Is that the vibe you got from your grandma-mother, that she wanted to be free, but she was tied down taking care of you?

You know, the older I get, the sadder it is to me how little I knew my grandmother, not only because she died almost 30 years ago, um, but also because I really knew her in the wake of the two greatest tragedies of her life, which were her daughter's life imprisonment and then her husband, her great love's death.

And so I think I knew my grandmother in incredibly grief-stricken years.

And so my grandmother did have a certain atmosphere around her of clearly being somewhat embattled with the life she had.

Um, but it's hard for me to source exactly where those feelings came from, and I will say the grandmother in the book is not my grandmother.

Um, but also the fundamental thing I had wanted to dramatize in that book was, you know, my grandmother did not want the life we had, and to some extent I did.

I loved my grandmother, and she felt like my whole life.

Um, so one of the themes in his book is if his parents knew that they were going to continue as revolutionaries who, um, were gonna be doing revolutionary acts that could easily get them in prison, why did they decide to have a child knowing that they could be locked away for years? And I'm wondering how much you thought about that too.

Is that the vibe you got from your grandma- mother, that she wanted to be free, but she was tied down taking care of you?

You know, the older I get, the sadder it is to me how little I knew my grandmother.

Not only because she died almost 30 years ago, um, but also because I really knew her in the wake of the two greatest tragedies of her life, which were her daughter's life imprisonment and then her husband, her great love's death.

And so I think I knew my grandmother in incredibly grief-stricken years.

And so my grandmother did have a certain atmosphere around her of clearly being somewhat embattled with the life she had.

Um, but it's hard for me to source exactly where those feelings came from.

And I will say the grandmother in the book is not my grandmother.

Um, so one of the themes in his book is if his parents knew that they were going to continue as revolutionaries who, um, were gonna be doing revolutionary acts that could easily get them in prison, why did they decide to have a child knowing that they could be locked away for years? And I'm wondering how much you thought about that, too.

But I, but yeah, I'm, I'm wondering how you navigate that relationship and how you think the characters here navigate that.

Yes, I think that in conditions of constant surveillance, I think it's both a form of self-protection and also a certain form of dignity to make the self somewhat illegible.

I do think that there are ways that the characters here are slightly removing themselves from sight in, in the environments they're in.

Every single thing Susanna says or does with her mother occurs in an observed condition.

Um, and so that dramatically limits or shapes the ways they can interact with each other.

And yet my hope is that you can still see they are meaningfully companioning each other within this, that it's not that they've been degraded into some false realm where they can't be real with each other.

They are still finding ways to connect, um, to enjoy each other even though they're not in a space where they can bring whatever we might call our full selves.

So both for the daughter in this book and for yourself, it's like how out of that p- or arrangement, position can you conceive of a future where you, you know, could go on to more, better and, you know, in your case, go on to great achievement and success? It's like how did you even know that was possible?

Yeah.

But it was definitely important to me to try to airlift the prison in my book out of all of our cultural scripts about prison and, you know, free the reader from any ways they're used to feeling about prisons so that they could encounter for themselves how they ended up feeling in the book.

You know, I think one of the ways that prisons legitimate themselves in our society is by seeming very normal.

You know? They seem ordinary to us, and so they appear reasonable.

Um, and the thing I wanted to try to get back into the tone of the book was how extraordinary [chuckles] this is.

Um, right? A, a child looks up a hill and knows that her mother is going to be trapped on the top of this hill forever.

That's extraordinary.

That rule, you know, nothing said or done in this book could have happened in your life, um, were there moments where you've been surprised that maybe your grasp of what had happened in this life w- was murkier than you'd realized, and it sort of emerged through the book?

It's so personal and idiosyncratic, and yet the echoes with Palestinian politics makes me wonder if it is connected to a sort of larger politics.

The writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has this line, "The wish to return seals the hero's fate." And I guess one of the things I got from that is that there are many ways to be a hero in this life.

You know, there are many forms of hero's journeys, and some are venturing out, and some are venturing back.

And I personally don't believe one is more meaningful or more ethical than the other, but I do think there are particular difficulties and fates [chuckles] that are accorded to whichever one you're inside.

If you're in, you know, what are called nostos narratives, like narratives about people trying to get home, where the heroism is to get home, then of course there is something seemingly perhaps more backwards-facing than the narratives that are about going out.

And I think that was part of why I did have a pretty degraded opinion of Susanna for so long.

The part of me that thought she wasn't a protagonist, that thought she didn't do anything, was because she wasn't venturing out.

I'm just, like, curious how you thought about that wreckage in writing this book and that legacy and what we should do with it at this point.

But I think to a lot of people listening to this, and certainly t- for me, thinking about my cousin, who again, took out a hit on the mother of his children, right? I think, well, why, why would you want to have a relationship with a parent who did something so horrible?

You know, um, people have actually put a lot of thought into this, this question of what do we do with kids whose parents are inside? Because it's easy perhaps to think, well, if someone's caused great harm, they've, you know, abdicated their right to be in their child's life, including the fact that, you know, sometimes that harm, as in your case, takes place within the family.

Um, or they think prisons are traumatizing spaces, and we have to spare children those spaces.

And actually, again and again, I think what people have found is that children are aided by staying in relationship to their incarcerated parent.

Um, when your parent goes to prison, you inherit a very painful piece of knowledge, which is that you are leaveable.

And that's a very scary thing for a kid to know.

And I think that you need that knowledge counterpointed by as many efforts as possible from your parent to continue to connect with you.

And, you know, when I was working on the podcast, you really kind of woke me up at a certain point, um, because I was so focused on what Alan had done, and you really helped me refocus on what happens after, right? So what does happen after?

But I think to a lot of people listening to this, and certainly t- for me, thinking about my cousin, who, again, took out a hit on the mother of his children, right? I think, well, why, why would you want to have a relationship with a parent who did something so horrible?

You know, um, people have actually put a lot of thought into this, this question of what do we do with kids whose parents are inside? Because it's easy perhaps to think, well, if someone's caused great harm, they've, you know, abdicated their right to be in their child's life, including the fact that, you know, sometimes that harm, as in your case, takes place within the family.

Um, or they think prisons are traumatizing spaces, and we have to spare children those spaces.

And actually, again and again, I think what people have found is that children are aided by staying in relationship to their incarcerated parent.

Um, when your parent goes to prison, you inherit a very painful piece of knowledge, which is that you are leaveable.

And that's a very scary thing for a kid to know, and I think that you need that knowledge counterpointed by as many efforts as possible from your parent to continue to connect with you.

You need to know that they still think of you, that they are still trying to reach out to you, that they're still trying to support you.

And, you know, when I was working on the podcast, you really kind of woke me up at a certain point, um, because I was so focused on what Alan had done, and you really helped me refocus on what happens after, right? So what does happen after?