[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the latest novel from author Katie Kitamura, a woman's life is upended by a young man named Xavier. Our protagonist is a successful actor who is working on a new play. She is struggling a bit to find her character. Her marriage to her husband Tomas might also be in danger. There was infidelity in the past. Then this young man named Xavier enters her life. Xavier claims that he might be the woman's long-lost son. The only problem is she never had a son. Did she? Soon, Xavier will become a key part of her life and her marriage. What is the truth of their relationship?

The novel is titled Audition. It's full of twists and turns, and the second half leaves you questioning everything you thought you knew. Audition was our Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. Katie Kitamura joined us for a live in-person event at the NYPL, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Here's some of our conversation.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Before we get to the questions about the book, I am curious about the way you write. Do you have a studio? Do you write every day? Do you write about prompts? How do you start?

Katie Kitamura: Well, for a really long time, my desk was in my bedroom, and for a really long time, it was wedged between the closet and my baby's crib. I was really kind of writing from the middle of my life. Lately, I have a separate office for the first time. It's almost too much pressure. I sit down and I feel like I've really got to generate something on the page. I write when I can, to be honest. I wish it was every day. In a dream world, it would be every day. Much more, it's whenever I have a moment. I've become quite good about now, just slipping into the world of a novel. It feels like an escape from everything else, and I take a lot of pleasure in it.

Alison Stewart: What was the first seed of the idea for Audition?

Katie Kitamura: Quite a long time ago, maybe even a decade ago, I saw a headline that read, A Stranger Told Me He Was My Son. I was immediately captivated by the premise and I think also just the syntactical quality of the sentence. A stranger and son seem like mutually exclusive things. I was puzzling over it, trying to figure out how it could be more than just a headline and become a novel.

I happened to go for a walk with a friend of mine whose son is a bit older than my children, whose son is in his 20s. She said, "That's just a description of motherhood. Every time my son comes home, it's like a stranger has walked in the door." I remember thinking, that's a novel I want to write. I want to write a book about how some very universal experiences of motherhood, of marriage, of making art, contain within them something that feels incommensurate, something that feels oppositional.

Alison Stewart: Does that worry you?

Katie Kitamura: As a mother?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Katie Kitamura: I've always been interested in moments when you look at somebody you feel you know very intimately and they appear to you like a stranger. The thing I realized is that in a marriage, for example, that feels like a dangerous moment. I think in a relationship with a child, that feels like a very necessary moment. The process of a child becoming a stranger to their parent is another word for growing up. I think it's something that maybe writing the book has made me understand is something that I will need to see my children go through. That process of letting go, of letting children have their own inner life, their private life, is actually a very, very big part of parenting.

Alison Stewart: How did you know that you wanted to write about an actor?

Katie Kitamura: I had written a couple of books in which the idea of performance was kind of subtly in there. I wrote a book called A Separation, which is about a woman who is separated from her husband when he goes missing and then eventually is found dead. For the remainder of the book, she acts out the part of a grieving widow, even though that's not exactly who she is. This idea of performance, what it reveals about who you are and how you relate to other people, is something I think I've been kind of dancing around a little bit. I think with this novel, I thought I may as well just go for it and put it directly on the page.

Alison Stewart: Before we started talking, you told me that you are friends with Marjan Neshat, the Tony-nominated actor from English, and that she was on your mind when you were writing this book.

Katie Kitamura: She was. She's an extraordinary actor. I hope everybody here will have the opportunity to see her work. She's currently nominated for a Tony for English. She was also in a wonderful play by the same playwright, Sanaz Toossi, called Wish You Were Here. She is extraordinarily gifted. I met her right when I moved to New York in 2009. It's really been wonderful to see her engage with work. She has, as I'm sure you know from having spoken to her, an extraordinary intellect, but a very questing one. That's how I think about it.

She's always digging, pushing, exploring. She has a very restless intellect, it seems to me, when she's thinking about acting, when she's thinking about character. That was something I really wanted for my central narrator, somebody who was always going to be pushing against the limits of a part, wondering what it could be, seeing it as something mutable and changeable.

