TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. One of the last actions of the extremist left-wing groups with roots in the 1960s was the Brink's robbery of 1981. Two militant groups, one, an offshoot of the Weather Underground, the other an offshoot of the Black Panthers, robbed a Brink's armored truck carrying over a million and a half dollars. It ended in a shootout in which one security guard and two police officers were killed. Judith Clark was a getaway driver who was sentenced to 75 years to life. It meant leaving behind her 11-month-old daughter. That daughter, Harriet Clark, is my guest. She's just published a novel that draws from her own experiences being raised by her grandparents and visiting her mother in prison every weekend for most of the 37 years her mother was incarcerated. It required traveling about an hour from New York City to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for women.
Harriet knew her mother would never get out, but she did get out after being granted clemency and released on parole in 2019. Harriet Clark's new novel is called "The Hill," a reference to the prison in the novel being on top of a hill. It's her first novel. She received the Paris Reviews Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Wallace Stegner program.
Harriet Clark, welcome to FRESH AIR. And congratulations on the book. You're an incredible writer, and I'm glad that you wrote this.
HARRIET CLARK: It is an absolute trip and thrill to be speaking with you. And I'm so grateful to be on this show. Thank you.
GROSS: I'm honored to hear you say that.
CLARK: (Laughter).
GROSS: I want to start with a reading that I think will help set up your story and your mother's story. And this is from pretty early in the book when Suzanna, the child, the main character, is leaving the dentist's office with her grandfather. And her grandfather has just had one of his teeth capped. So this is as they're leaving.
CLARK: (Reading) My mother had robbed a bank, the first woman said. No, the second woman said, my mother had expropriated funds for the purpose of revolutionary struggle. The woman's tone suggested that she was possibly defending my mother and possibly mocking her. When my grandfather emerged dazed and swollen, it did not seem right to press for explanation. But he must've heard what the woman said, or the anesthesia must've caused his mind to wander, because on the drive home, he spoke to me for the first time about my mother's crime.
(Reading) A misguided attempt, he called it, to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Then an elaborate explanation of the insurance mechanisms of banks and further clarification that many people had money in banks, not just the rich. When this lecture got into the weeds, he shifted gears into another regarding imperialism, racism, militarism, also materialism, all the things he said that he and my mother opposed and that, he assured me, I opposed as well. His face was very close to the steering wheel - your mother took it too far.
GROSS: How old were you when you first learned why your mother was in prison? How was it explained to you?
CLARK: I don't have a memory of coming into awareness of my mother's crime. It must've been explained to me. But I don't recall who explained it. My mother made clear from when I was very young that she was in prison because she had been part of something that cost three men their lives. So I think I knew from before I even knew what I knew that people had died and that my mother was in prison because of that. And she, in that sense, always raised me to understand that in some ways, she was guilty, and that was why she was in prison, and that she would always be there. But I'm not actually sure who explained to me the details of the crime.
GROSS: When you found out that she was part of a revolutionary group and that the robbery was supposed to support the revolutionary cause, what did you make of that? Did you know enough about politics when you learned that? Did you know enough about radical movements and where this robbery fit in?
CLARK: Yes and no (laughter). Unlike Suzanna, I continued to have a relationship to the women in my mother's collective. I had a half-sister, and so I returned to that collective every three weeks for the weekend. And they were still very actively political. And so I did grow up inside a far more political atmosphere than Suzanna does. She's really in the aftermath of politics, and I grew up inside active organizing. So I think I did understand something about the particular movements and commitments they had.
But again, you know, for 40 years, every conversation I ever had with my mother occurred in a crowded room that was surveyed by officers or on a phone line that was recorded. And so we didn't have the privacy to talk about some of the things that might've been hardest to talk about. And for most of my life, you know, my mother had to make prison a place I wanted to come to. You know, our visits had to be enjoyable. And so in that sense, too, it was very rare that we were sitting there getting into the nitty-gritty of her crime, especially when I was young. You know, fundamentally, she was trying to play with me and have fun with me and let me feel close to her.
GROSS: Would you describe how the prison looked to you as a child?
CLARK: I think, fundamentally, the prison looked to me like a hill (laughter). It's hard for me to remember what the prison looked like to me as a child because I went there for almost 40 years, and it changed a lot. In that 40 years, it became much more prison-like. You know, it had initially been a reformatory for women. And so they would have, when I was very young, you know, these brick buildings that actually didn't look too terrifying.
