandals involving his closest staff members.

More important, he sought freedom and justice for black Americans, working to crush the Ku Klux Klan and earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass, who called him “the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race.” After his presidency, he was again brought low by a dashing young swindler on Wall Street, only to resuscitate his image by working with Mark Twain to publish his memoirs, which are recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.

With lucidity, breadth, and meticulousness, Chernow finds the threads that bind these disparate stories together, shedding new light on the man whom Walt Whitman described as “nothing heroic… and yet the greatest hero.” Chernow’s probing portrait of Grant’s lifelong struggle with alcoholism transforms our understanding of the man at the deepest level. This is America’s greatest biographer, bringing movingly to life one of our finest but most underappreciated presidents. The definitive biography, Grant is a grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of all sides of Grant’s life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary.

Click here to see all books by Ron Chernow.

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Photo of Ron Chernow (c) Sigrid Estrada.

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Editor’s note:  On the occasion of this year’s Man Booker Prize for fiction going to George Saunders for Lincoln in the Bardo, we’re highlighting Liesl Schillinger’s review, first published here on February 13, 2017.

In his new book Lincoln in the Bardo—his first novel—the tricksy, unsettling, masterly short story writer George Saunders has taken a family tragedy—the death of an American President’s child—and set it at the center of a national tragedy: the Civil War. Around this dark double-hub he affixes a flutter of other characters from the period, more than a hundred of them, who (in a typically ingenious Saunders invention) are no longer living, but do not know it. Stubbornly clinging to “memories, complaints, desires,” and “raw life-force” they refuse to advance to whatever post-mortal realm may exist to receive more biddable natures. Homer or Dante might have called such unquiet souls “shades;” and in Tibetan Buddhism, the notional realm they inhabit, between this world and the next, is known as the “bardo,” hence the title.

For the purposes of Saunders’s novel, though, the “bardo” is the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, where the arrival of the President’s embalmed son stirs the resident shades to commotion. His presence in their midst animates them, motivates them, and sets them awhirl. Vibrant and multi-voiced, they fling shards of color like the leaves of a pinwheel in a gale. Rarely has a novel about the dead felt so thrillingly, achingly, alive.

The President in question, of course, is Abraham Lincoln; and the boy entombed at Oak Hill was his favorite child, Willie, the third of his four sons. Today, father and son occupy such a hallowed and familiar position in American history that it can be difficult to think of them as ever having been flesh and blood. If you visit the comfortable but unshowy house in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln and his wife and sons lived until 1861 (when they moved to the White House), you feel yourself in a gallery of sepia-tone portraits, not a place where a human family jostled, worked and played—even as you climb the creaking staircase they climbed, and peer into the playroom on the second floor, where the boys’ antique toys spill across the carpet. Saunders takes the portraits off the walls and sets them walking.

His novel begins in the brutal month of February of 1862; eleven months after the Lincolns moved to Washington D.C., ten months after the outbreak of the Civil War. As thousands of soldiers lay slain or maimed in the battle of Fort Donelsen, their bodies “heaped and piled like threshed wheat, one on top of two on top of three,” little Willie Lincoln was dying, probably from typhus, in his White House bedroom. On February 20, he succumbed to his disease, aged eleven. Lincoln needed all his strength and focus to hold the country together, but the shock of his son’s death unmoored him. “I never saw a man so bowed down with grief,” wrote one observer. Newspapers of the day reported that the President’s agony was so overwhelming that he returned to the crypt where the child was entombed, brought out his son’s body, and held it in his arms, unable to bear his loss. Meanwhile, the author writes, summoning the voice of an old-time chronicler, “The nation held its breath, hopeful the President could competently reassume the wheel of the ship of state.”

Saunders (who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago) first heard of Lincoln’s cemetery visitation during the Clinton administration, on a visit to Washington. In an interview printed in the novel’s end pages, he recalls, “As soon as I heard that, this image sprung to mind: a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Pietà.” This vision, in which a grieving Lincoln took the role of the Virgin Mary in Michelangelo’s statue, gestated in Saunders for nearly a quarter century, he explains: “I just wanted to get on paper something that would evoke the feeling of pathos and beauty I’d get every time I imagined that night in 1862.”

