CANR
WORK TITLE: Mothers and Sons
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.adamhaslett.net/
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 325
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 24, 1970, in Portchester, NY.
EDUCATION:Swarthmore College, B.A., 1993; Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A., 1999; Yale University Law School, J.D., 2003.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and attorney. Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow; Michener/Copernicus Society of America fellow; Rockefeller Foundation fellow; Guggenheim fellow; Iowa Writers’ Workshop, visiting professor; Columbia University, visiting professor; Hunter College, MFA program director.
AWARDS:National Magazine Award finalist, for “Notes to My Biographer”; National Book Award finalist, 2002, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction finalist, 2003, both for You Are Not a Stranger Here; L.L. Winship PEN New England Award, 2003; Berlin Prize in fiction; Lambda Literary Award and Commonwealth Prize shortlist, both for Union Atlantic; Guggenheim fellowship, 2005; Strauss Living Award, American Academy of Arts & Letters, 2016; Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and National Book Award longlist, both 2016, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction finalist, 2017, all for Imagine Me Gone.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Zoetrope, Yale Review, Financial Times, Esquire, New York, New Yorker, Prospect, Nation, Atlantic Monthly, Guardian, Der Spiegel, Best American Short Stories, and Bomb. Author’s works have been translated into thirty languages.
SIDELIGHTS
Adam Haslett simultaneously applied for admission to Yale Law School and to a number of writing fellowships, and he was successful in both areas. Yale gave him a one-year deferral so that he could study in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and when he was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop the deferral was extended by two additional years. During the second semester of Haslett’s law studies, a Doubleday editor, who had read one of his short stories, offered to publish a collection. Thus, Haslett’s law degree was postponed yet another year so that he could write an adequate number of new stories to take Doubleday up on its offer.
“Notes to My Biographer,” the first of the nine stories in You Are Not a Stranger Here, was originally published in Zoetrope. It focuses on Frank Singer, an aged inventor and veteran suffering from mental illness who does not trust the medical establishment; by refusing to take his medication he makes life hell for all around him. Frank drives to California to see his gay son, Graham, who is suffering from the same inherited illness; the son does take his meds, though, for fear that not doing so will result in behaviors that would drive away his lover.
Reviewing the story for Salon.com, Laura Miller said: “It’s not a story about the ravages of mental illness after all, but one about the price paid for mental health. More often than not, Haslett’s characters find themselves contemplating a choice between subduing their demons or facing them head on; these stories are full of people deciding not to swallow their pills. … The twist in an Adam Haslett story is often a revelation about who is actually the stronger in a pair of characters.”
Craig Seligman wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Haslett “may have talent to burn … but his prose exudes a desolation so choking that it can come only from somewhere deep inside. … Haslett has despair. And I don’t mean the histrionic despair of discouraged youth. … Haslett writes like a man inured to disappointment.” Seligman called “Notes to My Biographer” and the collection’s last story, “The Volunteer,” the “showpieces of the collection.” The latter is about an aging, institutionalized female schizophrenic and the high-school volunteer who visits her. Regarding “Notes to My Biographer,” Seligman wrote: “It’s funny, it’s awful, and it’s the only one of the stories in this collection that gave me some hope that their creator might be able to draw some pleasure out of the spectacular career that … he’s surely heading into.”
Several of Haslett’s stories are set in Great Britain, including “Reunion,” in which a young man is dying of AIDS. Two stories that are gay-themed are “The Beginnings of Grief” and “Devotion,” about a brother and sister who love the same man. Other stories that deal with mental illness include “Divination,” in which a boy has the gift of prophecy but considers it a mental illness. Seligman said that this theme “supplies the ruling metaphor for the collection: a debilitating, humiliating, alienating condition … that can be escaped only through death; a condition, in other words, that’s very much like life.”
A Kirkus Reviews contributor called “War’s End” “a hypnotically strange amalgam of Chekhov and Beckett” and “one of the finest, and most unusual, stories of recent years.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer, however, thought this same story veers too much “toward the sentimental,” though the reviewer concluded that You Are Not a Stranger Here is “a strikingly assured first effort.” Finally, Book reviewer Tom LeClair said that the collection “welcomes the courageous—and the estranged.”
Haslett published his first novel, Union Atlantic, in 2010. Doug Fanning built the Boston bank Union Atlantic into a major international financial institution. But after he builds a house on preservation land in rural Finden, Massachusetts, he finds himself in a tough legal battle with former history teacher Charlotte Graves. A high-school senior connected to both individuals may be the key to sorting out this conflict.
A Publishers Weekly contributor suggested that “this book should be of interest to readers fascinated but perplexed by the current financial crisis.” In a review in Xpress Reviews, Patrick Sullivan said that the novel is “recommended for readers of literary fiction.” Reviewing the novel in USA Today, Carol Memmott noted: “Readers will get an economics lessons wrapped in a literary novel packed with gorgeous prose and the punch of a first-rate thriller.” In a review in Washington Post Book World, Ron Charles pointed out that “some will find the economic detail off-putting, others may consider Doug’s act of sexual exploitation unbearable, but there are many pleasures in this book with its crosscurrents of satire and grief, high finance and gnawing remorse.” Charles concluded: “It’s a profound, strikingly intelligent story about the cost of living in a world in which real values have been supplanted by a fiat currency of self-interest and empty promises.”
