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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Adam Haslett's 'Mothers And Sons'
00:33:07
'Mothers and Sons' by Adam Haslett, a novel about a New York City asylum lawyer grappling with his estrangement from his mother.
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- [00:08]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. In the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Hayslett, a mother and son try to find their way back to each other. It's 2011 in New York City, and Peter is an asylum lawyer. He basically only goes to work and comes home. He doesn't seem to have many friends. He keeps the man he's been dating at a distance, and he barely talks to his mom, Ann. Ann is a former female priest. Years ago, she left Peter's father for another woman, Claire. Now, Ann and Claire have helped found a spiritual retreat in Vermont for women seeking guidance. She's not really sure why her son never really wants to come to visit. Peter's resentment towards his mother is something he keeps bottled up until one day he meets a young asylum seeker named Vassal. Vassell is gay and had to flee his home of Albania in the aftermath of a vicious hate crime. Vassell's case brings up Peter's memories of a horrible day years ago, a day that ended in violence and a day that Peter and his mother don't talk about. The book is titled Mothers and Sons. It was our march get lit with all of it Book club selection. Adam Hayslett joined me earlier this week for a live event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Here's some of that conversation. What was the original germ of the idea for this book?
- [01:42]
Adam Hayslett
Well, I start everything I write with a character. I'm always trying to find a way into the mind, the rhythm, the voice of the person that I'm going to spend time, probably years writing about. And so I had an idea that there was a guy, a male character, who was living in New York. And I knew, for some reason I didn't know why yet, he was estranged from his mother. And so I had a scene actually in the book where he comes back from work and is in his apartment overlooking Trinity Church down on Wall Street. This is in an earlier part of the book. And I just start from there and I start asking myself questions. What does he do? What's his job? Why is he estranged?
- [02:36]
Alison Stewart
What does he do?
- [02:37]
Adam Hayslett
He. He's an immigration lawyer. He's an immigration lawyer, an asylum lawyer. And so he spends his days talking to people who are seeking asylum. And much like a therapist or a priest or a social worker, he needs to talk with these people about the most difficult things they've been through. But unlike those people, he. He needs to get their stories quickly and in a particular form that he can then speak to a court about it. So it's both got a lot of emotional content to it, but it's also a very formal, rigid and impersonal process, and I wanted to capture that.
- [03:23]
Alison Stewart
Why did you want him to be an asylum lawyer? You're a lawyer yourself.
- [03:26]
Adam Hayslett
We should say, well, I went to law school. I shouldn't say that I'm a lawyer, but I went to law school. I think it's that dynamic that in any of the helping professions, there's this question of how do you take in the stories that you hear and the experiences of the people you work with and allow it to resonate with you enough to be able to be good at your job? I mean, this is true of teaching, it's true of so many. But then also, how do you let those things pass through you so you aren't buried by the totality of it adding up? And so that interested me. And so, as an asylum lawyer, he also is finding out a certain amount about a lot of different places we meet him. He's got to understand gang culture in Central America. He's got to understand, with this one client that occupies a lot of the book, Modern Albania. So he's learning all these things, but again, for that very particular purpose of making. Creating a storyline that is what the asylum seeker. Well, not creating, but with the asylum seeker making up the pleadings that will go to the court.
- [04:45]
Alison Stewart
Now, this book is set in 2011.
- [04:46]
Adam Hayslett
Yeah.
- [04:47]
Alison Stewart
Why did you set it in 2011?
- [04:49]
Adam Hayslett
Yeah. So I had the decision to make, which is that in 2019, which is 2018. 2019. I started the book and I thought to myself, I could let the present, the past and present present swallow the book, or I could be like, no, I want my own book. And the fact is, you don't have to go back. I mean, you don't have to wait till Trump's in office to find an immigration system that was in crisis. And so more people deported under Obama and Biden than in Trump's first administration. There's just a lot of the system is broken and has been for a long time. So I wanted, in a sense, to be able to get at those dynamics that I was talking about and not be as much distracted by, like, electoral politics. Yeah.
- [05:41]
Alison Stewart
Does Peter like his job?
- [05:44]
Adam Hayslett
You know, I think somewhat if someone ever asked me, do I like my job as a writer, I would say, I don't know that I have a choice. You know, that it's. It's. He. Does he. He's someone who's addicted to work. In some ways, he is a workaholic. And I think one of the other themes that I wanted to discover, that I wanted to write about in the course of writing about this was that a lot of those people that I was just mentioning in the helping professions, there can be a certain kind of loneliness that goes along with the work because you're very focused on what's happening with other people, and. And as a result, you can not look inward. And so does he like the job? I think he comes to the job for reasons. There are things that drove him to that kind of work.