And then, of course, over the years, it became much more, more and more barbed wire and gun tower and whatnot. But I think that primarily my memories of the prison from when I was a child, I was trying as minimally as possible to interact with the space. And I primarily was interacting with the people. So, you know, I knew all the officers out front. And so the experience of approaching the prison felt less like approaching a building, or a series of buildings, and more like approaching a series of people and processes I was about to engage with.
GROSS: The prison was like your home, or your second home, because you were there every Saturday. Suzanna, in your novel...
CLARK: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...Vows to keep returning there for the rest of her mother's life, since the assumption was she was going to be there for the rest of her life. And that gives Suzanna a sense of security, of routine, of safety and of purpose, and, of course, of connection with her mother. Did you feel that way, too?
CLARK: I mean, yes and no. I think that there is a way that the prison was a holding container for me and is meant to be a holding container for Suzanna. I think, in the prison, she's existing inside patterns that really do give a certain kind of steadiness to her life. Whereas, actually, I think one of the things that makes prison in real life quite difficult is that they're always changing things on you. You know, they don't want you to be stabilized and steady. The point is a certain kind of perpetual instability so that they can enact control over you. So I could wear the exact same outfit one week to the next, and they could say, nope, those sleeves are too short. You can't come in.
So actually, my experience wasn't quite as steady as Suzanna's is. Though I do think that I had an experience of peacefulness by virtue of the fact that I knew nothing was ever going to change, you know? My mother had been in there as far back as I could remember and she was going to be in there forever. And so that felt like a kind of steady peace for me, and made me feel different than the great difficulties the kids around me were in.
GROSS: Was it a good feeling to know she would be there forever? I mean, it was prison. On the other hand, she was always there. She was always waiting for you. You always knew where to find her.
CLARK: Yes. I think that I did experience myself as having a peace that the children around me did not have because, you know, most children lose their mothers to prison within their active awareness. You know, they had a mother at home. Most women in prison were the primary caregivers for their children. Most women in prison are mothers. And so they lost their mothers. And that is obviously an incredible trauma that I felt fundamentally spared.
And most kids, even though their mothers often had long sentences, their mothers were actively trying to come home. And I never envied that. It seemed like another form of torture to me, the way these kids were always hoping. You know, they would - at the end of visiting hours, they would say, will you be there this weekend for my recital? And some of the women would say, I'll try, you know? Or will you be able to be there for my graduation? There was always this possibility on the horizon that, to me, seemed so torturous. And so I felt grateful to be spared a certain kind of hope and waiting.
GROSS: You know, I was thinking that writing the novel was in a way of, like, staying visiting your mother in prison. It took you about 20 years, I think...
CLARK: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...To finish. It's not like it was the only thing you were doing, but you...
CLARK: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...Worked on it for 20 years until you felt like you got it right. And so for those 20 years, like, you were, like, living in prison (laughter). And so there were many years after your mother got out when you were still, in your writing life, in prison. And did you want to be there? Do you feel like there were still things you had to work out, or that you weren't ready yet to leave that part of your life or to feel like you comprehended that part of your life?
CLARK: A hundred percent. I think that that's true both with the prison, especially my childhood experience of the prison. The book allowed me to stay inside rooms and atmospheres that were still bewildering to me, that I was still kind of working something through about. But I really felt that in terms of my grandparents and their friends. You know, they had been my entire life until my grandmother passed away when I was 16, but by the time I was 19, every single one of their friends, who had been very, very present parts of my life, every single one of them had passed away. And so an entire world I had lived inside was gone. And it felt to me like I was, 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 (laughter), you know, 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 (ph).
GROSS: My guest is Harriet Clark. Her new novel is called "The Hill." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOOKER ERVIN'S "THE BLUE BOOK")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Harriet Clark. Her new novel, "The Hill," is based on her experiences visiting her mother in prison each weekend for about 37 years.
Did you do research for the book? Did you go back and read news reports contemporaneous with the Brink's robbery that your mother participated in?
CLARK: 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 and - about lots of things, you know? 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. 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 Suzanna is inside.
And that, I think, is a dominant quality to lots of people's childhoods, you know? 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.