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Liesl Schillinger observed that “many of the characters in Union Atlantic are more closely linked than is strictly probable.” Schillinger added: “And yet these overly convenient connections reflect a larger truth that obtains between Main Street and Wall Street: compact or no compact, the fates of both streets are entwined. In Union Atlantic, swiftly and confidently, Haslett unwinds the ball of yarn that is the global financial crisis to reveal its core: a knot of ineluctable yearnings and individual needs.”
In 2016 Haslett published the novel Imagine Me Gone. Michael’s signs of inheriting his father’s severe depression and anxiety issues cause much torment in a tightly knit British-American family. Medical setbacks and inner turmoil keep the tension high throughout.
Critics greeted the novel warmly. Reviewing the work in BookPage, Stephenie Harrison said that it “is immensely personal and private, yet feels universal and ultimately essential in its scope,” and that “the end result is a book that you do not read so much as feel.” In a review in Esquire, Julia Black observed that “Haslett suspends a sense of dread over you like an anvil” from the very beginning of the novel. Booklist contributor Diego Baez insisted that Haslett is “definitely a writer to recommend to fans of Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Franzen, and Alexander Chee.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews found the novel to be “touching,” adding that “the portrait of Michael stands out.” A Publishers Weekly contributor also noted that “in Michael, Haslett has created a most memorable character. This is a hypnotic and haunting novel.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Bret Anthony Johnson observed: “This is a book refreshingly replete with surprise. It sneaks up on you with dark and winning humor, poignant tenderness and sentences so astute that they lift the spirit even when they’re awfully, awfully sad.”
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Haslett’s third novel, Mothers and Sons, explores the relationship between Peter, an immigration lawyer, and his mother Ann, a former Episcopal priest. The interlocking stories involve Peter working on a case for a gay Albanian immigrant, Ann founding a women’s retreat, and how mother and son try to overcome their estrangement. The family’s history is presented through a series of flashbacks, but the focus is on a secret that tore mother from son long before.
A reviewer in Publishers Weekly described the novel as “irresistible” and an “excellent and subtle story of characters grappling with events beyond their control.” They compared it favorably with Haslett’s earlier work. Tom Crewe, in the New York Times Book Review, agreed, calling it “Haslett’s best novel” and praising him for “new levels of moral depth and narrative push.” “A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets,” wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. They praised Haslett for his “sophisticated grasp” of how people handle their feelings. The result, for this writer, was a “remarkably acute and effective character study.”
[CLOSE NEW]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Book, July 1, 2002, Tom LeClair, review of You Are Not a Stranger Here, p. 78.
Booklist, April 1, 2016, Diego Baez, review of Imagine Me Gone, p. 22.
BookPage, May 1, 2016, Stephenie Harrison, review of Imagine Me Gone, p. 19.
Esquire, May 1, 2016, Julia Black, review of Imagine Me Gone, p. 32.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2002, review of You Are Not a Stranger Here, p. 685; March 1, 2016, review of Imagine Me Gone; October 15, 2024, review of Mothers and Sons.
Library Journal, August 1, 2002, Edward Keane, review of You Are Not a Stranger Here, p. 148.
Literary Review, May 3, 2016, Amity Gaige, author interview.
New York Times Book Review, July 21, 2002, Craig Seligman, review of You Are Not a Stranger Here, p. 6; February 12, 2010, Liesl Schillinger, review of Union Atlantic; May 6, 2016, Bret Anthony Johnson, review of Imagine Me Gone; January 19, 2025, Scott Heller, author interview, p. 5; January 26, 2025, Tom Crewe, “Back Stories,” review of Mothers and Sons, p. 10.
Publishers Weekly, July 8, 2002, review of You Are Not a Stranger Here, p. 32; December 21, 2009, review of Union Atlantic, p. 41; January 25, 2016, review of Imagine Me Gone, p. 178; September 2, 2024, review of Mothers and Sons, p. 43; November 4, 2024, Elaine Szewczyk, “Adam Haslett is a Self-Described ‘Method Writer’ Whose Work Allows Readers to Deeply Feel the Humanity of His Characters,” pp. 26+.
USA Today, February 25, 2010, Carol Memmott, review of Union Atlantic, p. 11B; June 29, 2016, Don Oldenburg, review of Imagine Me Gone, p. 6D.
Washington Post Book World, February 10, 2010, Ron Charles, review of Union Atlantic.
Xpress Reviews, February 26, 2010, Patrick Sullivan, review of Union Atlantic.
ONLINE
Adam Haslett website, http://www.adamhaslett.net (February 13, 2025).
Book Sense, http://news/bookweb.org/ (August 1, 2002), Anne Whalen, author interview.
MSNBC.com, http://www.msnbc.com/ (August 29, 2002), Will Femia, moderator, chat with Haslett.
PEN America, https://pen.org/ (January 30, 2025), Aileen Lambert, author interview.
Powell’s Web site, http://www.powells.com/ (May 2, 2016), author interview.
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (August 1, 2002), Laura Miller, review of You Are Not a Stranger Here.
Zoetrope, http://www.all-story.com/ (February 8, 2003), Adam Haslett, “Notes to My Biographer.”*
Adam Haslett is the author of Imagine Me Gone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and his journalism on culture and politics have appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others.
He has been awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Winship Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He currently directs the MFA Program at Hunter College.
His new novel, Mothers and Sons, will be published in January 2025.