I think also I found myself thinking a lot about what is made available to actors. It's different from writing. When you're writing, you can make the work by yourself, and even if nobody's reading it, you can still make the work. Acting, you have to be given the parts, and I think you have to be given parts of a certain quality, perhaps. I think the collaboration between Marjan and Sanaz Toossi, this playwright, has been really an extraordinary one to watch, and I think we're so lucky to have it unfolding in our city because it's given her a terrain to really showcase her extraordinary gifts as an actor.

Alison Stewart: When you were saying about actors being given apart, I was thinking about a place in the book, I hope I underlined it, talking about how she could change her name. Her agents told her to change her name because she would get more parts as opposed to being a whole, but she doesn't change her name.

Katie Kitamura: The character in the novel is Asian American, and there is a reference to the fact that the parts that are available to her are flat in some way, that she often feels that she's being given parts that are reinforcing certain stereotypes, characters that are often literally silent, that are at the margins. Then over the course of her career, there is a kind of shift in the culture, which is, I think, something that we've seen fairly recently.

This cast of English, I think many of them, the two actresses who are nominated for Tony's are the first female Iranian-American actors to ever be nominated for Tony, and that's 2025. I think the character in the novel is part of this wave of actors who have undergone that path from having parts that have felt perhaps quite thin and prone to racial stereotype to a more expansive way of being able to work.

Alison Stewart: You let us know that she's a woman of color, but you don't give her a name.

Katie Kitamura: I don't. [laughs] I've now written three novels with unnamed female narrators. Sometimes people ask me if I know their names. The truth is, I don't know their names. I don't have a secret name for any of them. Naming is really interesting because naming, I think, gives a lot of information about a character. It often can position a character in a very precise social category. I'm interested in people who can't be contained by a social category for ill or for good.

Often my characters are people who feel themselves uncertain of where they are in the world, who are trying to figure out exactly how they are perceived, where they fit in. Part of not giving them a name allows me to heighten that sense of being in between.

Alison Stewart: Are we supposed to trust her as a narrator?

[laughter]

Katie Kitamura: Well, I think you can trust her as much as she trusts herself, which is maybe not all that much. I would say one thing. I did not write in first person for quite some time. I didn't start writing in first person until my third novel. For a long time, I think I had a kind of nervousness around first person precisely because of this trope of the unreliable narrator and the narrator who might be, in some way, manipulating the reader.

I think as a writer, I have a lot of trouble with authority. I have a lot of trouble with inhabiting the role of authority. The idea of being a writer who is manipulating the reader makes me uneasy in some way. The characters are unreliable, but they're not manipulative to me. I think she is trying to figure things out, maybe alongside the reader. I would say that.

Alison Stewart: Did the story always have this sort of two-act structure?

Katie Kitamura: It didn't. I wrote about 30 pages of this novel in a much more straightforward way. It was a couple without a child who met a charismatic young man who found his way into their lives. Then what I imagined is that they would slip into role-playing, the fantasy of being a family together. I wrote about 30 pages, and I could see all the way through to the end of the book. I thought, "I know how to write that book."

There's something for me about writing when I can see the end, when I can see all the steps leading up to the end, that suddenly feels like I'm not taking enough of a risk. I think that was when the idea of really directly enacting this idea of oppositions and incommensurability in the structure of the book occurred to me, and this idea of doing a big jump in the second half presented itself. For much of the writing, I did find myself saying, "I don't know if this will work." That was what made it exciting for me to write.

Alison Stewart: You like a challenge, then?

Katie Kitamura: [laughs] I like a challenge. Even more than a challenge as a writer, what I like as a reader is when I feel that the writer has skin in the game, in some way, when the writer is taking a risk. I think the thing I don't love as a reader is when, and I feel like I can sniff it, when the writer knows they can do the book, when they know they can do everything that's necessary to make the book work. I like it a little bit when I see a writer taking a big risk. It's almost more interesting to see me-- Sorry, that was a slip. It's almost more interesting to see a writer take a big chance and maybe fail a little bit than watch a writer just do what they know they're able to do and execute it perfectly.