- [06:35]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, you say workaholic. A holic is not necessarily a positive suffix.
- [06:41]
Adam Hayslett
Yeah, well, I mean, I just think that it's not uncommon for people to, especially maybe in this country and especially maybe in New York, for people to turn to work as a way of dealing with loneliness and other things in their life. Like, you can always work. There's always more work to do. There's always a screen and an email and things to do. And I think that habit of mind is something I know myself, and I know it in a lot of people around me. And I wanted to explore what the emotions are underneath that urge to just fill up all the time.
- [07:22]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk about Vassal's case.
- [07:24]
Adam Hayslett
Vassal, sure, Vassal. I mean, I'm not Albanian, so Vassal's fine. Vassal is a young Albanian guy, 21 years old, comes to this country, and because he really has to escape his family situation in Albania, he's gay and is in physical danger there, actually, from his own family. So he comes and, you know, he's a 21 year old. He's trying to make a life in New York. He realizes he's got to deal with this. But on the other hand, it's a confusing system and he doesn't trust anybody in it. So Peter has a kind of push and pull to get him to cooperate, in a sense, in his own case. And this is something that's common in immigration law, which is that you need a lot of cooperation from the person seeking asylum, because you need them to get documentation. You need them to talk to you about the most painful things they've gone through. And so he spends a lot of time sort of in a back and forth. And so Basil's story only really comes out slowly over the course of the first 2/3 of the book.
- [08:40]
Alison Stewart
What kind of research did you do into Albania?
- [08:43]
Adam Hayslett
I did a lot of research into Albania. I was going to be going to Albania right before the lockdown. And then it sort of, you know, pandemic era came. But I did a lot of research. And also, the kind of research that I was doing is, in essence, the same sort of research that a asylum lawyer has to do. Right. Which is that you need to read up on something. You need enough information to describe what the State Department calls, like, country conditions. Like, how is the. What's the situation in this country for someone in this social group? So I did a lot of reading about that, a lot of reading of history. Ishmael Kadar is one of the modern Albanian novelists that I read a lot of. So, yeah, just trying to. Like, when I do any research, you try to do as much as you can so that you're soaking up more than you need, you know, what part.
- [09:39]
Alison Stewart
Of your research wound up in the book? Something about Albania.
- [09:42]
Adam Hayslett
Something about. Well, so there is. So I was. His family is in northern Albania, and the village is in northern Albania. And there is a kind of almost medieval, like, legal code called the kanoon, which is extrajudicial. It's not a. It's more like a folk form of legal enforcement among kind of clans, but it's still very powerful. And a lot of these kind of crimes of shame, like homosexuality or extramarital, you know, sex or anything like that, are still in a sense, ruled by that. And there's a lot of control that people's lives are under and that the police will not interfere in. And I didn't know about that.
- [10:31]
Alison Stewart
Peter becomes kind of obsessed with Vassal. Not just with Vassal's case. Vassal and Vassal's case.
- [10:38]
Adam Hayslett
Yes.
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Alison Stewart
To the point where he's ignoring other of his clients. What about this case has him so thrown off?
- [10:45]
Adam Hayslett
Yeah. So right at the beginning of. When he encounters him with. We see him begin to start kind of forgetting things afterwards. It's almost like he's been made distractible. And what's happening really is that something that happened when he was a teenager, not that much around a little bit younger than when Vasil's own experience happened, that he's just looked away from. And with another boy, a boy he was in love with when he was a teenager. And he's just looked away from that. And there are things about Basil that remind him both his story and him that begin to kind of bring this up. And so I was interested in trying to write about something like dissociation, not in the sense of, like, someone who doesn't know what time it is or. But someone who's just not looking at this thing over here and what that does to your perception of the world and your sense of time and feeling and that it really can interrupt how you function, which eventually it does for Peter.
- [12:07]
Alison Stewart
Which brings us to his mother.
- [12:09]
Adam Hayslett
Yes.
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Alison Stewart
To Anne.
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Adam Hayslett
Yes.
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Alison Stewart
What is the story that Ann has told herself about why her son Peter doesn't visit her in Vermont?
- [12:21]
Adam Hayslett
It's a good question. So she's running this women's retreat center in Vermont where she went in sort of midlife after her husband. She left her husband and entered a relationship with a woman. I think she tells herself the story that Peter was alienated by her change of life and that she left the family first in some sense, that she departed and left the house that he grew up in and was with someone very quickly after her father died with this woman. So I think she thinks it's a kind of alienation, that it's, in some sense, about her and the decision she made. Yeah.