To do so, he has devised a richly hybrid work that defies easy categorization. Chapters of whirligigging dialogue between the cemetery denizens are interleaved with chapters holding excerpts from news accounts, biographies, memoirs, and diaries of the era (many actual, many invented), which ballast the fantasy with the gravitas of real occurrence. One example: while Willie was burning with fever from the sickness that would kill him, the President and Mrs. Lincoln threw a sumptuous (late) New Year’s fête in the White House, attended by hundreds of foreign and national dignitaries. As guests danced and made merry under chandeliers garlanded with flowers, stuffing themselves on pheasant, venison, and oysters, and plucking sweetmeats from elaborate dioramas made of sugar , the boy suffered in his bedroom. His parents slipped away continually to stand vigil at his bedside. Partisan scandalmongers denounced the party, before and after, as decadent and frivolous– “a piggish and excessive display, in a time of war, ” as one fictional commenter puts it; and after the child’s death, mean-spirited detractors accused the Lincolns of “heartlessness” for entertaining while their child was ill, tacitly blaming them for his demise. But those close to the family were “awe-struck” by the violence of Lincoln’s heartbreak. “Great sobs choked his utterance,” a seamstress remembered. “He buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion.”

In Saunders’ fervid, electric imagination, Lincoln’s grief-stricken visit to Willie in the crypt causes profound agitation —and jealousy—among the unruly bardo dwellers, who have received no such calls themselves. Hamming and pouting, bickering and boasting like actors on the stage (their words appear in the book like the script of a play, each speaker listed after his line) they attempt to assess the import of this invasion of their liminal precincts. One of the main players, an ungainly middle-aged printer named Hans Vollman (whose head was squashed by a falling beam when he was on the brink of consummating his marriage), muses, “No one had ever come here to hold one of us, while speaking so tenderly.” Another, Vollman’s friend Roger Bevins III— a closeted teenager who longs to be “revived” so he can “wander the earth, imbibing, smelling, sampling, loving whomever I please” wonders: “How had it felt, being held like that?” More pressingly, Bevins wants to know, had the visitor “offered any hope for the alteration of the boy’s fundamental circumstance?” —that circumstance being death, a state the self-deluding shades shy away from mentioning by name. If so, Bevins asks, “might said hope extend to us as well?” Willie is bewildered by the excitement he provokes in the spectral entourage. “So many were still waiting,” he marvels, “A shifting mass of gray and black….People in the moonlight outside pushing and shouting, standing on tip-toe to see….Me.” And above all, looming over the turbulent shadows, is the living form of the boy’s father, who cannot keep away, either.

A philosophical principle runs throughout Saunders’ novel that keeps the engine of his story spinning. That principle is that even the most private tragedy plays an integral part in the natural order. The shades in the bardo have stalled that natural order by dwelling with fixed intensity on their “primary reason for staying” in the world they had physically departed. But when Willie’s “primary reason for staying” — i.e., his father — walks into Oak Hill, Vollman and Bevins and some of their disembodied cohort are stricken by something like conscience. They don’t want the child to get stuck in their macabre stasis. Lincoln’s grief, like a turning gear, catches in its cogs the individual passions and grievances of the querulous shades, carrying them forward along with him. They are moved to empathy by his magnanimity. Peace cannot be restored in the bardo — or in the White House, or the nation, it would appear — until the finality of the boy’s death can be admitted by the President, by the boy himself, and by the shades as well. Saunders enlists his imaginary dead to rescue the living, and thereby, themselves. Attempting to speed this catharsis, Vollman and Bevins share space in Lincoln’s head. “One must try to remember that all were suffering,” Vollman thinks, channeling Lincoln’s thoughts. “His current state of sorrow was not uniquely his.” Lincoln (as Vollman) also believes Willie would want him to keep prosecuting the Civil War. “Our Willie would not wish us hobbled in that attempt by a vain and useless grief,” he thinks.

A little more than three years after these nighttime adventures, in May of 1865, the Union won the Civil War, and Willie’s presumed wish was achieved. In March of that year, in his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln had adjured the nation to “strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Having bound up his own wounds first, he knew the sacrifice this entailed. But the following month, before he could finish the work he envisioned, on the eve of peace, Lincoln was assassinated. And yet, as Lincoln in the Bardo hauntingly, movingly suggests, his death did not mean his influence had vanished; to know the full record of any life is to know that it never ends.

