Katie Kitamura
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
It draws from the atmosphere in which it was written. Yeah. It was finished well before the election. The power of fantasy is something that is relevant, politically speaking. As I said, I teach, and I remember the day after the election, my students came in and they said, you know, what is the point of a novel right now? You know, we should have all trained to be lawyers.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And I mean, I don't disagree. I think it would be great if we all had legal skills. That seems like a useful skill set to have right now. But I actually think. that novels and writing in general feels incredibly important because it is already clear in the new administration that language is going to be a terrain where a substantial part of this battle is going to be fought.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And I mean that absolutely, literally, in terms of what language people are allowed to use, in terms of how language is manipulated or denuded of meaning. And I think what writers do or can try to do is to use language with precision and care and use language in a way so that it does retain its meaning.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
I think when words stop meaning what they're meant to mean, then in a lot of ways we're in trouble. Katie, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
I mean, I really wanted interpretation to be at the center of this novel. In a funny way, even more than in my last novel where the character is literally a simultaneous interpreter. Because I wanted that... feeling of interpretation to be very active for the reader as well.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
You know, I wanted the reader to also be trying, alongside all the characters in that opening scene, to understand what is happening between those two central characters. And I'm very interested in characters, in particular female characters, who speak the words of other people. And I'm interested in passivity. And that goes a little bit, I think...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
against the grain or against what we're told to look for in fiction. You know, I teach creative writing, and in class often, if they're in workshop, if there is a character who the group feels doesn't have agency, that is often brought up as a criticism of the character. They'll say, oh, but, you know, she doesn't have any agency.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
As if a character without agency is implausible or in some way not compelling in narrative terms, But of course, the reality is very few of us have total agency. I think we operate under the illusion or the impression that we have a great deal of agency. But in reality, when you look at your life, our choices are quite constricted.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
So I'm interested in depicting characters who maybe understand that passivity a little bit more than other people might and who are trying to grapple with what that means.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
I've been thinking about it for quite a long time. I tend to sit with an idea forever. An embarrassingly long amount of time, I would say. You know, I can sometimes look back and think, oh, I first started thinking about this idea and it was a decade ago. I really came to see the degree to which performance is present in our day-to-day lives.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
You know, even now as we're talking to each other, even in our most intimate moments, we're always playing parts of some kind or another. Yeah. whether that is a part of a mother or a daughter or a partner or a writer or a student or a teacher. There are all these parts that we play every single day, and they come with quite prescriptive scripts in a lot of ways.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And the thing that struck me when I was thinking about audition is how seamlessly we flip between parts without almost being aware of it. So, for example, I can be... talking to my husband about something and I will be using a certain vocabulary and a certain way of speaking and then my children can come in and literally my voice will almost go up half an octave. The vocabulary changes completely.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
It's bizarre. And yet that is how the vast majority of people go through their day. And we're not even really aware of it. I think in audition, the central character is very much aware of it she sees where those cracks are and at a certain point she can no longer paper over them
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
There's kind of two narratives of creative development. development in the novel. There is The development of the younger man who has a very standard kind of coming of age story. In the beginning, he seems to not know exactly what he's doing. And by the end, he has emerged as an artist. And that is a narrative that I think we're very familiar with. We understand the shape of that.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
The narrative that is much less clear even now is a narrative of what happens to a woman, particularly in the middle of her life. Right. Which is astonishing to me. I mean, one thing that was striking to me when I published Intimacies is that the central character in that novel is explicitly not a young woman. She is in her mid to late 30s, say.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
But in a lot of descriptions of the novel, she was described as a young woman, moves to The Hague to start a new life. And that was really interesting to me because it was almost as if story and narrative only happens to the young. Which we know is not true.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And I think in this novel, we have a character who is certainly on a passage of discovery, but the narrative is not pre-established in the same way. She's not following something by rote. And so in a lot of ways, I think that's why it felt right for me. for the narrative to fracture in a lot of ways, for there to be kind of multiple possibilities that she might be exploring.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
Whereas the narrative for the younger character, this young man, is much more linear. It's much clearer because I think it's something within our culture that is much more familiar.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