- [13:10]
Alison Stewart
How would you describe the spiritual retreat that she's created for her?
- [13:17]
Adam Hayslett
I would describe it as a kind of first wave feminist space that she and a number of other women found and that they want to create a space where women can come and talk about their. Not just their spiritual life, but how they see their lives, how they understand themselves in the world outside of the kind of male power structure. And the way they do this is there are three of them, and they describe it as a kind of community of friendship. So they're offering their own friendship amongst themselves as a way of then letting people enter into these circles they do, where they have conversations with one person, but meeting with three people. So it's. Yeah, it's a little loose, but it's meant to be quiet and centering and discernment, to use another religious word.
- [14:23]
Alison Stewart
Well, she was once a female priest.
- [14:25]
Adam Hayslett
Yes. Yes. She was an Episcopal priest. And so she's bringing a lot of that kind of ministry of hospitality, I guess she would call it, but it's not actually religious.
- [14:36]
Alison Stewart
The Guardian called your characters Anne and Peter are maddening, admirable, tragic, and utterly human. So now that we've set them up.
- [14:46]
Adam Hayslett
Yes.
- [14:47]
Alison Stewart
How would you describe Peter and how would you describe Anne?
- [14:54]
Adam Hayslett
I mean, I would describe Peter as I would probably many of my characters, as someone who wants to connect with. Wants to have more intimacy in his life than he has, but in his case, doesn't even really understand that absence in a sense. Right. And so he's a little bit blinded to his own circumstance and lives through the other his clients, as I was saying. So I would say he does good work but is shut off from himself. And Anne is also, in some sense, in a helping profession. She's trying to help others. She has a much richer sort of narrative of her own life, sense of who she is and what she's doing, and is able to take that stuff, that material of other people's lives. She's able to process it more thoroughly. And so I actually made that choice in the book. Peter is in the first person present tense. And that's like, very much, I think, of, like, kind of the sense of the tense of dissociation. Like, I can only see in the present, whereas Anne is written in the third person in past tense. And so she has that kind of narrative, a capacity to narrate her own life.
- [16:22]
Alison Stewart
There are so many mothers and sons in this book. Peter and Anne, Jared and his mom, Vassal and his mom who saved him, Peter's sister and her son. Even the asylum seeker, Sandra and her son, Felipe. What did you want to focus on in Mothers and Sons?
- [16:39]
Adam Hayslett
Well, I guess I wanted to have all these refractions. Right. There was a reason I wanted it to be plural. I mean, we've talked mainly about the kind of the two main. The main pair, but I think. I don't know, there's something, I think, about the cross. The mother, son and the father, daughter. Like relationships where there's the proximity of parenthood, but the difference of gender. That was something that I was interested in also. I think, you know, it's a story. Peter is a gay man. It's a story about, like, queer life in New York. And I think as a queer guy myself, like, having mothers and gay men have relationships that are often very intense and intimate, and this one is broken off or estranged. And so I wanted. I guess I wanted to explore that. I was not estranged from my own mother, I'm glad to say.
- [17:41]
Alison Stewart
Well, it's interesting because Ann is queer.
- [17:45]
Adam Hayslett
Yes. She has sort of two lives. She was married and then she had two kids, but.
- [17:49]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, but it doesn't bond them.
- [17:52]
Adam Hayslett
No. There's a section late in the book where they talk and where Peter sort of says to her, you know, it's funny, people say to me, like, oh, your mom's queer. Like, you know, like, that must be great. You know what I mean? Like, in terms of people understanding or her understanding him. But no, there's this, you know, because of the events that happened in the past and a way that she tried to protect him from what happened when he was a boy or a teenager, a certain kind of dividend emerged. And so they haven't been close Peter.
- [18:26]
Alison Stewart
Doesn'T care too much for Claire and other half.
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Adam Hayslett
Yeah, right.
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Alison Stewart
Why can't Peter just accept Claire?
- [18:38]
Adam Hayslett
Good question. I mean, I think there's always the step parent dynamic, right? The step parent has come in and intruded in some sense. I think the particularity of it here is that Peter's father died right around the time that they were. That his mother and Claire were getting together. And so I think when there's a big death in a family, usually either everybody scatters to the wind or people get tighter. You know what I mean? There's a. At least I've sort of seen that and experienced it myself. We as a family, in my case, got tighter around when there were the death in the family. And so I think that's sort of what Peter maybe had wanted. And it was more like it went that way because Anne went off and did her thing, you know, not long after.
- [19:31]
Alison Stewart
What about his sister?