Adam Haslett
USA flag (b.1970)
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer. He was born in Kingston, Massachusetts and grew up in Oxfordshire, England, and Wellesley, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College (B.A., 1992), the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1999), and Yale Law School (J.D., 2003). He has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Columbia University. He currently lives in New York City, New York.
Awards: LA Times (2016), PEN (2006) see all
Genres: Literary Fiction, Mystery
New and upcoming books
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Mothers and Sons
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Union Atlantic (2010)
Imagine Me Gone (2016)
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You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002)
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Novellas and Short Stories
Seibert (2015)
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Dark Corners Collection
6. The Remedy (2018)
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Adam Haslett
Haslett at the 2016 Texas Book Festival
Haslett at the 2016 Texas Book Festival
Born December 24, 1970 (age 54)
Rye, New York, U.S.
Occupation
Writerjournalist
Education Swarthmore College (BA)
University of Iowa (MFA)
Yale University (JD)
Genre Fiction
Notable works Imagine Me Gone (2016)
Notable awards PEN/Malamud Award (2006)
Lambda Literary Award (2011)
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (2016)
Website
www.adamhaslett.net
Adam Haslett (born December 24, 1970) is an American fiction writer and journalist.[1][2][3] His debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were both finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.[2][4] He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017, he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.[4]
Early life
Haslett was born in Rye, New York and raised in Massachusetts and Oxfordshire, England. After graduating from Wellesley High School, he went on to receive a B.A. in English from Swarthmore College, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a J.D. from Yale University.
Career
Haslett began his career as a writer with a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He published his first short story, “Notes To My Biographer”, in Zoetrope Magazine. This is the first story in his debut collection, You Are Not A Stranger Here, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and was a New York Times Bestseller. The book was noted chiefly for its depictions of mental illness[5] and “masterly sense of character.”[6]
In 2010, Haslett published his first novel, Union Atlantic, which centers on a conflict over a piece of land between a young banker and a retired school teacher who is offended by the banker's new mansion. The novel was finished the week that the 2008 financial crisis began, and is the portrait of the culture of impunity than led to the great recession.[7] It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and received the Lambda Literary Award.
His second novel, Imagine Me Gone, was published in 2016. It depicts a family coping with the intergenerational consequences of the father and eldest son's struggles with depression and anxiety.[8] It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, Literary Hub named it one of the twenty best novels of the decade.[9]
In his journalism, Haslett has written about American politics,[10] the financial crisis,[11] and a range of cultural topics including gay marriage[12] in The New Yorker, Vogue, Esquire, Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Nation, among others.
He has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University.
Bibliography
Books
You Are Not a Stranger Here, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002
Union Atlantic, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2010
Imagine Me Gone, Little, Brown, 2016[13]
Mothers and Sons, Little, Brown, 2024
Short stories
Title Publication Collected in
"Burial" Small Craft Warnings (Spring 1990) -
"Reunion" The Alembic (Spring 1997) You Are Not a Stranger Here
"Notes to My Biographer" Zoetrope: All-Story (Fall 1999)
"The Beginnings of Grief" The James White Review 16.1 (Winter 1999)
"War's End"
aka "You Are Not a Stranger Here" Bomb 72 (Summer 2000)
"Devotion" The Yale Review 90.3 (July 2002)
"The Good Doctor" You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002)
"Divination"
"My Father's Business"
"The Volunteer"
"City Visit" The Atlantic (August 2005) -
"Night Walk" New York (November 30, 2009) -
"The Act" The Baffler 23 (2013) -
"The Party of the Century" Esquire (January 2015) -
Awards
2002 – New York Magazine Writer-of-the-Year Award winner
2002 – National Book Award for Fiction finalist for You Are Not a Stranger Here
2003 – PEN/L.L. Winship Award winner for You Are Not a Stranger Here
2003 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist for You Are Not a Stranger Here
2006 – PEN/Malamud Award winner for accomplishment in the short story form
2010 – The Commonwealth Prize finalist for Union Atlantic
2011 – Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction winner for Union Atlantic
2016 – Kirkus Prize finalist for Imagine Me Gone
2016 – National Book Award for Fiction longlist for Imagine Me Gone
2017 – Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction winner for Imagine Me Gone
2017 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Imagine Me Gone
2017 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist for Imagine Me Gone
Adam Haslett’s most recent novel is Mothers and Sons (Little, Brown, 2025), called “irresistible” by Publisher’s Weekly in a starred review. He is the author of three other critically acclaimed and national bestselling works of fiction, the novel Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown, 2016), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here (Anchor, 2003), named one of the five best books of the year by Time Magazine, also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award; and Union Atlantic (Nan A. Talese, 2010), winner of a Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His books have been translated into eighteen languages, and his journalism on culture and politics has appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic Monthly.
Discussing his development as a writer, Haslett notes, “I believe you write the book you want to read. As a reader what I craved was some recognition, however refracted, of the tumult of lived experience, of the pain and absurdity of trying to reach other human beings with some modicum of honesty and openness.”
Haslett has been awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, and a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2016, he received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. A graduate of Swarthmore College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Yale Law School, he has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University.
He lives in New York City.
Adam Haslett
“I am obsessed with the reader’s attention. The reader’s mind. Being able to structure a moment of consciousness within the reader. It’s one of the reasons I love to read aloud because I can then deliver the rhythm in addition to the sequence.”