Alison Stewart: The narrator is in a play. She's a veteran actress. Everyone thinks she's doing an okay job with it, except for her. She doesn't think so. What about her performance doesn't she like?

Katie Kitamura: One of the pleasures of writing about acting in this book was it was an opportunity for me to talk a little bit about writing. I think my experience of writing a novel is that when you start, it feels like a limitless horizon, in some way. The horizon seems so distant, the plane seems limitless. The possibilities of the book seem so expansive. As you write, the horizon of the book gets smaller and smaller and smaller, and then eventually you have the book that you've written.

I think as a writer, you always know when you haven't fully inhabited or exhausted the possibilities of the book. It might be a good book, but if it's not a book that has fully utilized or maximized everything that is possible in the premise or the parameters or the voice or the character, whatever it is, then to me, that feels like a book that has maybe not completely succeeded. I think that is what is frustrating her about the part that she's doing. Everybody's telling her she's doing wonderfully, that it works, but she has a sense that she's been given a rare opportunity to do something special, and she hasn't been able to fully inhabit the part and bring everything to life as she would like to.

Alison Stewart: She's also in the middle of her life. What's interesting to you about a woman in the middle?

Katie Kitamura: It was a very deliberate choice to write about a character who was in the middle of her life, in the middle of her career, in the middle of her marriage. I think as a culture, we do tend to prioritize the beginning and the end. I myself have written a novel that is about the beginning of a relationship, and I've written a novel about the end of the relationship.

It's true that, conventionally, there's a lot of narrative tension in the beginning of a relationship or towards the end, but a lot happens in the middle as well, in the middle of a relationship and also the middle of a life. It strikes me that the coming-of-age narrative is very well established. In fact, in this novel, there is a strand of this young man who has a coming-of-age as an artist. He starts the book as somebody who's not entirely sure of who he is or what kind of work he wants to make. Then at the end of the book, he is emerged as an artist of a kind.

I think that's a story that we are quite familiar with and we're quite comfortable with as a culture. I think the story of what happens to a woman in the middle of her life, quite surprisingly, remains somewhat under-explored. There have been some really wonderful, I think are being called, menopause novels. The big--

Alison Stewart: Miranda July?

Katie Kitamura: Miranda July. Right, exactly. All Fours would be the primary example. There's also a wonderful novel by Dana Spiotta called Wayward. These are novels that feel completely revolutionary in a way, precisely because this period in a woman's life, which has been happening for many, many years, has not really had that kind of creative and artistic exploration. That was, I think, a big part of what I was interested in. As a writer, the terrain that has not been fully occupied is always an interesting place to go.

Alison Stewart: What about the marriage in this novel? When we first meet them, what's the state of the marriage between Tomas and then protagonist?

Katie Kitamura: I think it's a good marriage, I hope. I wanted to write a book where you would never question that the two people loved each other. I guess people in the room could tell me whether I've succeeded. You would never want to question whether or not they loved each other, and you would never want to question whether or not they would stay together. It's an interesting challenge as a writer. What happens when you remove those two questions, which are the big questions that tend to be the motor for any relationship story, is do they love each other? Will they stay together? Will they get together?

I think there's as much narrative drama and tension and mutability and volatility in the middle of a marriage as much as there might be at the end or at the beginning. I wanted to write about a relationship that could undergo a great deal of change because I think that's necessary in any marriage and still survive. I wanted to put a lot of pressure on that marriage and see what would happen. At the end of the book, they're still together.

Alison Stewart: In the early parts of the book, though, it's the woman has had affairs. I went back to it. I was like, "Affairs? Affairs, she has?"

[laughter]

Katie Kitamura: She has. In the second half of the book, in this alternate reality, she has not had affairs. She has been faithful. She has had affairs.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Yes, she has.