- [19:34]
Adam Hayslett
Totally different person. Yeah, totally different person. Much more garrulous, open, kind of fun loving. Sense of humor. More sense of humor. And yeah, they're very much like opposites. So she initially also hates Claire for the same reasons, but then she's now much more down with the whole thing and kind of thinks it's cool that her mother's got a spiritual retreat center.
- [20:07]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to my conversation with Adam Hayslett, author of the new novel Mothers and Sons. It's our march get lit with all of it book club selection. We'll have more with Adam after a quick break. This is all of It. You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with Adam Hayslett. He's the author of the new novel Mothers and Sons, about a New York City asylum lawyer and his strained relationship with his mom. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, many of you were able to check out the book in March and read along with us. And as always, our audience members had great questions for our author. You'll hear some of those in a minute. But first, here's more of my conversation with author Adam Hayslett. In flashbacks, we learn about Peter's relationship with a boy named Jared in high school. How much had Peter thought about Jared before this asylum case comes into his life? This asylum case with Vassal, a young gay man.
- [21:24]
Adam Hayslett
Yeah, well, so what I want to say is, in a sense, it's the same thing. Like, so what happens to the them after? It's like, well, there is only the book. Do you know what I mean? So in A sense, like, I don't know, because I wasn't writing him when he wasn't, you know. So in a sense, I suppose I want to say probably not much in as much as in the writing of the book. I realized that he's keeping this thing apart. And, you know, he has a kind of very casual relationship with a guy in the book who's not a major character. But I think that's probably the kind of relationships he's had, you know, sort of like cook up culture. And so I would say he's. He probably hasn't thought about it a lot.
- [22:13]
Alison Stewart
Peter is living with crippling guilt because Jared died.
- [22:20]
Adam Hayslett
Peter.
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Alison Stewart
How is the guilt affecting the way Peter lives his life?
- [22:27]
Adam Hayslett
I now feel like his therapist having to account for him. I think in some sense he's trying to help other people because he feels as though he didn't help in the moment or more than didn't help, but was a cause. So, you know, I think you think about why do people go into professions where they're war journalists or they're therapists for people with very difficult problems, or they're, you know, there's. It can be all altruism, but I interviewed a lot of immigration lawyers, talked to a lot of people who do this work. And I think for some number of people, you are driven to do something that is selfless in the sense of. It's just not. It's never about you. It's always about the other people that you're helping. And so I think that's the main thing that it's channeled him into in some way.
- [23:31]
Alison Stewart
Let's go to the audience for questions.
- [23:35]
Audience Member 1
Anne is a clergy person, and you get the feeling at this revelation that the one person she's not ministering to is her own son. Do I read that correctly, that she just can't hear him, can't do for him what she does for everybody else?
- [23:57]
Adam Hayslett
Yes, I mean, I think. I guess I have a. I couldn't write about someone for as long as I wrote about either of these people or any of these people without taking some sympathy for them. So I have some sympathy for the circumstance she finds herself in. But, yes, in a sense. But should a minister be a minister to a child? I mean, she should be the mother to the child. Right. And the instinct is protection rather than revelation in that moment. But I think maybe also you're getting at. Can she hear more deeply not just the incident, but his. Essentially his desire. And they have a conversation about that towards the end of the book, because she does acknowledge that there is something about male desire in particular, that she associates with violence and that she sort of saw as erupting in her son. And there was part of her that was like, no. You know, there's a sort of. Yes. There's a kind of negation through a kind of silence. And that's the message that Peter internalizes it in some way. So it's like his mother is essentially saying, this didn't happen the way you think it happened. And to answer the question you asked earlier, that's, in a sense, how he deals with it, which is like, okay, it didn't happen. So I'm not thinking about it that way. But yet he had his own experience of it. So, yeah, I think that's right.
- [25:30]
Audience Member 2
Basically, I was struck by Sandra Vassall and even Peter, in a sense, that there's somebody trying to tell them how to do it. Like, Peter has a scenario, and Vassal and Sandra end up not really listening to him. They go, she goes to Florida. Faith disappears. And then Peter's mother tells him, this is how you have to handle this thing. And then he goes to visit Susan, I think, Jared's mother. And he's been holding this sense of responsibility for her. And he goes and sees, oh, she had a life afterwards. And it just. It made me wonder about this question of sort of like agency and trying to solve things for other people.
- [26:26]
Adam Hayslett
Yes.
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Alison Stewart
That's interesting.