‘I think of myself as a “method” writer’: Adam Haslett on the challenges and themes in Mothers and Sons
Writing as Craft
Aileen Lambert
January 30, 2025
A person wearing a blue button-up shirt is on the left, and the cover of the book Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett is on the right. The cover has silhouettes of two figures against an orange background.
Adam Haslett | The PEN Ten
Mothers and Sons (Little, Brown, 2025), the newest novel by Pulitzer Prize nominee Adam Haslett, concerns itself with the chilly yet tenacious relationship between a 40-year-old reclusive immigration lawyer and his mother, a former Episcopal priest who runs a women’s retreat in Vermont. With distinct precision, Haslett incrementally unspools a family history of heartbreak and regret, exploring how a single event can rupture a bond, while vulnerability and honesty might offer a route to repair.
In conversation with Campus Free Speech Program Manager Aileen Lambert, Haslett discusses seeing himself as a “method” writer, medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen, and the challenge of helping (and writing about) others without cutting oneself off. (Bookshop; Barnes & Noble)
Your protagonist, Peter, is a civil rights lawyer defending immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. You also have a JD. What is the greatest similarity and the greatest difference between being a lawyer and being a novelist?
Well to be fair, I’ve never practiced as an attorney, though many of my friends do. That said, the similarity between a lawyer and a writer is that they both rely on words—sentences and paragraphs that make up the briefs or chapters they produce—to convince others of something. A legal argument in the case of a lawyer, an imagined world in the case of a novelist. There’s print and paper and little else. No music, no special effects. So the precision of language (if not originality for lawyers) is paramount for both. I also think there’s a sense in which, at least to be an asylum lawyer, you have to have the mental capacity to put yourself in other people’s shoes in order to figure out the best way to help them. And at least for me, that’s what fiction is all about—imagining, in detail, the lives of others. As for the differences there are too many to number, but to cite just one: novelists don’t have clients. Their readers might be disappointed by shoddy work, but no one gets hurt.
This book is set in 2011, yet the current politics about immigration never felt far from my mind while reading. When did you start working on this novel? What stood out to you during the writing process as time went on?
I started work in earnest on the book in 2019. As soon as I realized the main character would be an immigration lawyer I knew I had a choice to make: set it before Trump or after. Given that the immigration system and the political discourse around it has been broken for decades—Obama and Biden both deported more people than Trump in his first administration—it wasn’t as if I needed to set it post 2016 to depict an overworked lawyer and his relationship to his clients, and that was what really interested me. And as I went on with the writing that is what pulled me in more and more, what late in the book Peter describes as “intimacy without intimacy,” that proximity that a lawyer has to the hardest experiences an asylum seeker has likely ever been through, yet without the time or form of connection of, say, a therapist or minister, who tries to look to the whole person. It’s a very particular relationship conducted under stress and with huge consequences. To state the obvious, the flagrant cruelty and meanness of the current administration already has and will continue to add to this stress. Which is itself purposeful. And which is why supporting people in these jobs is so important.
At the beginning of the novel, Peter’s boss Phoebe, also an immigration lawyer, says, “Some clients get under your skin. I’m saying it so it doesn’t just pile up inside. That’s how we shut down, that’s how we become bad lawyers.” How do you practice not shutting down as a novelist?
That’s a great question. I think of myself as a “method” writer, in the acting sense of the word, which is to say I spend much of my writing time trying to occupy the self-states that my characters are experiencing. So if Peter is rather numb and cut off from himself, at least for the hours at the desk, I’m trying to get inside that experience. Which is what made writing Peter’s early scenes in the book the hardest part of writing this novel, because I was spending time in a mind shorn of much feeling at all. It’s a privilege to have the time to absorb myself in this way, but the difficulty of it is it’s not always easy to leave at the desk. Again, because this is all in my imagination, and because I can take a day or a week off of writing if I need to, the consequences of these ghosts piling up in me isn’t as stark as it is for Peter in his world. As for how I practice not shutting down, I would say daily sitting meditation is the most practical means.
As I went on with the writing that is what pulled me in more and more, what late in the book Peter describes as “intimacy without intimacy,” that proximity that a lawyer has to the hardest experiences an asylum seeker has likely ever been through, yet without the time or form of connection of, say, a therapist or minister, who tries to look to the whole person. It’s a very particular relationship conducted under stress and with huge consequences.
The novel lets the reader into the haunting details of Peter’s past incrementally as he processes his adolescent grief, guilt, and regret. This builds to an intense and effective reveal at the climax of the story. How do you practice pacing in your writing?
In Mothers and Sons I had the sense of wanting to give the book some of the lyric concision of a short story (I thought at first it would be quite a short novel but it ended up being about the length of my other two). And one of the things this meant was having the kind of beat-by-beat awareness of where the reader’s knowledge of events stood, in the way you need to have in writing a short story, a form so eminently about pacing. This is one of the reasons it took me a long time to write this book. I wanted to attend to that pacing page by page. Which was mostly about careful revision, and then getting a deep edit from my editor Ben George, who is very good at clocking these sorts of things. At some point you’ve rewritten certain scenes so many times you lose perspective on how they’re functioning within the whole. And that’s where a good editor is indispensable.
Ann’s retreat center is named Viriditas, after the Latin word associated with the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen, who used it to refer to spiritual or physical health. How did you come across this concept and decide to use it in the novel?