GROSS: As part of my research for this interview, I read an article in The New York Times from early in your mother's incarceration, and it was a profile of her. And it describes her as reluctant to have participated in the Brink's robbery because you were a baby, but she felt she needed to prove her commitment to the revolutionary cause. She was in the getaway car. She didn't see the shooting. The money was thrown into the car. And the Brink's truck was carrying, like, $1.6 million. I don't know how much was actually stolen. And she portrays herself as a very kind of insecure driver and a really bad...
CLARK: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...Getaway driver and doesn't really know where she's going, and I think maybe gets in a little accident at the end.
CLARK: Yes.
GROSS: So did you read that? I don't know how much she told you. I don't know how much she wanted to talk about participating in the robbery and being the getaway driver. So, like, the more you learn, how did it affect your opinion of your mother?
CLARK: 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 Suzanna in terms of a kind of willful unknowingness. I mean, I have made myself understand better the details of my mother's crime. But one of the things I had wanted to dramatize in the book - you know, there's a chapter where the grandmother, who believes you should look things in the face - you know, she's always saying to Suzanna, do you go out of your way to know nothing? (Laughter) And Suzanna keeps saying, yes, you know? And that's a lot what the book is about - you know, what feels so threatening about knowing things about our loved ones, like knowing their mistakes or their sufferings or their histories.
GROSS: You know, in the novel, the grandmother really doesn't want the burden - 'cause it feels like a burden - of raising Suzanna after Suzanna's mother's in prison. Is that the vibe you got from your grandmother - that she wanted to be free but she was tied down taking care of you?
CLARK: You know, the older I get, the sadder it is to me how little I knew my grandmother, not only because she died almost 30 years ago, but also because I really knew her in the wake of the two greatest tragedies of her life, which were her daughter's life imprisonment and then her husband - her great love's - death. And so I think I knew my grandmother in incredibly grief-stricken years. And so my grandmother did have a certain atmosphere around her of clearly being somewhat embattled with the life she had, but it's hard for me to source exactly where those feelings came from.
And I will say, the grandmother in the book is not my grandmother, but also, the fundamental thing I had wanted to dramatize in that book was, you know, my grandmother did not want the life we had, and to some extent, I did. I loved my grandmother and she felt like my whole life. And so, you know, there's a moment in the chapter where the grandmother is fantasizing about how their life should be if the mother hadn't committed the crime, and Suzanna says, I want to live with you, and the grandmother says, then you're wishing a man dead. And I think that was a real conundrum to me in my life - that sense of how can I value my life if it's based off of a tragedy and suffering by so many other people? And so that was one thing that I felt I was trying to look at in the chapter.
And also, this - the fact that my grandmother and I did have this difference because she always knew we were inside a tragedy. She always felt this should not be as it is. And I fundamentally did accept the life I had and still found much of it meaningful and delightful, even.
GROSS: I recently interviewed Zayd Ayers, who's the son of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were two leaders of the militant left-wing group the Weather Underground. And so Zayd wrote a memoir about growing up underground because his parents, early in his life, had, like, fake identities. They were basically in hiding underground. So one of the themes in his book is if his parents knew that they were going to continue as revolutionaries who were going to be doing revolutionary acts that could easily get them in prison, why did they decide to have a child, knowing that they could be locked away for years? And I'm wondering how much you thought about that too.
CLARK: You know, it's interesting because from the outside, people have often been struck by my mother's abandonment of me. And I know that that is touched on - this idea of the mother abandoning her child is touched on often in the book. But my actual lived experience was of my mother's profound devotion to me because, you know, most people have to share their mothers with the world. You know, their moms have partners and jobs and other kids and friends. And every time I saw my mother, all she was doing was giving me attention. I was her whole world. And so I didn't have the feeling of being abandoned by my mother in my kind of conscious reality. I'm sure something in me did feel fundamentally abandoned in life. I think I've always felt somewhat precarious. But I didn't feel abandoned by my mother. And I - because her love for me was so present, it was never confusing to me why she'd had a child. I could see how much she wanted a child. I could see how much she loved me.
And I was also - you know, if you're raised in a women's maximum-security facility, you're raised around women who are perpetually being demothered, whose mothering is being disrespected, and I've never wanted to imply that my mother was less of a mother to me because she had other commitments. My experience is not that she's less of a mother. I think she's an incredible mother. I think she figured out how to mother me in some of the most difficult conditions possible. And so I think because I've never felt like I had a second-class mothering experience, it doesn't feel to me like, why did she even bother having a child if it was going to be under these conditions? I knew she loved me and wanted me, and I knew it was the great tragedy of her life not to be able to be around me all the time.
GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Harriet Clark. Her new novel is called "The Hill." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELA FLECK, EDGAR MEYER AND MIKE MARSHALL'S "TRAVIS")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Harriet Clark. Her new novel, "The Hill," draws on her own experiences. When she was 11 months old in 1981, her mother, Judy Clark, drove a getaway car in the armed robbery of a Brink's truck carrying over $1.5 million. Judy was part of a militant revolutionary group that was an offshoot of the militant revolutionary group the Weather Underground. The robbery was in collaboration with a radical group that was an offshoot of the Black Panthers. The goal was to raise money for the revolutionary causes they stood for. One guard and two police officers were killed in a shootout. For most of the 37 years Judy was in prison, Harriet spent every Saturday visiting her.
Until you were 8, when your grandfather died, he drove you to the prison every weekend. And you'd spend the time with your mother. And there was a children's room where you could be with her. Was that considered, like, an important reform in the prison? I think not all prisons had that, and I think your mother's prison didn't have it forever either.
CLARK: I mean, it is one of the greatest pieces of good fortune in my life that my mother's prison had that room, because I was able to want to see my mother because the environment in which I saw her could be playful. So there's a large visiting room that has dozens of tables. And then in the back of that room, separated by this kind of large plastic wall, is a carpeted room that has lots of toys and games, and just places you can sit on the floor so that you don't have to be at these kind of stern separating tables. And it is run by women within the prison. In the book, it's run by nuns, but that's not accurate to the actual children's center. It was run by women inside.
And so you can play with your mother. Your mother can touch you. Your mother can read to you. You can, as much as possible, still be a kid with your mother. You know, they try as much as possible to keep the officers out of that room so you're not having a sense of constant surveillance. But eventually, you know, the last 20, 25 years were spent in the other room, where you just have to sit at the table and talk to each other, which, luckily, my mother and I are incredibly good at.
GROSS: After your grandfather died when you were 8, a nun from the prison took on the responsibility of picking you up and driving you to and from the prison every weekend. Was that a responsibility she took on herself? Was she assigned that? It seems so wonderful and unusual.
CLARK: Well, I'm glad you think it's wonderful and unusual because it's made up. It's part of the novel.
GROSS: Oh, I thought that really happened.
CLARK: No.
GROSS: I thought I'd read that happened.
CLARK: No. There was an amazing nun at my mom's prison, but - and she did occasionally drive me to the prison. And she did many heroic things. When my mother was transferred when I was 6 to Tucson, Arizona, she actually flew me to Arizona to help enable me to visit my mother because those visits were so hard for my grandparents. And so there was a nun who played a profoundly healing role in connecting me and my mother and also connecting my mother and my grandparents. But most of my rides to the prison after my grandfather died actually happened from the women in my mother's collective, both because they stepped in to help make sure we had that relationship and because it was a way that they could continue to see me.
GROSS: Did they stay revolutionaries?
CLARK: (Laughter) I would say every member of my family remains committed to opposing how oppressive and unjust the current systems of our country are and to imagining more just systems. So, yes, they have all remained political. They all use their retirement to do, you know, organizing on behalf of collective movements. My mother, too, has remained political. You know, she was an organizer before she went in, and she was an organizer when she was inside.
She organized a huge amount in there, in terms of the college program and parenting programs and an AIDS counseling program. And so, in that sense, she was a revolutionary in the prison, too. You know, she's always thinking about how we can create better conditions for people's lives. And the prison really demanded that. And it's the work she does out of prison. So, yes, you know, I don't consider (laughter) any member of my family an ideologue anymore. But I do consider them profoundly committed people.
GROSS: And when you talk about your family, you're talking in part about the collective...
CLARK: Yes.
GROSS: ...That your mother was a part of. And the collective raised you for the first five years of your life. It's interesting you still think of them as your family.