If you visit Springfield, Illinois today, not the Lincoln house, but the Oak Ridge Cemetery there, you will find the President’s family reunited in Lincoln’s Tomb, except for the oldest son, Robert, who survived his parents and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. A larger-than-life bronze head of Lincoln stands at the entrance; children are told to rub the nose for luck. The nose gleams from the pressure of so many hands, stretching to touch history’s patina in the living day. As superstitiously as the gaggle in the bardo, the visitors hope, through this symbolic contact, to carry away a micron-dusting of the man who could not save his son, or himself, but saved the nation; and who remains as awe-inspiring in death as in life.

 

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The novelist Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967, which means that she grew up in a country that no longer exists. The shock of the disappearance of the German Democratic Republic, with all its socialist ideals and secret police realities, has left her with an acute sense of the contingency of history. In her book The End of Days, which appeared in the U.S. in 2014, Erpenbeck wrote about the German twentieth century by telling the story of a single life that could have ended in various ways, at various moments. The main character is seen to die first as a baby, then as a teenager, and so on, with each potential death sending the lives of those around her careening down very different paths.

In Go, Went, Gone, her new novel, Erpenbeck is once again obsessed by the moral significance of chance in human lives. This time, however, her subject could not be more contemporary: she is writing about immigration, the mass movement of peoples from the global South to the North, which over the last several years has transformed the politics of Europe and America. Fiction has not been slow to catch up with this phenomenon: earlier this year, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West offered a fable about immigration, imagining a world in which refugees from the Middle East could walk through magic doors and appear in London or San Francisco.

Erpenbeck takes a more conventionally realistic approach to the subject. indeed, Go, Went, Gone is a very earnest book, its every page designed to force the reader — in the first instance, the German reader — to confront the human realities behind today’s refugee crisis. Our proxy is the novel’s lightly drawn protagonist, Richard, a widowed professor who has just been forced into retirement; when we first meet him, he is resentfully cleaning out his university office. Isolated and needed by nobody, Richard finds a source of interest, and then of meaning, in his interactions with a group of African refugees living in Berlin. Over the course of the book, he meets several of these men and forges an uneasy friendship with them, hearing the stories of how they came to Germany and learning about the unforgiving political and bureaucratic forces that keep them always on the move.

Africans represent only a small fraction of current immigrants to Germany. Of the million people who came seeking asylum in 2015−16, the majority were from war-torn Syria and Iraq. By choosing to focus on the relatively small number of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa — including Niger, Nigeria, and Ghana — Erpenbeck is able to sidestep the largest political, cultural, and economic questions raised by mass migration. There is no prospect of these particular refugees transforming German society, demographically or in any other way. This enables Erpenbeck to frame the German response to immigration as a purely individual and moral question — really, as a matter of hospitality rather than politics. Richard’s awakening to the duty of compassion is presented, somewhat didactically, as a model for the reader, and for Europe as a whole.

This awakening begins when Richard sees a TV report about ten Africans who have launched a hunger strike at a refugee encampment in Alexanderplatz, a large square in central Berlin. As it happens, Richard had been there that very day, but he hadn’t noticed the refugees — a failure of attention of which he becomes increasingly ashamed. This shame is idiosyncratic, since all of us are constantly hearing about suffering in the world, yet we continue to lead our lives: “His going hungry would do nothing to help one of these striking men,” Richard tells himself. But for a German of his generation — he was born at the end of the Second World War — there is something especially uncomfortable about this kind of excuse. His mother “hadn’t known about the camps. At least that’s what she said,” he reflects; but not knowing about injustice, at a certain point, becomes a form of collusion with it.

Richard does not suddenly experience a religious conversion, selling everything he has and giving it to the refugees. But in a series of tentative interactions, he comes to the realization that their world is not, in fact, separate from his own, as the privileged like to think about the unprivileged. He pays visits to the detention center where the refugees are temporarily held and starts to hear about the journeys that brought them from Africa to Germany, usually via Libya. He hears about the terrors of the Mediterranean crossing, and what it is like to see your own children drown in front of you. He hears the refugees’ desperate desire, not for charity but for the opportunity to work, to take responsibility for their own lives.