My partner is a composer and a few years ago he had a commission to set some of Hildegard von Bingen’s invented language, her Lingua Ignota, a lexicon that seems to have been her way to get at spiritual concepts she felt couldn’t be expressed in existing languages. That’s how I came to hear the term Viriditas, which was an important concept to her. She saw it as a force that ran through all living things, associated with verdancy, growth, and the power of plants and animals to renew themselves. All of which seemed apt to the mission of the retreat center that Ann helps to found in the book, though it’s Clare, the former religion professor, who suggests the name. It’s also true that I just liked the sound of the word.
Peter uses work to distract him from painful memories, while Ann uses religion, meditation, and nonattachment to justify emotional distance. What interested you in the different ways people might avoid processing their difficult feelings?
The parallel you refer to is obvious to me now that the book is done, but to be honest I wasn’t as aware of it while writing. My goal is always to get as far inside a character’s way of being in the world as I can, and each person’s manner of coping with their experience is different. Which is just to say that I came up with these attributes of Peter (his almost exclusive focus on work) and Ann (her meditative groundedness) in trying to make sense of them as individuals, not thinking of them as twinned. And then, of course, it turns out their ways of coping with the things they don’t want to see share a family resemblance: they help others. Which I think, to be honest, is part of the psychic life of liberalism, as Ann herself thinks at one point. To help others can also be, ironically, to distance yourself from them, and from yourself. Not always, by any means, but there is always that danger of condescension.
What is the most impactful depiction of a mother/son relationship you have encountered in literature?
The tricky thing about a question like this is that, of course, what ends up impacting us isn’t “the” depiction itself, but the memories of it we retain, which like all memories may well be distorted. That being said, the depictions that come to mind are the narrator and his mother in Proust. She isn’t the central woman in the book, but the scenes of her and Marcel are just so incredibly rich and lovingly done. The mother and son in St. Augustine’s Confessions, talking in that window as they look down over the gardens of Ostia. That scene was in my mind writing this book. Monica has spent much of her adult life trying to bring her son back to God, and they have this glimpse of joy together. And a third, in stark contrast, but again from the son’s point of view, would be Meursault in The Stranger, for the mystery of his lack of any grief at all at his mother’s death, a lack that is the driving force of that book.
To help others can also be, ironically, to distance yourself from them, and from yourself. Not always, by any means, but there is always that danger of condescension.
What is the last thing you read that made you see the world in a different way? (Anything from a book to a billboard to a cereal box).
Ned Blackhawk’s book, The Rediscovery of America, Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. It’s a remarkable history of indigenous communities in North America over nearly five hundred years. One of the most revelatory episodes for me is how settlers in Western Pennsylvania in the pre and post Revolutionary period managed over two or three decades to shift the nascent political establishment’s view away from the treaty making and trade with native tribes that had gone on for a century and a half toward a more openly genocidal and eliminationist approach to all Indians, regardless of which side a tribe had fought on in the war with Britain. It’s such a stark example of how a racialized, settler ideology moves from the fringe of a body politic to the very center of it. Which, two hundred and fifty years later, we see playing out again with the politics of the U.S. border, in what is, ironically enough, described as American “nativism.”
What are three words you would use to describe your own mother?
Wise, generous, loving.
Everyone comes from different places, literally and figuratively, and the dilemmas or challenges they’re grappling with are different. So if I were to give the same advice all the time, it wouldn’t be all that helpful.
In addition to being a novelist, you also teach creative writing. What is the hardest part about teaching writing? What is the best?
The hardest part is trying to discern what a graduate student is most in need of to clarify and strengthen their work. Everyone comes from different places, literally and figuratively, and the dilemmas or challenges they’re grappling with are different. So if I were to give the same advice all the time, it wouldn’t be all that helpful. But this leads fairly naturally to the best part: getting to know younger writers, reading their work, and most of all getting to discuss it with them so I can understand not just the words on the page, but the ideas and interests that lie behind them. Which is when teaching really becomes a conversation, and getting to have conversations about stories and fiction and how to translate life into art—that can be both meaningful and pleasurable.
Adam Haslett is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Union Atlantic and Imagine Me Gone. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Berlin Prize, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently directs the MFA Program at Hunter College in New York.
Mothers and Sons
Adam Haslett. Little, Brown, $29 (336p) ISBN 978-0-316-57471-6
The irresistible latest from Haslett (Imagine Me Gone) revolves around the mystery of a man's teenage trauma. Peter, a 40-year-old immigration lawyer, works on asylum seekers' cases in New York City. In interlocking threads, Haslett delves into Peter's work on the case of a gay Albanian immigrant and his upbringing with his mother Ann, an Episcopal priest. In the latter timeline, Peter gradually discovers his own sexuality with his stunning and mysterious friend Jared. A third story line follows Ann as she divorces Peter's father for a woman named Clare, with whom she goes on to found a women's retreat, Viriditas. Ann and Clare's relationship struggles as Ann develops feelings for another woman at the retreat. Gradually, the reason for the rift between Peter and Ann--a harrowing event that happened over the course of one fateful--is revealed, leading to a climactic present-day confrontation between mother and son at Viriditas. Themes of guilt, new beginnings, survival, and violence permeate the excellent and subtle story of characters grappling with events beyond their control, and the author, himself an immigration lawyer, delivers a deeply personal portrait of Peter's tenacious advocacy for his clients. This matches the heights of Haslett's best work. Agent: Amanda Urban, CAA. (Jan.)