CLARK: When my grandmother died, I went back to live with two of the women from the collective. And they've always been my family. They're my primary family now because I don't have my grandparents in that particular part of my family from my youth. So, yes, I very much consider my extended family my family. I feel very lucky. You know, Suzanna's life is quite narrow in the book. But I was very lucky. And when I fell out of conventional nuclear care structures, I really did fall into a vast network of care. You know, it's the two truths of my life that something in me has been and felt somewhat orphaned, and something in me has been incredibly well cared for by a very large number of people (laughter).
GROSS: I want to hear more about the nun who worked at the prison and who helped you get to Arizona to visit your mother when she was transferred to a prison there.
CLARK: Yes, that also was one of the great blessings of my life, was to be raised with Sister Elaine, which thousands of children whose mothers were in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, this was one of the blessings in their life as well, for many reasons - both because, structurally, she created the children's center and the nursery and the programs that made us be able to have, you know, the good times we could have with our mothers. But, fundamentally, Sister Elaine, she walked into that prison every day, and part of what you saw was how much she respected our mothers. You saw her take delight in them.
You saw she always said, oh, my gosh, your mother loved you so much. Oh, my gosh, your mother showed me this picture. Your mother showed me this drawing. Everything she did was to make it clear, I respect the relationship you and your mother still have. I respect your mother. And that is incredibly important in an environment where what you are seeing constantly is your mother being degraded. You know, I think even some of your questions have to do with how critical I am of my mother. And the truth of the matter is I think my mother will have to be out of prison a very long time before I could take a fully critical look because it's very, very painful to be raised where your parent is perpetually being criticized, degraded and controlled around you. You feel protective of them. And I think kids feel protective of their moms in prison, and we knew that Sister Elaine felt protective of them too - that she was - sometimes felt like the only protective force in there. And so she was just this experience of lightness in a very dark place, and really gave me a way of understanding how you forbear in dark places.
GROSS: You came to think of prison as collective punishment because the whole family is being punished.
CLARK: It is collective punishment. I don't think of it that way (laughter). It is collective punishment. I mean, when I say that prison is collective punishment, I mean - you know, and there's this very tricky balance in the book where, on the one hand, I'm trying to communicate that degrading conditions are degrading. These are forms of deforming people's lives - not just the people inside, but the people who love them. You know, I didn't want to have a wedding because I didn't want my mother to not be there. I didn't want to have a child because I didn't want that child to grow up in prison like I had, you know? And so I feel like one part of me did want to show this is a system that's impacting millions and millions and millions of people across this country. And on the other hand, you know, you have to show that people resist their own degradation and that they're vaster than the circumstances they're in and they do fight for meaningful lives.
GROSS: My guest is Harriet Clark. Her new novel is called "The Hill." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF RHYTHM FUTURE QUARTET'S "IBERIAN SUNRISE")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Harriet Clark. Her new novel, "The Hill," is based on her experiences visiting her mother in prison on weekends for about 37 years. She was a getaway driver when members of radical offshoots of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers robbed a Brink's truck in 1981. It ended in a shootout, leaving two police officers and a security guard dead.
Your mother's sentence was commuted and she was released on parole in 2019. Was there a campaign for her release? Did you campaign for it?
CLARK: I did not campaign enough. You know, I - my consciousness was entirely shaped by the knowledge that my mother would be in forever. You know, one of the differences between me and my mother is that she wasn't in prison her whole life and I was, you know? So if I - you know, if things happened when I was in - you know, coming to visit her and, you know, something happened and they made the visitors wait for hours outside in difficult ways, you know, my mother would say, you need to lodge a complaint. You need to do something. And I never would because I was institutionalized. I did accept things as they were, and I had accepted my mother was going to be in forever. And I think I just couldn't ever really rouse myself to believe she was going to get out.
It - you know, in that way, I feel like of the many extraordinary changes brought about by my mother's release, one is that I will never have the arrogance of thinking something is impossible again. You know, I had a fundamental skepticism that has now been humbled. So when other things (laughter) seem like they stand no chance, I kind of think, well, your mother got free, you know? So much is possible when people come together to try to make something happen.
GROSS: When your mother got out of prison, did she live with you at first?
CLARK: No. She's never lived with me. And actually, you know, I think that many people - my mother included, I think - did expect that we would be making up for lost time, you know? But actually, because I was so shaped by my mother's imprisonment, you know, it's, like, my whole life - my whole life as a child, as an adult - I could never call my mother, you know? I have no memory of ever wanting to - of having something upsetting happen and wishing I could call her or having something exciting happen. I just never - I knew I couldn't call her and I didn't want to call her. And now, of course, she's like any mother and she's like, why don't you ever call me? - you know?
