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Parallels, Parents and Perspective: A Q&A with Adam Haslett

By Adam Haslett, Isabelle McConville / January 24, 2025 at 1:56 am

Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Haslett returns with a story about new beginnings, old grudges and complicated family ties. Read on for an exclusive Q&A with Adam Haslett and blog writer Isabelle McConville on Mothers and Sons.

Hardcover $29.00

Mothers and Sons: A Novel

By Adam Haslett

In Stock Online

Hardcover $29.00

A mother and son, estranged for years, must grapple with the shared secret that drove their lives apart in this enthralling story about family, forgiveness, and how a fleeting act of violence can change a life forever, by “one of the country’s most talented writers” (Wall Street Journal)

IM: My name is Isabelle McConville, and I am the blog writer here at Barnes & Noble. Today, I have the privilege of speaking with Adam Haslett, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of Imagine Me Gone, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and most recently, Mothers and Sons. Adam, thank you so much for being here today.

AH: Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.

IM: Can you please get us started by setting up the story of your brand-new novel?

AH: Mothers and Sons is a novel that centers on an immigration lawyer living in New York City who is buried in himself and in his work. He represents asylum seekers who have often very difficult stories to tell about what they’ve been through, which is why they’re able to claim asylum, and he has the task in a way — not unlike a therapist or a priest — to try to get them to talk about what’s most important to them. The difference is that as a lawyer, he needs it on a certain time frame and a certain form in order to present it in front of the law and in front of the courts. As we begin the story, there’s Peter in the law courts, and then there’s his mother, Ann, who is a former Episcopal minister who has now started a women’s retreat center with her partner up in Vermont. The question of the novel is: why are these two people estranged? They’re both working in professions that help people, and yet they barely speak to one another, and they’re both in touch with the other member of the family, Peter’s sister, Liz, who does go and see her mother. There’s a bit of a mystery to the book. We want to figure out why these two people aren’t close anymore.

IM: I will say this was one of those books where I really clung to every sentence. I love a book where I’m invested in the plot, but I’m also really enjoying myself as I’m reading it. Without any spoilers, it has a very satisfying ending — I did cry.

AH: We always like to hear that.

IM: Where did this story really start for you?

“I ask myself a series of questions . . . The course of writing a book is taking things that interest you and figuring out if they can live together.”

AH: I always start with individual characters, and I ask myself a series of questions. This story began with Peter in an old apartment he lived in — it’s referred to in the past of the book — down by Trinity Church on Wall Street in lower Manhattan. He’s staring out a window at this church, and I began to ask myself a series of questions like, who is this guy? What is he doing in this room? What is he looking at? It’s a very inching forward process. More broadly, I can say that I went to law school and a lot of my friends became immigration lawyers. I saw the difficulty and the toll of the work they were doing for asylum seekers. Years ago, I did some volunteering in immigration detention facilities way before I thought that I might write about it. When I was asking myself those questions about who this guy is and what’s his situation, the two intuitions I had were that he was an immigration lawyer — I had never written about a lawyer before — and the other, is this is based a bit on my best friend’s mother, who did in fact start a retreat center in Maine. They’re very different elements, and you don’t know whether they’re going to fit in the same book. The course of writing a book is taking things that interest you and figuring out if they can live together. In this case, they did.

IM: Absolutely. It’s interesting to hear that you started out with Peter, and I’m wondering how you went into crafting the other characters like his mother, Ann, and Vasel, who Peter has a close relationship with throughout the book. How did they stem from imagining Peter first?

“I wanted to focus on what it’s like for the lawyer and the client to have to go through the most traumatic stories about what’s happened to them, but in a very distilled form.”

AH: As an asylum lawyer, Peter has clients. I wanted to focus on what it’s like for the lawyer and the client to have to go through the most traumatic stories about what’s happened to them, but in a very distilled form. I knew there would be a central client in the book. In this case, Peter has buried himself in his work, and he’s done that to shut himself off from his own emotional life. Vasel is a character who is claiming asylum based on sexual orientation because of violence he experienced in Albania. There’s something not quite right about the story, and Vasel doesn’t tell him the whole truth at the beginning. It comes out in stages, and it really gets under Peter’s skin. He’s not even aware of it at first, but the things he’s being told are troubling him and his relationship to the arm’s-length dynamic he typically has with clients. Vasel’s story pierces his numbness, and that’s a big part of the book. With Ann, I had this intuition that there was going to be an estranged mother in the book. I tried writing her sections initially from Peter’s point of view, but it just didn’t work. As soon as I allowed her to have her own point of view, it opened everything up so much more.

IM: I thought it was really interesting that you wrote them from two different perspectives, first person and third person. Did you know you wanted to write her in third person?

