Maureen Corrigan
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In 2017, historian Judith Giesberg and her team of graduate student researchers launched a website called The Last Seen Project. It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by formerly enslaved people who hope to find family members separated by slavery. The earliest ads date from the 1830s and stretch into the 1920s.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Giesberg says that when she's given public lectures about this online archive of ads, the audience always asks the question, did they find each other? Giesberg says, I always answer the question the same way, and no one is ever satisfied with it. I don't know. Giesburg's new book, called Last Scene, is her more detailed response to the question.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In each of the ten chapters here, she closely reads ads placed in search of lost children, mothers, wives, siblings, and even comrades who served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. Giesburg isn't trying to generate reunion stories, although there are a couple of those in this book.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Giesburg tells us the cruel reality was that the success rate of these advertisements may have been as low as 2%. Instead of happy endings, these ads offer readers something else. They serve as portals into the lived experience of slavery.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
For instance, countering the lost cause myth that enslaved people were settled on southern plantations and Texas cotton fields, the ads, which often list multiple names of white owners as a finding aid, testify to how black people were sold and resold. The ads that hit hardest are the ones that illuminate what Giesburg refers to as America's traffic in children.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Selling children away from their mothers, she says, was the rule of slavery, not the exception. Clara Bashup's story opens last scene. Bashup had been searching for her daughter and son for 30 years when she took out an ad in 1892 in the African-American newspaper, The Chicago Appeal. Here are some portions. I wish to find my daughter patience green.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
I have no trace of her since she was sold at Richmond, Virginia in 1859. She was then 12 years of age. John William Harris, my son, went with some servants after the surrender. He was 14 years old. Both belonged to Dick Christian in name only, by whom they were sold. The language of Bashup's ad is direct and somewhat defiant.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Giesburg comments on the words in name only that Bashup appended after the name of Dick Christian, the man who owned her children. Against this legal right, Giesburg says, Clara Bashup asserted a moral and emotional one. In comparison, Giesburg unpacks the language of a human interest story aimed at white readers about Bashup's search. That story ran in the New York World newspaper.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There, Patience is described as the missing child of an aged mother, and Dick Christian is a country gentleman. Giesburg says that white papers everywhere were publishing similar stories that threw a thick blanket of nostalgia over the history of slavery.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Another ad that speaks volumes is one posted in 1879 by Henry Tibbs in the Lost Friends column of a New Orleans paper, The Southwestern Christian Advocate. It opens, Mr. Editor, I desire some information about my mother. Tibbs recalls being put in a jail with other boys prior to being sold away. I cried, he writes.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Tibbs says he was told that if he would hush, the slave trader would bring my mother there the next morning, which he did. Mother then brought me some cake and candy, and that was the last time I saw her. Throughout Last Seen, Giesburg steps back from these individual ads to give readers the larger historical context that made them necessary.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
For instance, she reminds readers that no federal agency existed to help freed people locate loved ones after the Civil War ended. Instead, there were things like the Grapevine Telegraph, which she describes as And there were the ads, many of which were read aloud in black churches.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Those ads testify to the inner strength of people like Henry Tibbs, who was still placing ads in search of his mother when he was 55 years old.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
To us readers who admired Tony Horowitz's writing infused with his animated and wry first-person voice, his sudden death in 2019 was hard to take in. Horowitz, who was a fit 60-year-old, died of cardiac arrest a few days after his book, Spying on the South, was published.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Like his 1998 bestseller, Confederates in the Attic, Spying on the South presciently explored the great divide in America between red states and blue. Curiously, for a writer so attuned to boundary lines, Horowitz, who was traveling on book tour, collapsed and died on a street that divides Washington, D.C. and Maryland.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Horwitz's wife, novelist Geraldine Brooks, was far away at their home in Martha's Vineyard. The opening of her memoir, Memorial Days, describes in present tense fragmented phrases what it was like to be on the receiving end of a call from an ER doc whose voice is flat, exhausted, impatient, and who refers to her husband's body as it.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