- [26:27]
Adam Hayslett
Yes. Yes, I think. Yeah. In fact, directly on what you just said, one of the things that Ann thinks about and considers when she's talking to people in these circles that they do at the retreat center is she can't be prescriptive. I mean, if the first thing they do when someone comes in is they announce a problem, they're like, well, you should do X, Y and Z. It's like, well, that's just giving advice. It's not necessarily hearing fully what the person has to say. So, I mean, the complexity here, of course, is for someone who's an immigration lawyer, there are answers. There are things that are prudential to do for your case, and there are things that are not so good to do for your case. He's. His duty as a lawyer is to point those things out to his clients. But that's not to say that it isn't emotionally messy in the way you're talking about. One of the immigration lawyers that I interviewed for the book was talking about that. It's like, the trouble is, sometimes our legal duty and our emotional obligations are different. And that's the question is how you navigate it. And always when I'm writing, what I want to do is pull. Put the reader in the shoes of the character and just have them live there for a while. And not editorial. Not a sense of, like, you should do it this way, you should do it that way, but have them live inside that person's. You know, I think that's what fiction does. It's why I read myself. So.
- [28:01]
Audience Member 3
Hi. I just want to say, like, after I completed the book, I had to go back and reread the first page because when I first read it, I was so confident thinking, he has to tell his mother something. And it's, you know, something nice that happened on a date or in the car. And then after the reveal, you totally re understand what actually happened. And then, like, what happened between Venjarrett is, like, revealed solely over time through the flashbacks in parallel to vassals. And I just curious, like, sort of a writing question, how you develop that overall structure with the parallel flashbacks and the relation to the overall emotional impact of the story.
- [28:38]
Adam Hayslett
Yeah, yeah, it is a good question. So I wanted to create for the reader and so essentially had to create for myself the experience of this coming into view slowly. So, you know, the book is written in sections. Some of them are longer and sort of chapter like, some of them are quite brief. But I think that's when there's something that we're not looking at, when we do start to look at, comes in pieces, right? You don't see the whole thing suddenly in a full narrative from beginning to end. You, like, glimpse something and then it drifts away again. It's like islands in the fog. You don't really know how they're connected yet. And so I wanted, to the extent that I could reproduce in the reader somewhat the experience of dissociation. So that little piece at the beginning, the very beginning of the book, you kind of have to forget it because there's nothing to hold on to. Right. You don't know much of what it means. So in a sense, you just now are thrown into a courtroom and you're doing other things. So I put it together sort of as you read it. I mean, not exactly, but I really write until the very end. So I don't finish a draft and then go back and rewrite the whole thing. So the last pages of this book I wrote in the last two days before I had to hand in the last draft to the last edition to the editor.
- [30:12]
Alison Stewart
Wow, that's impressive. Let's get this one more question. And then we'll start to wrap up.
- [30:18]
Adam Hayslett
I'm curious why so many people who educated as lawyers end up writing novels when the style of writing legal materials is normally extremely tight, overly tight, but extremely tight, while writing fiction has loose ends and ambiguity. And how do you deal with that? Yeah, yeah, it's a very good question. So I actually. I mean, my answer is somewhat easy, which is that I was writing fiction before I went to law school and then published my first book when I was in law school, and then thought, oh, I don't have to be a lawyer, so I didn't become a lawyer. But you're right that I think the main difference is that in law, you're trying to write kind of impregnable sentences, like in a contract. Like party A wants it to mean this, party B wants to mean that. But no, it can only mean this. It's sort of an illusion that you can write such sentences. But that was the part that I think of. It took me a while to get out of when I got out of law school, which is. Yeah, precision is great and it's very useful in writing. Very, very useful. But it's not the goal. It's not the end. You do need those. You need space and ambiguity. That's under some kind of control. But, yeah.
- [31:44]
Alison Stewart
The book's been out for a little while.
- [31:46]
Adam Hayslett
Yes.
- [31:47]
Alison Stewart
What is something you've wanted to say about it that you haven't gotten to say about it?
- [31:52]
Adam Hayslett
Well, I actually got to say what I wanted to say a little earlier at the beginning of the interview, because I wanted to talk about loneliness because I think it's such a common experience. It's a common human experience, but more common now perhaps than ever in terms of people living on their own. More people live on their own than ever have before. And even if you're not living on your own, the forms of technology we have, the way society is put together, there's just. I think loneliness is an experience that often has a lot of shame attached to it at the same time. And I wanted to write a character and write about circumstances where that came up and the consequences of it came up. So that's sort of what I wanted to say.
- [32:44]
Alison Stewart
That was my conversation with Adam Hayslett. His new book, Mothers and Sons, was our march. Get lit with all of it book club selection. Up next, live music from indie rock band the Ophelias. Stay with us.
- [33:08]
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