Katie Kitamura: Which doesn't seem ideal, I would say. Well, it's definitely not ideal.

[laughter]

Katie Kitamura: Again, that is a challenge that their marriage somehow overcame, in some way. I think one of the reasons I wrote that in is that she's a character who I think is always in search of a third, in some way, whether that third is an extramarital affair or whether that third is a child. I was interested in a character who does not find the dyad of a marriage sufficient in some fundamental way. I think her husband is different. Her husband finds their life together sustaining.

Alison Stewart: When we first meet Xavier, the young man, he comes into the restaurant. He claims he could be her son. She says that's not possible. It's in the first half of the book. What do you think Xavier wants out of the relationship? Does he just want to know her? Does he want more?

Katie Kitamura: For me, his motivations shift quite a lot. That was part of the fun of writing the character. The novel is really inside the head of the narrator. A lot of the speculative work that she's doing and that I think the book is doing is trying to understand what this young man wants from her. It varies throughout the book. One of the fun challenges of writing the book was creating a narrative structure where multiple things could be possible at once.

On the one hand, it could be that he's trying to get close to her to further his career. On another level, it could be that he is suffering from a severe misapprehension and genuinely believes that he is her child. In another way, it could be that he is her child and he is trying to stage some kind of reconciliation after a period of distance and possibly rejection on her part. I think that, for me, that character's motivations had to be multiple all the time because you're never in his head. You're always experiencing him through her lens. Of all the characters, he's the one who shapeshifts the most.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation with author Katie Kitamura about her new novel Audition. It Was our May Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. We'll have more with Katie after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with Katie Kitamura, author of the new novel Audition. It Was our May Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 4,623 people were able to check out a copy and read along with us. We hosted our event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. As always, our audience had some great questions for our author. You'll hear some of those in a bit. First, here's more of my conversation with Katie Kitamura.

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Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the second half of the book.

Katie Kitamura: Yes.

Alison Stewart: In the second half of the book, this family becomes bigger.

Katie Kitamura: It does.

Alison Stewart: Xavier is their son. Whether it's true or not, we can discuss later or not, but he is their son. They both claim him as their son. How do the dynamics of this family change when Xavier is around?

Katie Kitamura: It's funny, this book, which I would never have described in many years, I was going to say a million years, but I would never have described this book as a pandemic novel when I was writing it. After I finished writing it, I realized that in a lot of ways, the atmosphere in which I was writing the book had seeped into it, in some way. There's no mention of a virus. There's no vaccine. There's no masks. There's nothing like that. People are going to the theater freely, but at the same time, it is a story about a family that needs to stay in a small apartment with their child who has returned, which is a narrative that I think a lot of people experienced during the pandemic.

They are contained inside this apartment, and they're going a little bit bonkers together. I think that idea of a kind of pressure cooker on the family dynamic where you are with somebody who you love and you've known your entire life, but they've come home and the relationship cannot be the same relationship, because on the one hand, if the son returns home and he's just their little boy again, then that's a regressive relationship, so they're having to negotiate both the specter of how they used to be as a family and then they have to reimagine what their family life might look like now.

Alison Stewart: I wanted to talk to you about rituals. It's mentioned in the book quite a bit. One of the rituals they have is these morning pastries. It takes a weird turn in the second half of the book. First of all, what did you want people to think about rituals? What did you want them to consider about rituals?

Katie Kitamura: I think rituals are a really big part of any story that we tell ourselves about almost anything, whether it's about national identity or whether it's about a marriage or whether it's about a family or whether it's about a workplace, whatever it is. Rituals are how we structure our life. It's also how we exist in the world. I think they're tremendously important. They allow us to enact certain roles that maybe otherwise we wouldn't know how to enact.

I think for the central character, the ritual of this breakfast is a way of her learning to be intimate with her partner again and learning to be what she thinks of as a good mother in some way. At the same time, they are performative and they can become, as we all know, oppressive in some way. They can be a display of power even. I think that's definitely the case in this book with this breakfast, which is something that she does on a whim for her husband when she's feeling guilty for having had these affairs. Then he says to her, "I think we should do it every day."