AH: Not until I started to, and then it snapped into place. As a writer, first person present tense is a bit of a difficult place to be narratively because you don’t have a lot of leeway. In Peter’s case, he’s stuck in the present. That’s the point of view of dissociation — first person present, not looking, not seeing. Ann is someone who has a much more grounded, calm ability to take in other people’s lives, think about them, be a container for their baggage. That all functions better with the third person past tense. There’s a calmness to it. Their alternate points of view were very much about the kind of characters that they are.

IM: I liked how Peter and Ann live parallel to one another. I didn’t fully realize that until I was thinking about the book afterward. I think they both work to help people seeking asylum in different ways — physically and emotionally. Did you know you wanted to write them that way from the start? We also see this similar parallel between mothers and sons throughout the book with Sandra and Felipe.

AH: I was aware of the parallels as time went on. Vasel and his mother also have a very intense relationship. I think the echo of one of the books that I had in mind in when I was writing this was Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. It’s a book about incomprehension between generations, and a very important male friendship in the younger generation. I think seeing it through different lenses is a way to echo out. When I started, I thought it might just be a book from Peter’s point of view, but it became too limiting. I can’t remember exactly when I discovered it, but I would say at least for the last three years of writing it, I was definitely aware that there were two points of view.

IM: One of the other scenes that really stood out to me when I was reading was between Sandra and Felipe at her court hearing. They’re another example of a mother and son facing entirely different problems in the world than Ann and Peter. We get a close look at Peter’s day-to-day grappling with his client’s most heartbreaking and harrowing life experiences and then having to watch their stories get grilled in the courtroom. Can you walk me through crafting that scene where Sandra gives her testimony? I liked that you wrote it out in Spanish and then translated it on the page. What was it like to write that?

“They’re strange events. It’s like if you went to therapy, except there’s someone that cross examines you about whether what you’re saying is true.”

AH: One of the things that I did in researching things for this book was to spend quite a bit of time in immigration court. Not for particular people’s stories, I was inventing those, but for the procedure. They’re open to the public, so anybody can go, but nobody really does. They’re strange events. It’s like if you went to therapy, except there’s someone that cross examines you about whether what you’re saying is true. They’re telling these quite harrowing stories, and translation is so often part of that. Oftentimes, someone claiming asylum may speak some English, but not so much that they want to tell their full story in English. You get little bits of incomprehension or confusion that slip in because of translation. Also, this relates to Peter in a way because Sandra doesn’t want to remember any of her story. She doesn’t want to recount it. She’s being forced to do the thing Peter doesn’t want to do himself, with his own past. Putting the scene together, I wanted to take the reader inside the courtroom and say, this is what it looks like. These are the people. There’s a lawyer, there’s a judge, there’s a government lawyer, there’s a translator. I’ll just let you live inside that scene for a while.

IM: That scene really stuck out to me throughout the entire book. I kept thinking back to it because first we get to see, like I said before, Peter’s day-to-day, and you’re really thrown into the chaos of it and see life from his point of view. We also get to see Sandra and Felipe’s dynamic and how they are as mother and son. You’ve written about these complicated family dynamics in your previous novel, Imagine Me Gone. What interests you about exploring these complicated family dynamics and why do you think you come back to it?

“You’re not just looking at the individual character in crisis, but you’re looking at how it’s echoing.”

AH: I suppose it’s because of my own intense experience of family as such a site of often intense love, but also sometimes intense loneliness. I think the other thing with Sandra and Felipe in this book — this ties in with Imagine Me Gone — is that we often read about or hear about characters in distress, or in some sort of dramatic or difficult circumstances, but I’ve always been interested in how the experiences of those people affects their families. You’re not just looking at the individual character in crisis, but you’re looking at how it’s echoing. In this case, Filipe is very worried about his mother being deported. It’s really hard, but the only thing he can do is sit there in court and worry over the procedure because he doesn’t have power over the situation. He’s 14 and he doesn’t have power. I wanted to capture that adolescent fear and apprehension of someone caught in the system.

IM: Speaking of Imagine Me Gone, it’s been almost a decade since that book came out. What’s it like going back on the road and meeting new readers again?

AH: It’s lovely. I’m a slow writer, I’m afraid. I’m also meeting people who’ve read the previous books who I hadn’t met at the time. Also, immigration is central to this book, and having conversations about it now feels relevant.

IM: Lastly, who are you reading now?

AH: I’m reading a book of short stories by a wonderful writer named Paul Yoon called The Hive and the Honey. I’m also reading a book, as I often am, on cosmology. How the universe ends based on quantum mechanics, relativity and all this stuff. I’m not a physicist, but I find that to experience awe is a good thing. Reading about that subject almost always produces kind of awe.

IM: Maybe we’ll get some of that cosmology in your next book! Thank you so much for doing this today.

AH: Yes, thank you.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.