That call, Brooks reflects, was the first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system. Memorial Days is a beautifully modulated cry in the wilderness, an unsentimental contribution to the ever-growing pile of secular literature about grief, in which the end of life is punctuated by a period, not an ellipsis.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Brooks converted to Judaism when she married Horowitz some three decades earlier, and though Judaism doesn't offer her the assurance of an afterlife, it endows her with a spiritual language and vision. Memorial Days alternates between the immediate time after Horwitz's death and 2023, when Brooks flies to an isolated cabin on Flinders Island, off the coast of her native Australia.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
The trip, Brooks tells us, represents an effort to escape what Hebrew scriptures call the Metsar, the narrow place. Tending to her two sons in the wake of their father's death and meeting her own writerly deadlines meant that Brooks couldn't surrender to grief. Here's how she explains the need to withdraw.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving, the right to grieve, to shut out the world and its demands. I've come to realize that my life since Tony's death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role, woman being normal. I have not allowed myself the wild wideness of an elaborate, florid, demonstrative grief.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Instead, it has been this long feeling of constriction, of holding it in and tamping it down and not letting it show. Brooks is far from clueless about the privilege that enables such a retreat. She grew up, as she tells us, in a blue-collar neighborhood of Sydney, in a house where all the furniture was secondhand.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
She arrived as a scholarship student at Columbia Journalism School, where she met Horowitz, and her life took a turn. The luxury of spending weeks alone in a cabin by the sea gives Brooks not only the time to grieve her husband, but also to grieve the life she might have lived had she never met him.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Given Brooke's own distinguished career as a novelist and journalist, it's no surprise Memorial Days is such a powerful testament of grief. But what is more of a surprise is the emergence of another subject, namely the tough reality of the writing life. Brooke says at one point that she thinks of Spying on the South as the book that killed Tony.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
She recalls that to finish it on deadline, her husband chewed boxes of Nicorette gum, nibbled Provigil, the pill developed to keep fighter pilots alert, and drank pints of coffee. At night, he countered all the stimulants with wine. Wondering how she can practically sustain her life without Horowitz, Brooks is told by a financial advisor that she'll be okay as long as she just keeps writing.
Fresh Air
What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
There's the rub. Fortunately, Brooks was able to finish her stalled novel-in-progress Horse, which was published in 2022. And fortunately, she was able to go on to write Memorial Days, a book that not only pays tribute to a loving marriage between two successful writers, but also manages to be a clear-eyed assessment of the costs of that success.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
I've always loved coming to New York stories, and judging from the acclaim that's greeted the new Bob Dylan movie, America does too. Dylan, played by Timothee Chalamet, arrives in the Greenwich Village of 1961. In no time, this complete unknown is embraced by the burgeoning folk scene of Greenwich Village, thanks in part to the city's gift of proximity.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
But I wonder about the longevity of the coming-to-New York genre. These stories of arrival and promise fulfilled are almost always nostalgic, predating the New York of obscenely high rents. And does a dreamer even need to come to New York, or any city for that matter, in the age of the internet? In a New York minute, Kay Sohini vanquished my doubts.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Her debut book, a graphic memoir called This Beautiful Ridiculous City, affirms the enduring power of New York and the power of literature to give people the courage to cross all manner of borders. Sohini is a South Asian graphic artist who grew up in the suburbs of Calcutta, living, as she says, in a sprawling ancestral house with four generations and far too many territorial people.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
From a young age, she was a loner and a reader, a reader peculiarly drawn to New York stories. Everybody writes about New York with so much tenderness, even when they are sick of it, Sohini says. And so from afar, she began to read her way into New York. Years later, Sohini broke away from a long, abusive relationship with a man who she says made a room smaller just by walking into it.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Staking her escape on little more than her years of reading and a modest fellowship to grad school, the wounded Sohini flew to New York. Through understated language and jolting comic-style images, Sohini tells a vivid, multidimensional New York story of her own. There's her odyssey, a capsule history of modern India, and always references to books, books, books.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