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"Mothers and Sons." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 33, 2 Sept. 2024, p. 43. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812513262/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fa786871. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Haslett, Adam MOTHERS AND SONS Little, Brown (Fiction None) $29.00 1, 7 ISBN: 9780316574716
An overworked immigration lawyer and his religious mother work to finally face their pasts.
Haslett's third novel is partly narrated by Peter Fischer, a New York City lawyer working for a nonprofit handling asylum cases. There, and in the rest of his life, he handles things with assurance but little joy--his lover, Cliff, has little more depth than a dating-app hookup, and he avoids conversations with his snarky and unfiltered sister, Liz. But he's unsettled when he takes on the case of Vasel Marku, a young gay Albanian man seeking asylum over fears he'll face homophobic persecution. Peter's narration of his unusually deep involvement in Vasel's case is braided around third-person narration about his mother, Ann, who leads a women-focused spiritual retreat in Vermont with her partner, Clare. Ann's breakup with her husband (and Peter's father) after falling for Clare disrupted her life, and it's clear that both mother and son have been swallowing a lot of unspoken hurt. The strength of Haslett's storytelling is its deliberation, slowly peeling back the veneers of Peter's and Ann's professional accomplishments and cool public personas to reveal storms of guilt and fear. The two share complex queer sexual coming-of-age stories--Peter as a teenager falling for a handsome and emotionally distant classmate, Ann as a middle-aged woman falling for a woman, shipwrecking her marriage and career as a pastor. They share losses, too--Peter's father's death from cancer and a withheld event that gives the novel its emotional payoff. It's "practically mandatory," Clare observes, for women to "hide in other people's pain," just as men like Peter are asked to never feel it. And though the outlines of the novel suggest sentimental family-trauma fare, Haslett's sophisticated grasp of the ways that people over-police their feelings makes it a remarkably acute and effective character study.
A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets.
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"Haslett, Adam: MOTHERS AND SONS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811898553/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=009a8e45. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
In Adam Haslett's ''Mothers and Sons,'' crisis reconnects an immigration attorney and his estranged mother, the co-founder of a women's retreat.
MOTHERS AND SONS, by Adam Haslett
Three novels in, a writer is running low on secrets. We know for sure, now, what Adam Haslett likes to put down on the page. Dead men (usually fathers). Widows (usually nature-loving). The children left behind (usually siblings, one of whom grows up a gay man). Unequal gay relationships, in which one partner provides sexual favors but yearns to be looked at and kissed. Houses as sites of memory and complicated belonging. Pity, shame and loneliness. Depression or anxiety figured as a beast, lurking, prowling and pouncing.
Most important, we know that Haslett is a writer in thrall to retrospect. In his first novel, ''Union Atlantic,'' a prologue informs us that Doug, a macho banker taking insane risks in the early noughts, has been warped by his complicity in a military-civilian disaster in 1988. In ''Imagine Me Gone,'' a prologue informs us that the history of a family will span the death of its eldest son.
And in Haslett's new novel, ''Mothers and Sons,'' a prologue informs us that its protagonist, Peter Fischer, is haunted by a long-ago event involving a boy called Jared and Peter's mother, Ann. Even this summary understates the extent to which Haslett's stories are mainly back story. Everywhere you look, his characters are troubled by their pasts, forever unraveling toward the present.
In his first two novels, Haslett divided his attention among multiple characters, seeming to share with Jonathan Franzen (with whom he studied, and to whom he is often compared) a conviction that family and society are the proper engines of the contemporary novel. But both times, the result was a thinness of texture: the reader seeing too many aspects of too many lives too briefly.
In ''Mothers and Sons,'' Haslett has wisely concentrated his gifts, choosing to give only the perspectives of Peter and Ann, who have been estranged for many years. He has also embraced his predilection for back story by making the narratives people tell to explain themselves the subject of the novel itself.
Peter is a New York asylum lawyer, his job to help clients convincingly describe the conditions that forced them to flee their home countries -- ''there's a lot of violence,'' he generalizes at one point -- and that prevent them from safely returning. Haslett, who has a law degree, is himself very convincing in his depiction of this work, and has Peter reflect on its strangeness, ''projecting myself into one life after another, intimacy without intimacy.''
We come to see that this describes not only Peter's job, but his denuded way of existence. He is gay, and subsists on casual sex, but has avoided cases relating to sexual orientation until he is forced to take on Vasel Marku, a 21-year-old Albanian. Vasel's story -- he was nearly murdered by members of his family after being discovered with another boy -- stirs destabilizing memories of Peter's own teenage years. Intimacy has finally breached his defenses, and soon he is headed for crisis.
Meanwhile, Ann is living in Vermont at the remote women's retreat she co-founded with her partner, Clare. She is a former priest and a widow -- also an escapee, from the roles of wife and heterosexual -- who has long been praised for her openness to others. Listening, with patience and restraint, to women speaking about their lives is the retreat's specialty. (It's a tribute to Haslett's careful, calm prose that Ann comes across as dignified and believable, rather than as an object ripe for satire or debunking.)
Peter needs Ann. The question is how, despite their superficial similarity, this mother and son came to be parted, and why Ann has been unable to respond to Peter's obvious angst. (Their experience is shadowed by other mother-son relationships, including, from outside the book, the lesbian mother and gay son in Alan Hollinghurst's recent ''Our Evenings.'')
