The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Jennifer Wilson is a critic at The New Yorker, but one with a very wide purview. She'll write about digital breakups or finding an apartment, as well as her latest obsession in the world of literature, which at the moment is a new book by Katie Kitamura.

Katie Kitamura's new novel, Audition, is about a middle-aged actress living in New York City who meets a much younger man, a playwright. And the two embark on a kind of undefined relationship that's mysterious to us as readers. We have to kind of interpret for really long periods of the novel what's going on between them.

And, you know, it's set in a theater and this is a novel about roles. And this is also a character who's trying to figure out gender roles. You know, what kind of figure should she be to this young man? Is she a romantic interest? Is she a maternal figure? What are the appropriate gender roles for a woman? I think is one of the things that probably drew Katie Kitamura to the theater for this most recent novel.

The New Yorker's Jennifer Wilson spoke with Katie Kitamura about Audition, which comes out this week. You know, this first scene in the novel kind of primes us to read the rest as being sort of about interpretation. And, you know, it struck me that your last novel, the main character, was an interpreter. So what is it about interpretation that's continuing to inspire you or nag at you?

I mean, I really wanted interpretation to be at the center of this novel, in a funny way, even more than in my last novel, where the character is literally a simultaneous interpreter. Because I wanted that...

feeling of interpretation to be very active for the reader as well. You know, I wanted the reader to also be trying alongside all the characters in that opening scene to understand what is happening between those two central characters. And I'm very interested in characters, in particular female characters who speak the words of other people. And I'm interested in passivity. And that goes a little bit, I think,

against the grain or against what we're told to look for in fiction. You know, I teach creative writing and in class often, if they're in workshop, if there is a character who the group feels doesn't have agency, that is often brought up as a criticism of the character. They'll say, oh, but, you know, she doesn't have any agency. As if a character without agency is implausible or in some way not compelling in narrative terms,

But of course, the reality is very few of us have total agency. I think we operate under the illusion or the impression that we have a great deal of agency. But in reality, when you look at your life, our choices are quite constricted. So I'm interested in depicting characters who maybe understand that passivity a little bit more than other people might and who are trying to grapple with what that means.

I'm curious how long you had been thinking about acting and how long you had been thinking about writing a novel with a central character who's an actor. I've been thinking about it for quite a long time. I tend to sit with an idea for everything.

An embarrassingly long amount of time, I would say. You know, I can sometimes look back and think, oh, I first started thinking about this idea and it was a decade ago. I really came to see the degree to which performance is present in our day-to-day lives. You know, even now as we're talking to each other, even in our most intimate moments, we're always playing parts of some kind or another. Yeah.

you know, whether that is a part of a mother or a daughter or a partner or a writer or a student or a teacher, you know, there are all these parts that we play every single day and they come with quite, you know, prescriptive scripts in a lot of way. And the thing that struck me when I was thinking about audition is how seamlessly we flip between parts without almost being aware of it. So, for example, I can be

talking to my husband about something and I will be using a certain vocabulary and a certain way of speaking and then my children can come in and literally my voice will almost go up half an octave. The vocabulary changes completely. It's bizarre. And yet that is how the vast majority of people go through their day. And we're not even really aware of it. I think in audition, the central character is very much

aware of it, she sees where those cracks are. And at a certain point, she can no longer paper over them. To what extent is this a novel about middle age? I was struck by the part where the main character is struggling with a scene in rehearsals. At one point, she becomes convinced that the playwright just got bored of this character and wished she could start over halfway through.

And I was just curious to what extent is this, you know, kind of a midlife crisis novel? There's kind of two narratives of creative development in the novel. There is a

The development of the younger man, who has a very standard kind of coming-of-age story. In the beginning, he seems to not know exactly what he's doing. And by the end, he has emerged as an artist. And that is a narrative that I think we're very familiar with. We understand the shape of that. The narrative that is much less clear even now is a narrative of what

happens to a woman, particularly in the middle of her life, which is astonishing to me. I mean, one thing that was striking to me when I published Intimacies is that the central character in that novel is explicitly not a young woman. She is in her mid to late 30s, say. But in a lot of descriptions of the novel, she was described as a young woman, moves to The Hague to start a new life. And that was really interesting to me because it was

almost as if story and narrative only happens to the young, which we know is not true. And I think in this novel, we have a character who is certainly on a passage of discovery, but the narrative is not pre-established in the same way. She's not following something by rote. And so in a lot of ways, I think that's why it felt right for me

for the narrative to fracture in a lot of ways, for there to be kind of multiple possibilities that she might be exploring. Whereas the narrative for the younger character, this young man, is much more linear. It's much clearer because I think it's something within our culture that is much more familiar.

Speaking of age, age gap relationships between older women and younger men are all over popular culture. Thinking of movies like Baby Girl, The Idea of You, novels like All Fours. Why do you think we're suddenly so fascinated by that dynamic? I think it's something that still feels transgressive, which is in some ways extraordinary. You know, the

It's a very, very obvious thing to say that an age gap between a man, an older man and a younger woman is something that is overly familiar. I think the inversion of it feels exciting. It feels like it's

centering female desire in a way that is new. And I think it still feels in some way transgressive. There's a way in which we know it shouldn't feel transgressive because we all say, well, hey, if a man did it, nobody would say anything. But at the same time, it is about a desire that culture at large has told women not to have.

I don't know about the timing. That is something really, really interesting to think about. I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting question. Why now? Why not five years ago? Why not five years from now? That I don't know. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. WNYC Studios is supported by the United Nations Refugee Agency.