This beautiful, ridiculous city engages with a good slice of the essential New York City literary canon— From Anne Petrie to Fran Lebowitz, E.B. White to Dylan Thomas, Colson Whitehead, Nora Ephron, and fellow graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel. Like all these chroniclers of the city, Sohini sometimes questions her illogical attachment to such a difficult place.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
wondering if I am forever doomed to love things and people whose reciprocation is fraught with contradictions. But New York, in image and reality, saved her, and her love for the city remains hardy. One New York City writer Sohini doesn't mention is Gay Talese, who's hailed, along with Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, as a pioneer of new journalism.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Talese, now in his early 90s, has written a lot of great pieces about New York – many of which are gathered together in a new book called A Town Without Time. The very first piece Talese published in Esquire in 1960 leads off this collection. It's called New York is a City of Things Unnoticed.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Among the thousands of things Talese notices are the night workers, truck drivers, cops, hacks, cleaning ladies who line up for movies in Times Square at 8 a.m. Other essays here ruminate on the oft-overlooked Verrazano Narrows Bridge and mobster Joe Bonanno. Worth the price of this collection alone is Talese's masterpiece, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
This 1966 profile of old blue eyes packs the sparkle, fizz, and complexity of genuine New York seltzer. Here's Talese reading from the opening of that profile as originally heard on This American Life.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Just as Sohini assures us that New York still draws in dreamers, Talese reminds us that New York is already riddled with ghosts, many of them tough-talking and hard-drinking. Eight million stories and counting about the city, but still room for more.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Unprecedented surely was one of the most popular words of 2024, so it's fitting that my best books list begins with an unprecedented occurrence, two novels by authors who happen to be married to each other. James by Percival Everett reimagines Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of Jim, Huck's enslaved companion on that immortal raft ride.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Alternating mordant humor with horror, Everett makes readers understand that for Jim, here called James, the Mississippi may offer a temporary haven, But given the odds of him making it to freedom, the river will likely be a vast highway to a scary nowhere. Everett is married to Danzy Senna, whose novel Colored Television is a revelatory satire on race and class.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Senna's main character, Jane, is a mixed-race writer and college teacher struggling to finish her second novel. Desperate for money, Jane cons her way into a meeting with a Hollywood producer who's cooking up a biracial situation comedy. Disaster ensues. Senna's writing is droll and fearless. Listen to Jane's thoughts about teaching.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini-strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers, and mystical dogs. Two other novels invite readers to catch up with familiar characters.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Long Island is Colm Tobin's sequel to his 2009 bestseller, Brooklyn, whose main character, Eilish Lacey, is now trapped in a marriage and a neighborhood as stifling as the Irish town she fled. It's Tobin's omissions and restraint, the words he doesn't write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working-class Catholic world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
I've come to dread a new novel by Elizabeth Strout because I usually can't avoid putting it on my best-of-the-year list. Tell Me Everything reunites readers with writer Lucy Barton, lawyer Bob Burgess, and retired teacher Olive Kitteridge, all living in Maine.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Nobody nails the soft melancholy of the human condition like Strout, and that's a phrase she would never write because her style is so understated. Martyr is Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's debut novel about a young man named Cyrus Shams struggling to make sense of the violent death of his mother and other martyrs, accidental or deliberate, throughout history.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Akbar's tone is unexpectedly comic, his story antic, and his vision utterly original. Two literary novels on my best list are indebted to suspense fiction. Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the plastic wrap of noir. Her main character, a young woman, is a former FBI agent turned freelance spy who infiltrates a radical farming collective in France.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
