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Katherine Hill, photo by Zoé Fisher |
Katherine Hill is the author of the new novel A Short Move. She also has written the novel The Violet Hour, and is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She is an assistant professor of English at Adelphi University, and she live in Brooklyn.
Q:
How did you come up with the idea for A Short Move, and for your character
Mitch, a football player?
A:
I first met Mitch in a short story I wrote about his daughter Alyssa working in
retail. Mitch was a minor character, retired from football and growing more
distant from his daughter, and I found myself really interested in him—an old
man already in his late 30s. So I wrote a story about him when he was roughly
Alyssa’s age, basically to get to know him better.
That
story also gave me a chance to develop Alyssa’s mother, Caryn, and it
introduced me to Mitch’s mom, Cindy. Suddenly, I had a whole complicated family
and the outlines of an accelerated, novel-length book. It felt really
appropriate to the sport, which I’ve watched my entire life, to write the
narrative as a series of spurts, jumping forward in time at intervals as Mitch’s
life unfolds.
Q:
You tell the story from a variety of characters’ perspectives. Did you know
from the start that it would be a multi-point-of-view book?
A:
Yes, once I had those first two episodes, a multi-perspective approach was the
only way to go.
From
the beginning, I understood Mitch as someone who belongs to many different
people and audiences, and I wanted the form of the book to register that in
some way. I worked multiple perspectives in my first novel, too, so it actually
felt pretty natural to me. Maybe it’s the only way I can write!
Q:
In an interview with The Millions, you said that “one of the really important
features of this book is the absences, which is something I’ve always been
interested in, artistically.” Can you say more about that?
A:
I really love off-the-page action. It allows the reader to learn about events
indirectly, and to act as a kind of co-author, imaginatively filling in the
gaps.
So
many of my favorite books—Jane Austen’s Emma, Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—are built around
important gaps, and I wanted to write a book that would do something similar.
It
felt right for football, which is all about exploiting physical gaps to move or
stop the ball. It also felt right for a story about the clash of private and public
life.
Q:
Did you need to do any research to write the book, and if so, did you learn
anything that especially surprised you?
A:
Tons. I’ve never played football myself, and I didn’t grow up in a
football-playing family, so I had to read and watch a lot of footage to get the
details right. I also had to talk to players to make sure I understood the culture
and psychology of the sport.
Maybe
the biggest surprise in my research was that I got to learn so much about
subjects that are technically outside of football.
I
read outstanding books about evangelical Christianity (Tanya Luhrmann’s When
God Talks Back), reproductive technology (Henry Greely’s The End of Sex and the
Future of Human Reproduction), and the American soldier’s experience in Vietnam
(Christian Appy’s Working-Class War), all of which had something really
important to show me about my characters and their experiences.
Q:
What are you working on now?
A:
My baby turned six months old the same day A Short Move was released, so I’m
mostly just enjoying her first year of life. I do have some messy early pages
of a new novel on the back burner. It’s still too provisional for me to say
much about it, but there’s a good chance it will have more than one
perspective.
Q:
Anything else we should know?
A:
This is actually my second book in 2020—a sentence I can’t believe I get to say!
The
first is a co-authored book of literary criticism about the Italian novelist
Elena Ferrante. It’s called The
Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism, and it’s sort of
like a seminar in four voices for fans of the Neapolitan Quartet.
In
2015, I spent the summer reading and exchanging letters about the novels with
my co-authors: Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, and Jill Richards, all literature
scholars and wonderful writers.
Our
book republishes and expands that correspondence, offering ideas about
Ferrante’s books, friendship, and reading in general. It was such a fun and
illuminating way to write, like being in a band with really talented musicians.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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