But are any of us really responsible for our good or bad fortune? It is a question especially pertinent to Germans of her generation, Erpenbeck suggests, since they grew up in a postwar order shaped entirely by occupying powers: America in the West, Russia in the East. “Neither the material prosperity on one side nor the planned economy on the other could be explained by any particular trait of the German citizens in question,” Richard thinks. “So what was there to feel proud of?” If Germans were not responsible for either the success of capitalism or the failure of socialism, how can they hold Ghanaians or Nigerians responsible for the problems that forced them to emigrate — especially since the roots of those problems lie in European colonialism?

Is it fair, Richard wonders in another passage, that his own to-do list includes petty items like “urologist appointment” and “meter reading,” while his new friend Karon’s would read “Eradicate corruption, cronyism, and child labor in Ghana”? The answer, of course, is that it is not, because the world is fundamentally unjust. The hard question, which Go, Went, Gone does not directly address but unavoidably raises, is how far we are morally obligated to remedy this injustice. How can the lucky and guilty people of Europe justify hoarding their good fortune, while the people of Africa and the Middle East suffer and die? Are borders themselves morally defensible? The questions could not be more pertinent for American readers, though the specific circumstances are different. Erpenbeck, a Berliner, grew up in the shadow of an infamous wall; it has left her with a lifelong hatred for walls that we would do well to learn from.

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Of all the thinkers to emerge from France in the 1960s, Roland Barthes stands alone. Even among a generation of extraordinary genius — for starters: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Lacan — Barthes towers as a singular mind. Not only did he transmute the often-obscure language of critical theory into a literary beauty worthy of Proust; his work evoked a powerful Romanticism equally capable of seducing both dusty old professors and teenage lovers.

Barthes’s death was just as memorable as his life. After publishing A Lover’s Discourse and Camera Lucida, two of his most beloved and enduring works, an ascendant Barthes met his fate in the form of an errant laundry van. After a month-long coma, the great thinker finally succumbed in March 1980.

But what if this collision wasn’t an accident? What if this laundry truck was instead part of a wide-ranging conspiracy implicating multiple governments, powerful politicians, leading philosophers, and entire teams of secret agents? What if Barthes was in possession of a document of such immense power that it inspired murder? Such is the dizzying premise behind Laurent Binet’s frantic, Umberto Eco–esque The Seventh Function of Language.

Readers of Laurent’s tightly wound World War II novel, HHhH — an avant-garde page-turner about the assassination of the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich — might be surprised to find in The Seventh Function of Language a very funny, very campy novel, a madcap entertainment fueled by the odd couple at its center. Soon after Barthes’s collision, the archconservative, proletarian police detective Jacques Bayard is called to the scene. He doesn’t know exactly why he’s there; he just knows that someone up high thinks this death is of the utmost importance. So he investigates, but faster than you can say “welcome to the desert of the real” this plain-dealing man becomes hopelessly bewildered by the bizarre world of discourses, signifiers, and esoteric theories he’s been thrust into.

Baffled, he heads to the University of Paris VIII, the beating heart of student radicalism, runaway cultural studies, and poststructuralist thought, where Bayard encounters Simon Herzog, an awkward grad student whose vast talent for semiotic analysis belies his meek exterior. The detective immediately enlists Herzog’s entirely unwilling participation in the investigation, and our odd couple is off, soon making stops at Michel Foucault’s gay bathhouse, Umberto Eco’s leftist-ridden café in Bologna (complete with neo-Fascist terrorism), and an absolutely surreal academic conference in Ithaca, New York, at which archrivals John Searle and Jacques Derrida vie to wipe one another off the face of philosophical theory.

The adventures of the proletarian police officer and the precocious poststructuralist would surely be enough to fill up a novel, but Binet gives his story one more delicious layer: as Bayard and Herzog struggle to piece the case together — with interludes from the French presidential campaign between ultraconservative Georges Giscard and socialist François Mitterrand — Binet introduces us to the shadowy Logos Club. Something along the lines of a Fight Club for rhetoricians, the Logos Club meets in underground, invitation-only locations where intellectuals duke it out over questions such as “the written word vs the spoken word” and “Is legal violence still violence?,” hoping to climb the ranks to become the Great Protagoras. For those who lose a fight, more than honor and rank is at risk: oftentimes, the losing rhetorician must stride over to the dissection table and have a finger neatly chopped off.