You don't read Kushner for the relatability of her characters. Instead, it's her dead-on language and orange threat alert atmosphere that draw readers in. In Cahokia Jazz, Frances Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which before the arrival of Columbus was the largest urban center north of Mexico. Spufford's novel is set in an alternative America of 1922, where the peace of Cahokia's indigenous, white, and African-American populations is threatened by a grisly murder. One straightforward suspense novel sits on this list.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Liz Moore's The God of the Woods. There's a touch of gothic excess about Moore's story, beginning with the premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from a camp in the Adirondacks some 14 years apart. Moore's previous book, Long Bright River, was a superb novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
The God of the Woods is something stranger and unforgettable. Nonfiction closes out this list. I've thought about A Wilder Shore, Camille Perry's biography of the bohemian marriage of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson ever since reading it this summer. In her introduction, Perry says something that's also haunted me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
She describes her book as an intimate window into how the Stephensons lived and loved, a story that is, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life. That it is. I began this list with the word unprecedented, and I'll end it with an unprecedented voice, that of Emily Dickinson. A monumental collection of the letters of Emily Dickinson was published this year.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Edited by Dickinson scholars Chris Dan Miller and Donald Mitchell, it's the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an autobiography by the poet. Here's a thank you note Dickinson wrote in the 1860s to her beloved sister-in-law. Dear Sue, the supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a vision. 1,304 letters are collected here, and still they're not enough.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Happy holidays. Happy reading.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
In 2017, historian Judith Giesberg and her team of graduate student researchers launched a website called The Last Seen Project. It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by formerly enslaved people who hope to find family members separated by slavery. The earliest ads date from the 1830s and stretch into the 1920s.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Giesberg says that when she's given public lectures about this online archive of ads, the audience always asks the question, did they find each other? Giesberg says, I always answer the question the same way, and no one is ever satisfied with it. I don't know. Giesburg's new book, called Last Seen, is her more detailed response to the question.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
In each of the ten chapters here, she closely reads ads placed in search of lost children, mothers, wives, siblings, and even comrades who served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. Giesburg isn't trying to generate reunion stories, although there are a couple of those in this book.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Giesburg tells us the cruel reality was that the success rate of these advertisements may have been as low as 2%. Instead of happy endings, these ads offer readers something else. They serve as portals into the lived experience of slavery.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
For instance, countering the lost cause myth that enslaved people were settled on southern plantations and Texas cotton fields, the ads, which often list multiple names of white owners as a finding aid, testify to how black people were sold and resold. The ads that hit hardest are the ones that illuminate what Giesberg refers to as America's traffic in children.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Selling children away from their mothers, she says, was the rule of slavery, not the exception. Clara Bashup's story opens last scene. Bashup had been searching for her daughter and son for 30 years when she took out an ad in 1892 in the African-American newspaper, The Chicago Appeal. Here are some portions. I wish to find my daughter patience green.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
I have no trace of her since she was sold at Richmond, Virginia in 1859. She was then 12 years of age. John William Harris, my son, went with some servants after the surrender. He was 14 years old. Both belonged to Dick Christian, in name only, by whom they were sold. The language of Bashup's ad is direct and somewhat defiant.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Giesburg comments on the words in name only that Bashup appended after the name of Dick Christian, the man who owned her children. Against this legal right, Giesburg says, Clara Bashup asserted a moral and emotional one. In comparison, Giesburg unpacks the language of a human interest story aimed at white readers about Bashup's search. That story ran in the New York World newspaper.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
There, Patience is described as the missing child of an aged mother, and Dick Christian is a country gentleman. Giesburg says that white papers everywhere were publishing similar stories that threw a thick blanket of nostalgia over the history of slavery.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Another ad that speaks volumes is one posted in 1879 by Henry Tibbs in the Lost Friends column of a New Orleans paper, The Southwestern Christian Advocate. It opens, Mr. Editor, I desire some information about my mother. Tibbs recalls being put in a jail with other boys prior to being sold away. I cried, he writes.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Tibbs says he was told that if he would hush, the slave trader would bring my mother there the next morning, which he did. Mother then brought me some cake and candy, and that was the last time I saw her. Throughout Last Seen, Giesburg steps back from these individual ads to give readers the larger historical context that made them necessary.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