So I think that maybe she and others thought, you know, now we would be together all the time, but actually, it's, like, I'm kind of this awkward teenager having to learn for the first time how to, you know, get my mom to leave the house so I can drink with my friends.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: You went to college outside of New York, and grad school. Did you feel guilty for not being in New York where your mother was - not being able to visit her on weekends?
CLARK: I remember the last visit I had with my mother before I moved to California, and I do remember feeling very heavy leaving. You know, it wasn't just that every week of my growing up I visited my mother in prison. It was also that every week of my growing up I left my mother in prison, you know? So I have a very strong muscle memory of what it feels like to walk out of the visiting room and down the hill. And, you know, you're feeling the prison at your back, you're feeling your mother at your back, the women there. And there's this kind of, like, presence you're carrying with you on the walk to the train and on the train, and you're thinking of them, and you're thinking of them until you're not, you know? Until you're in the free world and you forget to think about them. And that's actually a terrible feeling.
And anytime I could get a ride from my mother's prison, I often would fall asleep, you know, so that I could kind of wrap up my life inside with sleep and then wake up in the free world. And I remember very much the visit where I was leaving my mother to move to California, and I remember wanting very much to be able to fall asleep - of kind of wanting a break from this consciousness before I woke up in the next one.
GROSS: Did you know your father?
CLARK: Yes. Not really when I was young. He was underground when I was very young, and then he was in prisons, where I very minimally visited him until I was 12. So I really only got to know him when my grandmother was dying.
GROSS: Were you able to build a relationship with him?
CLARK: Yes. And I feel very grateful about that because throughout my whole childhood, you know, he was supposed to initially just be my sperm donor. He had never signed on to be my father. It was only once my mother was in prison and my father was underground that the collective and the parents involved decided my sister and I should have each other. And so for most of my life, I referred to him as my sister's father, which, for the most part, I still do, but he was a really incredible man. He had incredible courage. And he's - he was very different from my mother.
And so I think that when he first got out and came into my life, he had a very different analysis of their behaviors and a different relationship to politics than my mother did. And initially, I think that that was hard for me, but I feel very grateful now to have had both their influences and to - I mean, he had had cancer when he was inside multiple times, and, you know, if he hadn't been a doctor, the way they treated him would have killed him. And so he had spent a lot of time after he got out trying to bring attention to the medical mistreatment in prisons, and he was just a remarkably committed person. So now it feels like a great gift that I can think of him as my father because I'm very proud to have him as my father.
GROSS: So you spent 20 years - not - that's not all you did, but...
CLARK: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...Over the course of 20 years, you were writing this book. You kept rewriting it. Why did it take 20 years?
CLARK: I say in my acknowledgments that writing the story - the book - was really a cover story for wanting time to myself. And I think for many years, that was the case, until 2017, when Trump came into office the first time. And that was when I decided - I think in part because, you know, he had the family separation policy at the border, and I was seeing people have this rightful outrage at having kids taken from their mothers' arms, and I really shared that outrage, but I was also a little bewildered, you know? Like, don't you know that this is happening every day at jails and prisons all over this country? You know, all detention is family separation.
And that was when I realized maybe people didn't know how massive this was, and that was the first time I thought, oh, I'm going to write a book. And when I saw this footage of parents carrying their children hundreds of miles, you know, on their backs and in their arms, I knew that this was heroism. You know, I knew that I was seeing the heroes' journey and that these were people calling on extraordinary reserves in themselves to try to keep their family together. And I realized that, you know, the protagonist of my stories, who never seemed to really do anything, I thought - I realized, actually, she also was a hero. You know, she was doing something incredibly difficult. She was resisting the great forces of separation, prison and death to try to keep her family together. And so once I knew she was a hero, then I - then the story had a shape and I could finally write a book.
GROSS: Harriet Clark, thank you...
CLARK: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...So much for talking with us.
CLARK: Thank you so much for having me. It really - it's a great honor.
GROSS: Harriet Clark's new novel is called "The Hill."
After we take a short break, rock critic Ken Tucker will review two new albums that draw on rock's past for their sources of inspiration. This is FRESH AIR.
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