Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Our Get Lit With All of It book club selection for the month of May is the novel Audition by Katie Kitamura. The novel begins with a lunch. A woman, a successful actor, heads to a FiDi restaurant to meet a much younger man who has recently come into her life. His name is Xavier. They talk, it's awkward. Her husband appears at the restaurant, he leaves, but there's a whole other story that goes on as well. The woman and Xavier, they sort of know each other and the husband wants to help the young man. The question is, well, there are a lot of questions like who is Xavier? Why are they meeting? How might their lives change?

You have to read Audition to find out, and join us for our Get Lit event at the NYPL. New Yorker, you can get an e-copy of the book thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library. Head to wnyc.org to find out more. That's where you can get your tickets to the event. They are free, but they do tend to sell out fast. Joining me now for a preview conversation is the author of Audition, Katie Kitamura. Hi, Katie. Katie.

Katie Kitamura: Hi, Alison. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I am doing well. There you are. This story begins with these two characters meeting for lunch.

Katie Kitamura: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Which of these two characters came to you first?

Katie Kitamura: Absolutely the central character, the narrator, who is an actress in the middle of her life, who's in rehearsals for a difficult new play. Then everything she knows about who she is in the world is upended when she encounters Xavier.

Alison Stewart: Why did you want to write about an actor?

Katie Kitamura: I think I've been interested in performance for a really long time. It's something that I've written about in some of my other books. Every day in my life, I play a certain number of roles. I'm a mother, I'm a spouse, I'm a teacher, I'm a writer, I'm a friend. All of these roles come with quite set parameters and almost scripts, but I flip between them really without even being entirely aware of that. I was wondering, what does it mean? What does it really mean to have performance be such a central part of my daily life? That was part of why I wanted to write about it in this novel.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about the creative process, as they call it, the actors? What did you learn about the creative process that helped you write this book?

Katie Kitamura: When I first moved to New York in 2009, a lot of my friends were actors and playwrights and directors who were mostly working in off off-off-Broadway shows. At that time, I think I had a lot more spare time, so I sat in on a lot of rehearsals. I talked to them a lot about their preparations, and I held that in the back of my head, and then when it came time to write this novel, I had a store of information to call from.

Alison Stewart: When we meet the narrator, this actress, where is she in her career?

Katie Kitamura: She is very much settled, I would say. She feels settled both in her career and in her marriage. She feels to a certain extent maybe that substantial change is no longer possible. I was really interested in writing about the middle of a life. I think quite often we focus on the start of a life or maybe the end of a life. We're very preoccupied with narratives of how people come into being both in their relationships and also artistic. I was really interested in what happens in that sticky middle where it seems like nothing much is going to change, and yet it's a very, very volatile, immutable period in people's lives.

Alison Stewart: There's something about Xavier, this young man who she's meeting for lunch, that's unsettling to her. Why does he bother her so much?

Katie Kitamura: There's a lot of different reasons, I think. One is that there's, at least in the first part of the book, a lot of undecidability about who he really is to her. There's nothing familiar about him. She is not quite sure if she should be relating to him as a potential romantic partner or rather more as somebody who is a childlike figure to her. I think that undecidability is what unnerves her. It's also the fact that she's not entirely sure of what he wants from her.

I think she's somebody who has made both a living and a way of being through acquiescing to what other people want from her from performing the parts that she's asked to play. In the case of Xavier, she's not entirely sure what he wants, and so that's what unsettles her.

Alison Stewart: My guest is author Katie Kitamura. We are spending the month reading her novel, Audition, as our May Get Lit With All of It Book Club selection. To borrow your e-copy and get free tickets to our May 29th event, head to wnyc.org/getlit. Of course, that event happens at our partner's place, the New York Public Library. There's also Tomas. Tomas is the husband of the actress, the narrator. How would you describe Tomas?

Katie Kitamura: Tomas is probably my favorite character in the novel. He is a very steady person, at least apparently steady. He's an intellectual. He is an incredibly caring and present partner to both the narrator and also to Xavier when Xavier enters into their family unit, but at the same time, he has a sense of dissatisfaction. There are things he wanted in his life that he didn't quite get, and that comes to the fore in the second half of the book.

Alison Stewart: We would love it if you'd read a bit of the novel for us. Could you set it up?

Katie Kitamura: Of course. So the novel opens with the two characters, as you said, meeting for lunch. At that moment, the reader doesn't quite know the tenor of the relationship between Xavier and the narrator, but there's something unsettled between them. At that point, Tomas walks in to the restaurant and she is not entirely of what he has seen and more importantly, what he thinks is happening between her and the younger man, and this passage follows from there. I knew that with Tomas, with the waiter, and the middle-aged couple sitting at the nearby table, what they had all been misled by was a current of intensity running between Xavier and me.

Its source was an imbalance of want. Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things or one person who wants near absence, a void, as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give. More than that, he wanted something that I could not begin to fathom. A desire with which it felt dangerous to collude or to involve myself. Yes, there had been conflict in the air between us, conflict and intensity, and that had read his carnal interest because the actual story, the reality of what was happening between us in that moment was much less easily imagined.

After that day in the restaurant, things were never entirely the same between Tomas and me. It wasn't a facade or a pretense that suddenly fell away. Our marriage was much more than mere surface or appearance. It was the substance of our relationship itself guarded by a shared reality that changed. You pull out the ropes tied to the statue, you pull and nothing happens, and then you pull and you pull again, and the whole thing topples over.

Alison Stewart: That's Katie Kitamura reading from her book Audition, our Get Lit With All of It book club events. Book club pick, I should say. People may be saying, "Oh, gosh, should I read this by the 29th?" You can read this. It clocks in at 197 pages, which made me wonder, was this book ever longer?

Katie Kitamura: All of my books are about 200 pages. It seems really difficult for me to write any longer. It's my natural length.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's so interesting; they all clock in around the same number.

Katie Kitamura: They do. Something about the shape of the novel as it emerges for me from the very beginning is always about 200 pages. I thought, as you correctly intuited, when I started writing this book, I would try to make it a little bit longer, and then when I was reaching the second half, I realized I was just trying to make it longer for the sake of making it longer, so I reverted to form.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] That's so funny. You have this 197 pages, but you do have to pace out the story a little bit. How did you work through the pace of the novel given it is only 197 pages?

Katie Kitamura: It's a really interesting question. One thing that I always felt about the book was that I wanted it to be very open to interpretation. I really thought of it as a book that would be made hand in hand with the reader. One of the things I thought about a lot in the constructing of the novel was how to make it capacious enough as a structure so that it had space to accommodate the reader as well. The flip side of that is that I had to actually exert quite a lot of control over, as you say, the pacing of the novel, both of events and also of what the reader knows at various different times. It's a little bit of a tension in the novel that I think about a lot even now, this tension between control and giving up control.

Alison Stewart: We always ask our authors if there are any Easter eggs in the book or one section you worked particularly hard on that you wanted people to pay special attention to.

Katie Kitamura: There are a lot of little Easter eggs in the book, but I guess the one I'll share is that there are a lot of artworks in the book. There are a lot of plays and there are movies and the titles of all the plays and movies are discarded titles from my previous books. They're titles that I tried out on my last books that weren't the right titles, and so I repurposed them to title the works in the book.

Alison Stewart: That's great. My guest has been Katie Kitamura. We are spending this month reading her novel, Audition. It's our May Get Lit With All of It book club selection. We hope you'll join us on May 29th at the New York Public Library. Head to wnyc.org/getlit to get your tickets. Katie, we'll see you in a few weeks.

Katie Kitamura: See you very soon. Thank you again, Alison.