A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN HARRISON

Random House: Envy is such a complex story. Where did you get your ideas? And how did you weave so many issues (the death of a child, a brother’s betrayal, a distant marriage, adultery, and unknown paternity—to name a few) into such a cohesive narrative?

Kathryn Harrison: The novel began as an exploration of grief, from the point of view of a mother who had lost her child. I think writers often use fiction to explore what frightens them, and I can’t imagine anything more annihilating than the death of a child. In fact, it was impossible for me to get close enough to the mother’s perspective, so I ended up trying on the father’s role. I gave Will, the father, a twin because I’ve always found identical twins—the idea of another you—sinister in its implicit threat to identity, and from that point, the book accrued subplots, by means of an unconscious process I don’t understand clearly enough to explain.

RH: Envy is your sixth novel. But you’ve also written wonderful, intimate memoirs (The Kiss and The Mother Knot). How do you move from completely looking inward and writing about your own experiences to writing a novel like Envy, which has a male protagonist? Is it more challenging to focus on the male perspective, or does the distance make it easier?

KH: I’ve found that alternating between fiction and nonfiction works to alleviate the strains associated with each. The hardest part of fiction, for me, is plotting. Nonfiction doesn’t demand the invention of plot, but it does pose challenges in terms of how much information is to be revealed, and in what order. As for the male perspective, the cerebral answer is that it makes conceiving a character more fun, challenging. The more honest answer is that my relationship with my mother, who was emotionally distant, and who left me in the care of her parents when I was six, gave me the perfect means of learning what it was like to suffer in loving a woman who always eludes one’s grasp—a conventionally male role, romantically speaking. So what may appear on the page as a very different experience from my own, as a heterosexual woman, is actually pretty familiar to me.

RH: How did you create Will’s character? What made you decide that he would be a psychoanalyst? What do you think his profession adds to the story?

KH: Will began as a veterinarian, as a means of my pursuing the career I thought I’d have when I was a teenager. But after hanging out with a few vets, doing my research, I discovered that vets didn’t have a lot to say: their patients, after all, don’t talk to them. So maybe turning Will into a psychoanalyst was an overcorrection, going from a man of few words to a man of unlimited words, one who can’t stop the torrent of words that flows from him. Envy is a much “talkier” book than my others, and that gave me a chance to have some fun with various kinds of dialogue. Jennifer arrived as pure voice, the rest of her taking form after her words were uttered. I wanted Will to be very smart, and very articulate, and very able to parse and address other people’s problems while remaining blind to his own, so his being a shrink gave me the perfect opportunity to do that.

RH: Will’s relationship with his twin brother, Mitch, is fascinating, and the motivation for the book’s title. Yet Mitch never physically enters the story. Was this a conscious decision from the start? What would have been gained or lost by bringing Mitch into the plot?

KH: Yes, how real is Mitch? I don’t think I can answer the question. As a catalyst—as the catalyst—for nearly all of the novel’s action, he is integral, and yet he doesn’t appear, except in Will’s memory, and through his conversations with other people. So is he a part of Will? Will’s dark side? The physical aspect of a man who is—other than sexually—trapped in his head? I think of Mitch as Will’s doppelgänger as much as his brother. It wasn’t a conscious decision, really— not many of them are, in a novel—but I can’t imagine Envy without him. He completes Will; together they make one hero, or anti-hero. Good and bad, mind and body, etc.

RH: Luke’s tragic death is the impetus for the deterioration of Will and Carole’s relationship. How were you able to capture the intense grief these characters felt without having experienced it yourself?

KH: I haven’t lost a child, but I have lost the family I grew up with: first my mother, twenty years ago now, then my grandfather and grandmother, who raised me for her. While I was writing this book my father-in-law died, a man to whom I’d been very close (and who was the inspiration, if not model, for Will’s dad), and who functioned to remind me of the visceral quality of grieving. I do know that grief— grief intense enough to threaten one’s understanding of oneself— requires a person to forge a new self. I don’t imagine that what I’ve felt approaches losing a child, because such a loss disrupts the natural order of things, and seems unbearable to me, but I think—I hope— I could extrapolate enough from the experiences I did have to grieve convincingly on the page.

RH: Jennifer is such a fascinating character. How did you create such an uninhibited, troubled, forceful young woman? Did you know she was going to be wild from the beginning? Or did she grow into something different than you had planned?

KH: As I said earlier, Jennifer arrived as a voice, a totally unplanned addition to the novel’s cast. In this way she is a sister to other female characters of mine—to May from The Binding Chair, to Francisca from Poison, to the Aleut in The Seal Wife, whose muteness, or refusal to speak, is a kind of communication. All of these female characters arrived unbidden and collided with the story I thought I was writing, changing it utterly. I’m not sure I can explain why this happens, other than that when I allow these women to refuse the roles forced on them, and to speak, to say what they want to say, rather than what other people want to hear, I address some of the damage my early life inflicted on me.

RH: On the topic of Jennifer, I read somewhere that you’d like to see her return in another one of your novels. Can you explain your affection for her? And do you think you’ll be able to bring her back?

KH: It’s delicious—intoxicating, really—to create a female character who is unapologetically selfish and “bad,” and who gets away with wreaking havoc on other people’s lives. Literature almost always punishes the bad girls; it’s nice to turn tables every once in a while. Too, no matter her sins, Jennifer is very full of life, and very hungry, psychically, and I think those characters are always bewitching. They are to me.

RH: What about Will’s troubled relationship with Carole? Do you think a crisis like Will’s affair with Jennifer was necessary to save his marriage?

KH: Yes, I do. Will needed to break open his marriage, violently, in order to understand what happened even before the death of Luke to set the stage for estrangement between him and Carole. It’s as if he unconsciously understands that he needs to take this risk in order to save his marriage.

RH: Which character was the hardest to write? Why?

KH: They’re all hard; they all present challenges. I think it’s difficult to write children without sentimentalizing them or forcing them into the role of miniature adults, so Luke and Samantha, and the child versions of Will and Mitch, made me most anxious to not misstep. Any character who requires my puzzling something out cerebrally is harder than one like Jennifer—the kind who just pops out of my unconscious without needing too many adjustments.

RH: The cover image is so understated and beautiful. How did you and the jacket designer come up with it?

KH: All I did was applaud—all credit to the art director. I do love it.

RH: What are you working on now?

KH: Something very different—a true story of three murders within the same family, twenty years ago, in Washington state. I admit I have a true-crime addiction—like Carole does—and my fascination with murder does fuel my interest in this story, but beyond that I want to understand how people move on after cataclysmic events like this. So I’m interviewing all the people involved, including the murderer and the sister he did not kill. So far it’s very compelling, and exhausting, to deal with such loaded material.