Of course, it is the gradually uncovered story of what happened with Jared -- especially on the night obliquely described at the beginning -- that will provide the answer. Or many answers. Because the novel is really about the ways that our self-explanations -- so often self-justifications -- fail to encompass our lives. How misleading they can be, and confining. How they can distance and divide us, as much as provide common ground.
''It's what I've spent my adult life doing,'' Peter thinks. ''Whittling stories down into patterns the law can see. ... And yet in that shaping, what violence is done to the fullness of an actual life.''
''Mothers and Sons'' is Haslett's best novel. By limiting his area of inquiry, he achieves new levels of moral depth and narrative push. But he has not escaped old problems; in some ways he has entrenched them. The past remains an accurate predictor of future ills, leading characters to banal and often sentimental therapeutic realizations (stated, one feels, in Haslett's voice rather than their own). In this book, we get ''what a waste a closed heart is'' and ''how full of shame it is to be lonely,'' among others.
Indeed the quantity of remembered events, all of them in the service of Haslett's main themes, undermines his argument for our bursting multifariousness: everything fits, too neatly and tightly. And it means that we tend to be told about the lives and personalities of characters, rather than learning from their actions and speech. Constantly looking backward, we lose the pleasure, and the interest, of living with them in the moment.
MOTHERS AND SONS | By Adam Haslett | Little, Brown | 336 pp. | $29
Tom Crewe is a contributing editor at The London Review of Books and the author of ''The New Life,'' the 2023 winner of the Orwell Prize for political fiction.
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Crewe, Tom. "Back Stories." The New York Times Book Review, 26 Jan. 2025, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824812391/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e8fe8a8c. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
A gay lawyer and his estranged mother confront the past when he takes on an asylum case in ''Mothers and Sons.'' In an email interview, the author credited law school, and research on Albania, for getting the details right. SCOTT HELLER
What books are on your night stand?
''The Fabric of the Cosmos,'' by Brian Greene, a wonderfully detailed account for lay people of what relativity, quantum physics and string theory have to say about physical reality. ''Ornament of Precious Liberation,'' a kind of monastic handbook on the stages of Buddhist doctrine, by Gampopa, a 12th-century Tibetan master. Also, ''Harrow,'' by Joy Williams, whose sentences make me smile again and again, and ''The Gallery,'' by John Horne Burns, a smoky, boozy and occasionally gay vision of Naples at the end of World War II.
What books might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
A lot of Immanuel Kant. A lot of English Romantic poetry. And a lot of books on drug trafficking.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
Late afternoon, early evening, recumbent, either learning something new to me, or absorbed in a novel the rhythms of which put the rest of the world at rest.
What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
That lithium, the salt form of which is used to treat manic depression, was one of only three elements present at the birth of the universe, along with hydrogen and helium. As if the cosmos were preparing for a mental health crisis 13 billion years in the making.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
In truth, not a great deal. Since college, I've been ambling in phases that last a few months at a time through fiction, history and philosophy of one sort or another.
''His prose exudes a desolation so choking that it can come only from somewhere deep inside,'' a Times reviewer wrote of your first book. How did that land with you?
As a high compliment!
In hindsight, was being a Pulitzer Prize finalist for that book a blessing or a curse?
A blessing for sure. There's nothing like encouragement, especially for a first book. Encouragement and the respect of one's peers. ''Keep going'' -- that's what writers always need to hear, because there are so many sound reasons not to.
Did your law degree help in exploring the legal asylum system in the new book?
Yes, because going to law school is like learning a new language, and once you can read it, you can get a more granular sense of how people wield it and the habits of mind it encourages, which is to say a sense of character. If you want to write about doctors, for instance, it helps to know what their training does to their perception.
What other research did it require?
Mostly talking to immigration lawyers, sitting in immigration court, and learning a good deal about the history of modern Albania.
Which literary mothers and sons loom large for you?
To be honest, the echo I had in mind in choosing the title was with Turgenev's ''Fathers and Sons,'' given the theme of incomprehension between generations in that book, as well as the friendship between the two younger men at the heart of the story.
What impact has teaching had on your writing?
A sporadic one, as I've only taught sporadically, but of late, as I get older, I would say it offers me the chance to approach writing -- that of my students, but also my own -- with more curiosity and less judgment.
What's the last book that made you laugh?
See Question 1: ''Harrow,'' by Joy Williams.
What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?
For its timing, I'd say ''A Home at the End of the World,'' by Michael Cunningham. My sister gave it to me for Christmas when I was 20 -- a gay college kid coming of age at the height of the AIDS pandemic -- and the first sections of that book, about a gay boy and his brother, are still emblazoned in my mind.
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
How people experience the jobs they do; how, where, when and why people experience wonder and awe; and also politics, not in the electoral sense but in the lived sense. It's so hard to do, particularly now, but so needed. We fight politically in two dimensions, but live in at least four.
You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
According to Ray Monk's brilliant biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein may have met Virginia Woolf at one of John Maynard Keynes's parties, but ''neither seems to have made much impression on the other.'' (Wittgenstein was often stiff or rude around women.) Rather than organize another party, I'd like to have been seated between them at that one. I somehow imagine myself easing Wittgenstein's rigidity and drawing the two of them into a conversation about the pleasures of language and the balance between faith and doubt in a writer or thinker's life.