That is a demand, that is a kind of imposition of a kind, but she accepts it. In accepting that, she both returns to the marriage, but also under some duress. I think looking at the dual sides of those rituals was interesting to me because I think they organize so much of both our private and our public life. Anytime you do something over and over again, you can forget to examine exactly how it's working and what it really means.

Alison Stewart: Let's get our microphones out to our audience while I ask about Hannah. Then we'll take your questions. Hannah, [laughs] the fourth person involved in this family relationship, the girlfriend of Xavier, who she says is a very serious girlfriend. That's what Hannah says. Why does Hannah bother the narrator so very much?

Katie Kitamura: I think in part simply because she is her little boy's girlfriend and she is the person who knows him intimately and who has more power over him than she does. I think she's a character who may not want to admit that she enjoys exerting power over people, but does enjoy exerting power over people. I think it's a tussle over who will control this young man more.

I think there's something else about the opposition between youth and the middle of life that frustrates her in some ways. Not least because when they first meet Hannah, this character of this girlfriend takes this kind of obsequious tone with her, which she really-

Alison Stewart: Does not like.

Katie Kitamura: -does not like. She feels that Hannah is making of her a part that she's not quite ready to play. Hannah is really turning her into a difficult mother-in-law as a character. That's not who she feels herself to be, and it's not a part that she's ever played before, so it's something that she has to learn to accommodate. In that tussle between those two characters is the narrator trying to figure out what it means to accommodate not just her son, but with her son, also his partner.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some questions from the audience.

Audience 1: Hi. Does the second half of the book take place in the same universe as the first, whether physically or metaphorically?

[laughter]

Katie Kitamura: That's a great question. I think there are a couple of different ways of reading the book. I think for me, a really important influence was David Lynch. I love the way that Lynch creates these worlds that have alternate or corresponding or parallel realities. If you think about a novel-- Not a novel. That was another slip. If you think about a film like Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway, there are what seem like alternate realities. Then if you look closer, they can be folded into the psychology or the consciousness of the central characters.

The second half of the book, it is. The book has two different realities happening at the same time. There are ways of reading it that I think can reconcile them into a single-character study if you wanted. I think for me, it was important that it read like two distinct realities. Does that answer your question?

Audience 1: Thank you.

Audience 2: Hi. Thanks so much. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on the impact of interpretation of a performance. I'm thinking about the aging actor and how the narrator's understanding of the reality behind the performance mutates and corrupts her reception of that film. I'm really curious to hear if you think that us knowing what you meant with this book, like us asking, "Oh, is it her son?" Do you think that that is something that would potentially disrupt our experience of the book?

Katie Kitamura: Thank you so much for that question. This anecdote in the middle of the novel, which is about the performance of an actor that the narrator admires greatly and then later finds out is, in fact, to some extent, the product of the fact that the actor has dementia. I think I wanted to write about that precisely for the reason that you mentioned, is that I wanted to put forward the idea that intentionality is not as important as interpretation on the part of the reader or the viewer in the sense that he didn't know the performance he was making, but at some point, the narrator says the performance still exists because it's been made by the interpretation of her when she watched that part.

That's very much what I wanted for this book, is I wanted it to be a book that was made hand in hand with the reader through their interpretation. It is a book that has multiple ways of being read. To some extent, I think it doesn't matter too much what I think. I think I know what the book is doing, but I might not be right. I think that's something that I realized a lot from my own reading and from knowing writers, is that often the book does-- it has its own life, it generates its own meaning. That is sometimes not always what the writer intended.

For me, I wanted to write something that could be read in many, many different ways. Some of the ways it's been interpreted are not necessarily what I consciously wrote into the book, but to me, that's the great pleasure of it. That's one of the reasons I feel so grateful to readers.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with author Katie Kitamura. Her new novel Audition was our Get Lit with All Of It book club selection.