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“The Best Possible Version of a Tragedy”: Harriet Clark on Her Debut Novel

A conversation with the author about her new novel, the experience of having a mother in prison, and the artist’s role in documenting atrocities.

For nearly four decades, Harriet Clark saw her mother only in the visiting room of New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. When Clark was less than one year old, her mother Judith, then a member of the Weather Underground, was arrested and later sentenced to 75 years to life in prison for her role as a getaway driver in a 1981 armored car robbery, during which a security guard and two police officers were killed. (In 2016, then-governor Andrew Cuomo commuted Judith’s sentence, making her eligible for parole, which she was granted three years later.)

In her debut novel, The Hill, Clark’s narrator Suzanna never remembers a time when she hadn’t spent her Saturdays visiting her mother sentenced to life in a fictional prison atop a hill. Like Clark, Suzanna was a baby when her mother was arrested and incarcerated.

“The year I turned eight the prison built the hospital and the gun tower and raised the fences around the hill another three feet,” Clark writes early in her novel. “It was the year the prison grew up.” It’s a nod to the nation’s prison-building boom as tough-on-crime laws swelled its population behind bars. In the 1990s, the United States saw an unprecedented boom in prison building with a new prison opening in rural America every 15 days.

Lyrical and introspective, The Hill paints a picture of a mother desperately trying to parent her daughter despite her life sentence, and Suzanna’s own efforts to stay connected. “To return each week and rise again to do this forever and ever,” Clark writes. “This was a feat I saw nowhere applauded and this was the challenge I set now for myself.”

Clark, now a mother herself and who edits books and films, spoke with The Nation about her new novel, the experience of having a mother in prison, and the artist’s role in documenting atrocities.

Victoria Law: Can you talk about why you chose to write a novel over a memoir or autobiography, given how autobiographical The Hill seems to be?

Harriet Clark: I love novels. I have always been able to feel my feelings more when I’m engaging with fiction. It was like granting dignity to the material to write it in the form that I most revere, and that has given me so much meaning and pleasure in my life. [A novel] felt like a way to say, “These are lives worthy of art, not just reportage.”

I [also] think that childhood lends itself to fiction. When we’re children, we haven’t yet consented to reality. We’re inside our imagination so much, and so a novel felt like the appropriate form for a book about childhood.

And if you grow up in prison, you learn to respect other people’s privacy. You try not to watch what’s going on at their table; you’re hoping no one’s listening to you. You’re inside a structure that grants you none of the dignity of privacy so people have to grant it to each other. I never had a reportorial impulse to take something I saw in there and share it with the world. Respecting people’s privacy is really important to me. For me, this novel is largely about privacy and about the ways we companion each other even across great chasms of unknowability.

VL: In the novel, Suzanna visits her mother every week. Their visits are imbued with a sense of claustrophobia—she and her mother stay inside the Reading Roost, a playhouse in the children’s area that’s increasingly too small as Suzanna grows. What were visits like when you were a growing child?

HC: I........

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