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So Katie, this is your first novel set in the United States in New York City. Your prior novels were set in Mexico, Tijuana, Greece, The Hague. Why did you choose to come home now and for this novel?

I've always been really interested in writing outsiders, and I've always been interested in the point of view of somebody who's newly arrived in a place. And so my characters are often like anthropologists who are studying the culture and the mores and the rituals of a place. And they see a place with quite fresh eyes because they don't know very much about it.

And that was useful for me as a writer because I think I was trying to figure out as well what the terrain of the novel was. I think I felt after four novels that maybe I had the skills to write about the place I knew very, very well without that kind of shield of discovery. New York is an intimidating city to write about. There's a lot of fiction that is set in New York. It's a city that I've lived in for decades.

15 years, but I still don't think I quite have the nerve to call myself a New Yorker, really. But this character is so dislocated in her life that the sense of dislocation that I often have relied on location to achieve, I think here was much more internal. There is, as I said, so many stories that have been set here, and that is a kind of...

you know, that is a canon that you are writing against, but it's also a canon that kind of can bore you along as well. I'm thinking about even a film like Rosemary's Baby. There's so many great horror films that have been set in New York. That sense of alienation, that sense of slight remove and otherness, the sense of something bubbling under the surface, that's very much a New York story. And so when I was thinking about this novel, I found myself thinking about horror as a genre the most probably.

It's funny you say that because this one has relative to, I mean, you know, your previous novels, the least amount of, I guess, how we would typically define violence. I'm curious, you find this one to be the most inspired by horror? I mean, horror is an interesting genre in that the moments that are frightening are often not when the monster appears, but all of the moments leading up to it when you don't really know what's going on.

what you're waiting for. You know, I think once you see the monster, you say, ah, there's a monster or whatever it is that, you know, you've been building. But the true tension of horror is always in the waiting. And I think this is a kind of novel where there is a lot of that waiting, maybe more than in any of the previous books. The other thing I would say is that, of course, the kind

kind of key moment in the novel is when the central character suddenly has this realization that she herself might be the problem. She might be the monster, so to speak, within the family. And so when I think about horror, when I think about, you know, who is the kind of monster that's out there, it's not a kind of moment of violence. It's not a moment of kind of some discovery of something horrible. It's actually the moment is finding that she herself is a problem in this story. Yeah.

You became a writer. You trained to be a ballet dancer. Then you did a PhD in American literature in the UK. You know, that's interesting to me because one of the things I love about your novels is that they take us into these different careers. And you're really interested in how all of your characters do their work and talk about their work.

You know, it gets really granular. And so it seems like you're really interested in work and jobs. Is that, I mean, is that true? Yeah, I love workplace novels. Yeah. And the workplace is a really interesting space. It's a, I mean, okay, less now, I think, because so much is remote. Right.

but it's a physical space that has so many very particular rules and cultures and subcultures and subcultures below the subcultures. And navigating a workplace, it seems to me, just full of fascinating interpersonal tensions and dynamics. But of course, I'm mostly interested in workplace novels because I think one of the things that novels excel at is interaction.

depicting the relationship between the individual and a larger social structure. And that is what makes novels special. That is what makes novels different to essays, for example.

And I think workplace is a place where you very naturally see the relationship between the individual and the institution. Because whatever the workplace is, it is representative of an institution of some kind. It will tell you about some kind of structural reality about the society that the characters are living in. And it allows you the opportunity to do it through really granular detail, through very, very small things that seem insignificant, whether it is...

the quality of the coffee in the break room or whether or not people feel they're surveyed when they're working or what the sight lines are from somebody's desk to another desk or how the office space is organized. There's so many ways in which hierarchies of

power are built into a workspace. And as a novelist, you then don't have to say hierarchies of power and you don't have to say social structures or institutions. You can just have a character who's at their desk working and is aware that their boss can see their screen, for example. You don't write political novels, I would say, but your characters' lives are shaped, as ours are, by political forces. What does it mean to

to come back to the U.S. right now and in this way politically? I mean, I'm thinking of the fact that your main character, you know, as an actress but as a woman, is having some difficulty distinguishing what's real and what's not real. You know, Audition was written...

broadly speaking, during the Biden administration and during the pandemic. You know, this is clearly not a pandemic novel. And yet it is a novel in which people are sequestered in rooms together with their family and they slowly go a bit crazy. So there's no, you know, there's no, there's not a single mask. There's no reference to the pandemic, but it's written. It draws from the atmosphere in which it was written.

It was finished well before the election. The power of fantasy is something that is relevant, politically speaking. As I said, I teach and I remember the day after the election, my students came in and they said, I don't, you know, what is the point of a novel right now?

You know, we should have all trained to be lawyers. And I mean, I don't disagree. I think it would be great if we all had legal skills. That seems like a useful skill set to have right now. But I actually think that novels and writing in general feels incredibly important because it is already clear in the new administration that language is important.

going to be a terrain where a substantial part of this battle is going to be fought. And I mean that absolutely, literally, in terms of what language people are allowed to use, in terms of how language is manipulated or denuded of meaning. And I think what writers do or can try to do is to use language with

precision and care and use language in a way so that it does retain its meaning. I think, you know, when words stop meaning what they're meant to mean, then in a lot of ways we're in trouble. Katie, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Katie Kitamura is the author of five novels and teaches creative writing at NYU. The novel Audition just appeared. Jennifer Wilson is a staff writer. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for this week. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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