Email interview conducted and edited by Scott Heller. An expanded version is available at nytimes.com/books.
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"Adam Haslett." The New York Times Book Review, 19 Jan. 2025, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824056998/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f717df23. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
For Adam Haslett, clutter is anathema to creativity. The author's workroom in his house in Upstate New York, where he lives part of the year with his partner, is sparsely decorated. Save for a black-and-white framed photograph of a spiral staircase that a friend shot in Italy, the walls are bare, which is how Haslett prefers it.
"I want to be able to look through the walls, into whatever is going on in my mind, as opposed to looking at objects," Haslett says. He meditates most mornings for about 45 minutes before he writes. "Concentration is hard, and quieting the voices in my head is important. I want to lower the level of distraction. To let the quieter voices in, ones that might be sources of surprise for me."
Haslett is skilled at examining the interior lives of characters in states of emotional extremis, whether they're dealing with anxiety, depression, loneliness, or mental illness, or facing homophobia or violence. His three previous books--the 2002 story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; the novel Union Atlantic (2009), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; and the novel Imagine Me Gone (2016), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award--have been translated into 23 languages. He's also the recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.
His new novel, Mothers and Sons, out in January from Little, Brown, examines love and longing, the price of keeping secrets, the impact of homophobia and violence on mental health, and the plight of asylum seekers struggling to stay in the U.S.
The plot centers on Peter, a gay 40-year-old asylum lawyer in New York City who's overworked, unfulfilled, and estranged from his mother, who left Peter's father and now runs a women's retreat in Vermont. Peter spends his days working to exhaustion, and his humdrum love life consists of hookups with a man who wants more than Peter can emotionally offer. But Peter's life changes when he meets Vasel, a young gay man from Albania who was forced to flee his country after his sexual orientation was exposed. As Peter works to help Vasel, he begins to recall a traumatic event from his own youth involving his first love.
Haslett had wanted to write a novel about a lawyer for a long time. He has a law degree from Yale Law School--he graduated in 2003--but has never practiced law, though over the years he's done volunteer legal aid work at immigration detention facilities. Going to court became part of his research for Mothers and Sons.
"I went to Federal Plaza in Manhattan and sat in on immigration hearings," he says. "They're open to the public, but no one tends to go. The courtroom is empty. It's just the judge, lawyers, and respondent. The lawyer for the asylum seeker leads the person through his or her story, then the ICE lawyer tries to pick that story apart and sow doubt as to the person's honesty. Most of the time, the judge decides right there and then, from the bench. The hearings can last a couple of hours or more, the decision only a few minutes."
Born in 1970, on Christmas Eve, in Rye, N.Y, Haslett was the youngest of three kids. He grew up primarily in Massachusetts, with a few years spent in England, the birthplace of his father, who suffered from manic depression and died by suicide when Haslett was 14.
Haslett has written about mental illness and severe anxiety--from which his brother, who died by suicide at 42, suffered--in You Are Not a Stranger Here and Imagine Me Gone. "When my father's energy was up, it was a solar level of energy," he says. "Things with my father took a turn when I was 12--there was a lot of stress and heaviness, and the death was out of the blue. I wasn't a formed person; I formed around the event. One of the responses I had was to become elegiac."
In 1993, Haslett graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in English, then earned an MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1999. By the time he'd graduated from Yale, he had already published You Are Not a Stranger Here, to critical acclaim, and the law career--which once seemed like a more stable option than writing--took a backseat.
With Mothers and Sons, Haslett also wanted to explore the life of a single gay man. "Someone who came of age when AIDS was raging," he says, "when sex was already laced with danger," and is now trying to navigate hookup culture. "I wanted to get at the pain and alienation, the way it can cause division between sex and intimacy, and at the shame of loneliness."
Whether writing courtroom scenes or exposing characters' emotional wounds, constructing elegant, carefully paced sentences is top of mind for Haslett. "With Mothers and Sons, my goal was to create a novel that had the lyric arc of the short story," he says. "A lot of the effort for me was trying to think, where is the reader at this beat and that beat? I'm always attuned to the rhythm of sentences. It's what I find most pleasurable."
His ability to capture what it means to be human, in all its beauty, mundaneness, and ugliness, is what makes Haslett a standout, according to his editor, Ben George. "Adam is unsurpassed at making you feel, on finishing a novel, that its events and characters are part of your own experience," George says. "Not fictional but real."
Sally Kim, president and publisher of Little, Brown, who has been a fan of Haslett's fiction from the start, agrees. "Adam writes tender books that are also harrowing," she says, "and has the ability to forge new ground with each one."
Haslett says he aims to write for those who might not see themselves in other work, and describes himself as a "method writer," one who's trying to mirror his characters' psychic states.
He hopes his books can act as a kind of quiet, uncluttered room for readers. "Given how aggressively distracted the culture is, how forcefully our minds are dragged away from us, I'm trying to create a space where people can become absorbed and slow down," he says. "I want to give people the opportunity to enter into others' lives--and further into their own lives, too."
BY ELAINE SZEWCZYK
Elaine Szewczyk's writing has appeared in McSweeney's and other publications. She's the author of the novel I'm with Stupid.
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Szewczyk, Elaine. "INSIDE OUT: Adam Haslett is a self-described 'method writer' whose work allows readers to deeply feel the humanity of his characters." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 42, 4 Nov. 2024, pp. 26+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815444263/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ba873eea. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.