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| Katie Kitamura |
MEET THE AUTHOR
Interview
Katie Kitamura: ‘I still feel incapable of processing what’s happening’
The author of A Separation on being a writer in Trump’s America, accepting her father’s death, and inverting stereotypes in contemporary fiction
California-born Katie Kitamura is the author of three novels, the latest of which, A Separation, is the story of a woman searching for her estranged husband.
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| Katie Kitamura |
Is it right to say your novel is about people who don’t understand one another both literally and emotionally?
Absolutely. The narrator is a translator in a foreign country searching for her former husband and the starting point for the book was whether there’s such a thing as total transparency between two people. I think more often than not, there is some kind of persistent unknowability, even in somebody you’re very close to. And I suppose there’s an unknowability in ourselves. I’m always interested in a character who does something and doesn’t understand why they’ve done it. So in this book, it’s the narrator’s decision to keep her promise to her husband not to tell anyone they’ve separated.
So much modern fiction deals with missing women, “gone girls”, and the men who go in search of them. What made you invert that paradigm?
There is so much in our culture that’s based on the dead and often mutilated body of a woman, and it seems absurd. I knew I wanted to write something where that body was not female and moreover where the mind and the consciousness that was circling around this mystery was female rather than male.
The novel is as much a meditation on grief as it is on marriage and infidelity.
Yes. I spent three weeks in the [Greek] village where the book is set and it was a very particular time in my life. I was in my late 20s, and my dad had been very sick with cancer for five or six years. It was while I was there that I accepted that he wasn’t going to get better. He died the following year. That landscape for me has so much to do with that feeling of anticipatory grief.
Your narrator and her mother-in-law find it hard to get on: why do you think that relationship can be so difficult?
It’s two different kinds of love, but they’re equally fierce in some way. It’s the tragedy of a mother’s love that necessarily has to be replaced and that can be very difficult to accept.
Which authors have had the greatest influence on your own writing?
It shifts from book to book. In the case of this one, Marguerite Duras.
And contemporary writers?
I like a lot of Spanish language writers. I really love Javier Marías. There are a lot of great Latin American writers right now like Alvaro Enrigue and Horacio Castellanos Moya.
What impact has the election and Trump’s presidency had on you as a writer?
A lot about what a writer is useful for in this moment, and my sense is that my job at the moment is possibly pure observation: witnessing, keeping track of the small day-to-day things that change under the new administration. I still feel incapable of processing what’s happening, so the only thing I can do is try to be present, observe everything that’s happening and not look away from it.
How has the rest of life changed for you in Trump’s America?
Multiple sections of society are under attack and their lives are being taken out from under them. It’s something I talk about a lot with my husband [the writer Hari Kunzru]: is there a line, and when that line’s been crossed do you say, this is enough, you don’t want to stay here any more? A week before the election I’d have said a Muslim ban was that line. Then, two weeks after the inauguration, there was in effect a Muslim ban, so that line keeps moving. It feels like there’s still a lot of very good journalism, and I don’t feel as a fiction writer that there’s anything you can’t write about. But I think the situation changes rapidly and one thing you have to do is be very vigilant. As a writer, I think the greatest danger would be self-censorship.
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