I think it's something that still feels transgressive, which is in some ways extraordinary. It's a very, very obvious thing to say that an age gap between an older man and a younger woman is something that is overly familiar. I think the inversion of it feels exciting. It feels like it's... centering female desire in a way that is new. And I think it still feels in some way transgressive.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
There's a way in which we know it shouldn't feel transgressive because we all say, hey, if a man did it, nobody would say anything. But at the same time, it is about a desire that culture at large has told women not to have. I don't know about the timing. That is something really really interesting to think about. I mean, it's an interesting question. Why now? Why not five years ago?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
Why not five years from now? That, I don't know.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
I've always been really interested in writing outsiders. And I've always been interested in the point of view of somebody who's newly arrived in a place. And so my characters are often like anthropologists who are studying the culture and the mores and the rituals of a place. And they see a place with quite fresh eyes because they don't know very much about it.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And that was useful for me as a writer because I think I was trying to figure out as well what the terrain of the novel was. I think I felt after four novels that maybe I had the skills to write about the place I knew very, very well without that kind of shield of discovery. New York is an intimidating city to write about. There's a lot of fiction that is set in New York.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
It's a city that I've lived in for decades. 15 years, but I still don't think I quite have the nerve to call myself a New Yorker, really. But this character is so dislocated in her life that the sense of dislocation that I often have relied on location to achieve, I think here was much more internal. There is, as I said, so many stories that have been set here, and that is a kind of...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
you know, that is a canon that you're writing against, but it's also a canon that kind of can bore you along as well. I'm thinking about even a film like Rosemary's Baby. There's so many great horror films that have been set in New York. That sense of alienation, that sense of slight remove and otherness, the sense of something bubbling under the surface, that's very much a New York story.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And so when I was thinking about this novel, I found myself thinking about horror as a genre the most probably.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
I mean, horror is an interesting genre in that the moments that are frightening are often not when the monster appears, but all of the moments leading up to it when you don't really know what you're waiting for. You know, I think once you see the monster, you say, ah, there's a monster or whatever it is that you've been building. But the true tension of horror is always in the waiting.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And I think this is a kind of novel where there is a lot of that waiting, maybe more than in any of the previous books. The other thing I would say is that, of course, the kind of key moment in the novel is when the central character suddenly has this realization that she herself might be the problem. She might be the monster, so to speak, within the family.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And so when I think about horror, when I think about, you know, who is the kind of monster that's out there, it's not a kind of moment of violence. It's not a moment of kind of violence. some discovery of something horrible. It's actually the moment is finding that she herself is a problem in this story.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
Yeah, I love workplace novels. Yeah. And the workplaces are really interesting. Interesting space. I mean, okay, less now, I think, because so much is remote. But it's a physical space that has so many very particular rules and cultures and subcultures and subcultures below the subcultures. And navigating a workplace, it seems to me, just full of fascinating interpersonal experiences.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
tensions and dynamics. But of course, I'm mostly interested in workplace novels because I think one of the things that novels excel at is depicting the relationship between the individual and a larger social structure. And that is what makes novels special. That is what makes novels different to essays, for example.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And I think workplace is a place where you very naturally see the relationship between the individual and the institution. Because whatever the workplace is, it is representative of an institution of some kind. It will tell you about some kind of structural reality about the society that the characters are living in.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
And it allows you the opportunity to do it through really granular detail, through very, very small things that seem insignificant, whether it is... The quality of the coffee in the break room or whether or not people feel they're surveyed when they're working or what the sight lines are from somebody's desk to another desk or how the office space is organized.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
There are so many ways in which hierarchies of power are built into a workspace. And as a novelist, you then don't have to say hierarchies of power and you don't have to say social structures or institutions. You can just have a character who's at their desk working and is aware that their boss can see their screen. for example.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
You know, Audition was written... Broadly speaking, during the Biden administration and during the pandemic, you know, this is clearly not a pandemic novel. And yet it is a novel in which people are sequestered in rooms together with their family and they slowly go a bit crazy. So there's no, you know, there's no there's not a single mask. There's no reference to the pandemic, but it's written.