The Seventh Function of Language does not lack for audacity, and the scenes from the Logos Club rank as some of its most bravura writing. Giving over to a cockeyed energy, the bouts are the perfect embodiment of the quandary at the center of The Seventh Function of Language: either critical theory is a just a bunch of scholarly gobbledygook run amok, or it’s a transcendent conceptual framework that has conquered the world. One crucial face-off transpires over the question “baroque vs classical,” and it’s easily some of the best writing I’ve read this year, with the two contestants raging for ten electrifying pages, punching and dodging with everything from the history of Venice to the debate over Racine vs. Shakespeare to quotes from Baudelaire and Barthes and theories of Renaissance art. Another contest, this one a title fight against the Great Protagoras himself, is a masterpiece of ironic absurdism in which the contestants must strive to debate a nonsense subject that neither of them even understands.

As with the best titles in the paranoid-schizoid genre, The Seventh Function of Language is like a self-perpetuating top that’s capable of generating its own ludicrous momentum, never slowing down enough to topple over. Binet knows his terrain intimately, crafting fantastic parodies of the real-life personalities of his star intellectuals but also integrating their ideas and disagreements in thoughtful, lively ways (don’t miss the sex scene that brings new meaning to Deleuze’s “body without organs”). Both erudite and accessible, it’s equally a boon to lazy undergrads cribbing for a critical theory class and to their professors in search of a fresh twist on old ideas.

What comes of this hysterical caper is a serious case for why poststructuralist theory is relevant to an age fueled by the likes of social networks and right-wing faux-populism. The norm-breaking rhetoric now being used by mainstream politicians has made for a very practical case study in how invasive discourses can suddenly take hold of our reality. As a statement on critical theory’s abiding contribution to politics — and the role that intellectuals play in the rhetorical arms race — The Seventh Function of Language pairs well with the reality-changing linguistic feats we have lately seen. Binet’s accomplishment is to give this rich body of work a James Bond–esque makeover, both radiating a charismatic appeal and confidently winking at the very excesses that its detractors have tried to mock.

Ultimately, the premise that Barthes was murdered is the sort of paranoid conspiracy that immediately gets you kicked out of all sensible conversations, but the premise that Barthes was in possession of ideas powerful enough to kill over is the sort of risky idea that should make anyone say, “Tell me more . . . ” Binet has managed to draw the preposterous and the provocative together into a novel that has it both ways, putting completely laughable propositions into the service of important lines of argument. In so doing, Binet reaches back to the foundations of the modern novel — what is the Quixote if not an absurdist plot making a deadly serious point? — while showing that the old poststructuralist dog still possesses a lot of new tricks.

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A charming courtship between hopelessly attracted opposites turns into an unexpected family in Happiness, Heather Harpham’s beautiful memoir about her “crooked little road to semi-ever after.” Bursting with grace and humor, this is an unforgettable story of parenthood and unconditional love that the booksellers who sit on the Discover Great New Writers selection committee are still talking about.

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Remember Me Like This, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the winner of the 2015 McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize. After directing the creative writing program at Harvard University for eleven years, Bret is now the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.   The following is an edited transcript of Johnston and Harpham’s recent conversation about Happiness.–Miwa Messer

Bret Anthony Johnson: Why is the book called Happiness?

Heather Harpham: I hoped the title would be received as a charged particle — a word that has the power to carry both its positive face value and its implied opposite. I have this line in the book, from Virginia Woolf — “Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.” This is a book with veins of unhappiness running through it in the form of a child’s suffering, the loss of innocence, and, on a much less profound scale, a series of upended romantic expectations — and at the same time there is happiness embedded into the small spaces even when we’re in rotten shape. I hope the title contains the tension that always exists when we feel happy — that sense that all could unravel in a heartbeat, as Woolf knew so well. And conversely, when we’re unhappy, that we might, at any moment, find some way to laugh at the absurd or at ourselves. There are wounds beyond humor or happiness, there are — we know this. But surprisingly few. Given enough time and distance, almost anything can grow lighter. Humans are ultimately very emotionally agile, and that’s a great thing.