For instance, she reminds readers that no federal agency existed to help freed people locate loved ones after the Civil War ended— Instead, there were things like the grapevine telegraph, which she describes as a sophisticated system of surveillance by which enslaved people kept track of one another. And there were the ads, many of which were read aloud in black churches.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Those ads testify to the inner strength of people like Henry Tibbs, who was still placing ads in search of his mother when he was 55 years old.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Dreary do-gooders, a mother who runs a women's retreat center in Vermont, a 40-year-old son who represents asylum seekers and lives alone in a studio apartment in Brooklyn where the air is redolent of depression and earnestness. These are not the kind of fictional characters I'd ordinarily want to usher the new year in with. But Adam Hazlett gives me little choice.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
His latest novel, Mothers and Sons, is too beautifully written to pass over, too smart about how secrets feed on time, perversely taking up more room in our lives as the years go by. We first meet Peter Fisher, the adult lawyer's son, in the midst of one of his overwhelming work days.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
His job, as Peter ruefully sees it, is to force his clients, people who've experienced violence in other countries, to go over and over the worst thing that ever happened to them. Peter then shapes their harrowing and often convoluted stories into a narrative that will hopefully persuade a judge to grant them asylum.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
A gay man, Peter limits himself to sporadic hookups that don't interfere with his work, work, work. Occasionally, Peter finds himself thinking back to a question he was asked by an older lawyer at his long-ago job interview. What if, in the big picture, you aren't actually helping?
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
What if you're a bureaucrat in an endless moral disaster, but if you walk away, the disaster will be a tiny bit worse? Will you still do it? Peter didn't know then, and doesn't know now, what the value of his work is in the big picture of things. That is, until a new client, a 21-year-old gay Albanian man seeking asylum on the grounds of his sexual orientation, pushes Peter into a crisis.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
While meeting with him, Peter feels a sudden deep fatigue, strong as a potion. He subsequently locks himself out of his apartment twice and experiences vertigo. A memory is forcing its way to the surface that impels Peter to contact his mother, Anne. She's the woman who runs that retreat center.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Anne and Peter have been quietly distanced for decades, ever since she left Peter's father for her current partner, a woman. But as it turns out, the estrangement between this mother and son is rooted in something much more devastating.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
I fear I'm flattening Mothers and Sons into a melodrama when instead it's Hazlett's appreciation of the all-too-human mess of life that makes his writing so arresting, his characters and storylines so authentic. Midway through the novel, Hazlett bends the narrative back in time to Peter's adolescence, an era when coming out felt riskier, especially to Peter himself.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Remembering the night he first had sex with another man, an indifferent stranger, the adult Peter thinks to himself, how full of shame it is to be lonely. Hazlett scatters such sentences throughout this novel, sentences that can make you stop and go down emotional rabbit holes of your own.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Another one of Hazlett's triumphs here is the way he makes the work his two main characters do so engrossing. Both Peter and Anne, who's a former priest turned lay counselor, are engaged in the hard work of listening. Here are samplings of Anne's thoughts during an extended scene where she and two of her co-workers listen to a hospital chaplain describe how burned out she is.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
It was in these moments, after a person finished her first unburdening of why she had sought out the center, that the urge to soothe came most strongly to Anne. But to speak immediately would be to glide over the heaviness in the room, in this case a story about the passage of time and the aging of a vocation.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
People barely had room to grieve the loss of others, let alone pieces of themselves, and yet, unmourned, such fragments were bound to haunt. Mothers and Sons is an intricate, compelling novel about the power of stories and especially about the need to let go of those stories that keep people stuck. Maybe in that sense, it's a fitting novel for the new year after all.