Harriet Clark
speaker
460 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Aug
Harriet Clark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
you know, exiled from my own life in many ways.
And so certainly working on the book was a way that I stayed in those rooms too.
I think, you know, the characters, the grandparents' friends in the book, none of them are exact transcriptions of any of my grandparents' actual friends.
But that feeling of being inside rooms while adults talk around you and fundamentally ignore you, that was the feeling of my childhood.
And there was something meaningful to me, painful but meaningful, about being able to stay inside that feeling in those rooms and realms.
Yeah, for many years, I had assumed that if I wrote a book that I would have to know a lot more than I did about lots of things.
So I read books about radicals in the 30s, 40s, and 50s to better understand my grandparents.
And I read about radicals in the 60s and 70s to better understand my mother and her friends.
And I read about prison officers.
And I read a lot of books about children of prisoners.
Yeah.
And finally, I realized that I did not want to write the book that knew those things.
You know, that I wanted to write a book that was about not knowing those things, that had to do with a certain kind of atmosphere of incomprehension that Susanna is inside.
And that, I think, is a dominant quality to lots of people's minds.
And so I decided I didn't want to triumph over my childhood bewilderment.
I wanted to see if I could kind of conjure the atmosphere of that bewilderment and see if it could be resonant for readers.
I mean, one thing I'll say is that my mother was a getaway car driver.
She wasn't the getaway car driver for the primary van that was used.
But I worry that I do share certain qualities with Susanna in terms of a kind of willful unknowingness.
I mean, I have...
Showing 241–260 of 460 · page 13 of 23
← Previous
Next →