BAJ: Did you always know that you would write about this period of your life?

HH: No, not really. Like most writers, I have a love-hate relationship with autobiographical material, which carries a unique set of potential pitfalls. When Gracie was sick, my hope was just to get through that time, to see her healthy. The writing I did was primarily to keep our people updated and to help myself cope, to have an arena where I could pour out some of the difficulties or tough questions pouring in. After the dust of living that experience settled, about five years post-transplant, I felt compelled to look at the writing and see if it added up to anything like a story. It didn’t. But I decided to start at the beginning and see if I could draw a portrait of what had been such a wild-and-wooly time, beginning with how Brian and I responded to: a surprise pregnancy; a surprisingly sick kid; a surprise second kid; and a surprising offer from kid number two to cure kid number one. It felt like snippets of despair and joy jumbled together in one basket; I wanted pull these out, piece by piece, and try to lay out a coherent design. Basically, I wanted to re-see, or see more deeply, what we’d been through together, and there’s no better way that I know of than to sit and write. Writing invites you to find sense, or to make sense, out of experiences in which no sense seemed to live.

BAJ: Your husband, the terrific novelist Brian Morton, wrote a novel inspired by this story. Can you tell me a little about the differences and similarities in how you approached the subject?

HH: Brian has the ability to look at life’s hardest things with wide-open eyes, to take the reader into true heartbreak, but without a wisp of sentimentality or of exploitation of the material. What I mean by that is that he works incredibly hard to be faithful to what feels and is true, rather than giving readers what they might like to hear. More than one person told Brian that they threw his novel Breakable You (which you referred to) across the room after reading the scene in which a beloved character dies. I’m not sure there’s higher praise than having your book physically acted on by a reader so invested in the world you’ve made.

Like Brian, I hoped to avoid the easy lob of sentimentality. But, and this might be a function of stereotypical male/female socialization, I’m perhaps more protective of the reader, more worried for them. Or worse, worried what they’ll think of me. Brian gives his readers full credit, he doesn’t pull punches as a writer because he’s fretting over their reactions. For better or worse, I’m a fretter. I am often worried about overwhelming people, or saying too much. At the same time, writing material that inherently invokes pathos (such as children in peril) carries a special set of responsibilities; you’ve got to commit to tell the truth without relying on the expediency of the material to stand in for craft or for honesty.

BAJ: To that end, earlier in your life you studied fiction, and yet you’ve chosen to write this as a memoir. Was that an easy choice? What did nonfiction offer that fiction didn’t?

HH: I wouldn’t have known how to approach this story through a fictional lens. It was simply too close to the surface. I think fiction works best when you’re taking dictation, as has often been said, from the unconscious. Which is why it’s so damn hard. The unconscious keeps its own hours. You have to show up for such huge stretches at the desk with your net out, hoping it will fly by. That’s true for people writing memoir, too, it’s a ton of time at the desk — you can’t just jot down what happened and call it a day. But you’re not searching for the heat, the heart, of your story; you have that within you already. The memoirist’s job is more about applying craft, coherence and, if we’re lucky, meaning to a miasma of undifferentiated experience.

On the other hand, the writer Geoff Dyer rocked the Bennington writers’ community, as we both know, by saying of fiction and nonfiction, “What’s the diff?” I like to think he’s right in the largest sense; good writing demands imagination, there’s no way around it. The imaginative impulse can take many forms — from a sci-fi plot twist to a new metaphor for the oldest game in town, love and heartbreak — but somewhere along the line if you’re writing, you’re imagining. And I love that. What a great job description: imagine.

BAJ: Your daughter, Amelia, is now a happy, healthy sixteen-year-old. How does she feel about the book?

HH: She has a complex set of feelings, and I’m not sure I’m the right person to convey any of them. Writing about her as an infant or as a four-year-old was much easier, and less ethically fraught, than writing about her as a sixteen-year-old. That said, I will share what she’s given me leave to share — that reading the book has widened her empathy for her brother, who, as a very small child, had to contend with his parents’ intense worries and distraction. As she put it, “I feel for the little guy.” And I think, or maybe only hope, that it has widened her empathy for her younger self, and the tremendous hardships she met with humor and spirit.

BAJ: We’ve both written about children in peril. In my novel, even with made-up characters, I felt intensely protective of them. Did you find writing this kind of story especially harrowing? Did you feel any kind of unusual responsibility to the characters, not least Amelia? Did you feel any kind of unusual responsibility toward the readers?

HH: I absolutely share your belief that material harrowing on this level demands special responsibilities: to readers, as I’ve discussed and also to the subjects you’re writing about. I find it touching that you felt this toward your fictional characters — that must be a mark of how real they became for you. I know your characters in Remember Me Like This were entirely real for me, and I followed their fates with my heart in my throat.

With Happiness I was writing with full knowledge, of course, of how it ends. I knew, as I sat to write, who would survive — whom I could protect and whom, excruciatingly, I could not. Writing about Amelia (called Gracie in the book) was hard, in that capturing a child’s idiosyncratic expressions and “vibe” on paper is like running after a wind going, come on, get in this jar! But I had notes and Brian’s formidable memory to help me.

As for the other children, I only wrote about children whose families I’m still in touch with. I wanted parents’ express permission to record, publicly, the most painful experience in their lives. Even with permission, it’s a slippery slope. My intention was to honor the children I wrote about. I hope that is how the writing is received, but I can’t know. Most of all, I wanted to record my own grief, to say I was there, I knew you. I saw you. I remember you.                                                                             

BAJ: When I was doing research for Remember Me Like This, and as I tried to empathize with the married couple, the parents, in my novel, I found that such extraordinary trauma to the child often does irreparable harm to the adults. It’s a kind of collateral damage that isn’t often considered. How did you approach that in your writing process?

HH: When we witness an innocent being suffer, especially our own child, we naturally cast around for someone to blame: Who the hell has allowed this to happen? Why? These questions feel personal, and enragingly unanswered. It is easy, even if totally illogical, to blame your mate. They are right there, handy! And that’s so tragic because in reality no one on earth is more of an ally than your child’s other parent. No one on earth cares more — it’s you two. Or in our evolving world, you three or four. Parents are the front line. In the book, I wrote about how alienated I allowed myself to become from Brian, under the stress and anxieties of transplant, and how inspired I was to rethink that “approach,” by the loving example of another couple we came to know, Ramya and Deepak Bhaskaram.

Loving each other through fear, through terror, through those unanswered questions is incredibly hard. It’s easier, for some of us to isolate and try to gut it out alone. I was afraid of seeing my own fears mirrored in Brian, and so I turned inward. But if you do that, you’re cut off from your lifeline. And ultimately I think both parents, if they can bear to stay sentient, stay connected and deeply feeling, can give much more to their child by nurturing one another.

BAJ: I’ve long believed that the very telling of a story is a kind of victory, a kind of hope, no matter how dark or unsettling the material. How did you negotiate that delicate line between hope and melancholy, between light and dark, as you worked on the book?

HH: The act of telling a story is a kind of victory, I totally agree. It is an act of survivorship; it means you lived to tell. Or more than lived: lived and noticed, lived and stood ready to describe. To tell, you’ve got to have the power to wedge space between the events and the self — whether those events are actual or imagined, you have to have perspective, breathing room, a view. And so, in a sense, to tell a story is to transcended it. Or maybe to surrender to it. I don’t know really how to describe that phenomenon, but I do agree that telling feels like victory, even when what you’re describing is the most knee-bending defeat or loss. Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina springs to mind; it’s a description of a the most decimated childhood, and yet we know the teller is intact enough to convey that experience, and so there’s hope.

As we’ve said, telling carries responsibilities, but it also carries great privilege. It is an honor to be a storyteller, to have the time and energy to recast experience into a form that can be shared, or passed along. Telling stories is an innately human act; those first stories were probably mechanisms of actual survival, of evolution: Hey, listen to how Jed escaped the big gray tiger (or how he didn’t!). Our lives aren’t on the line in the same way, but I do still believe in the power of storytelling — in the hands of masters — to evolve us, to grow us; to make us understand ourselves, or one another, better. Our world has some terrifyingly narrow-minded streams running through it at the moment, and the ability of story tellers to grow empathy and mutual curiosity has never been more necessary. Collectively, we have this impossible, essential job: to face what’s dark, full on, unblinking, but with an open heart.

Author photo of Heather Harpham (c) David Kumin.

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