For Adam Haslett, clutter is anathema to creativity. The author’s workroom in his house in Upstate New York, where he lives part of the year with his partner, is sparsely decorated. Save for a black-and-white framed photograph of a spiral staircase that a friend shot in Italy, the walls are bare, which is how Haslett prefers it.
“I want to be able to look through the walls, into whatever is going on in my mind, as opposed to looking at objects,” Haslett says. He meditates most mornings for about 45 minutes before he writes. “Concentration is hard, and quieting the voices in my head is important. I want to lower the level of distraction. To let the quieter voices in, ones that might be sources of surprise for me.”
Haslett is skilled at examining the interior lives of characters in states of emotional extremis, whether they’re dealing with anxiety, depression, loneliness, or mental illness, or facing homophobia or violence. His three previous books—the 2002 story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; the novel Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award; and the novel Imagine Me Gone, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award—have been translated into 23 languages. He’s also the recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.
His new novel, Mothers and Sons, out in January from Little, Brown, examines love and longing, the price of keeping secrets, the impact of homophobia and violence on mental health, and the plight of asylum seekers struggling to stay in the U.S.
The plot centers on Peter, a gay 40-year-old asylum lawyer in New York City who’s overworked, unfulfilled, and estranged from his mother, who left Peter’s father and now runs a women’s retreat in Vermont. Peter spends his days working to exhaustion, and his humdrum love life consists of hookups with a man who wants more than Peter can emotionally offer. But Peter’s life changes when he meets Vasel, a young gay man from Albania who was forced to flee his country after his sexual orientation was exposed. As Peter works to help Vasel, he begins to recall a traumatic event from his own youth involving his first love.
Haslett had wanted to write a novel about a lawyer for a long time. He has a law degree from Yale Law School—he graduated in 2003—but has never practiced law, though over the years he’s done volunteer legal aid work at immigration detention facilities. Going to court became part of his research for Mothers and Sons.
“I went to Federal Plaza in Manhattan and sat in on immigration hearings,” he says. “They’re open to the public, but no one tends to go. The courtroom is empty. It’s just the judge, lawyers, and respondent. The lawyer for the asylum seeker leads the person through his or her story, then the ICE lawyer tries to pick that story apart and sow doubt as to the person’s honesty. Most of the time, the judge decides right there and then, from the bench. The hearings can last a couple of hours or more, the decision only a few minutes.”
Born in 1970, on Christmas Eve, in Rye, N.Y., Haslett was the youngest of three kids. He grew up primarily in Massachusetts, with a few years spent in England, the birthplace of his father, who suffered from manic depression and died by suicide when Haslett was 14.
Haslett has written about mental illness and severe anxiety—from which his brother, who died by suicide at 42, suffered—in You Are Not a Stranger Here and Imagine Me Gone. “When my father’s energy was up, it was a solar level of energy,” he says. “Things with my father took a turn when I was 12—there was a lot of stress and heaviness, and the death was out of the blue. I wasn’t a formed person; I formed around the event. One of the responses I had was to become elegiac.”
In 1993, Haslett graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in English, then earned an MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1999. By the time he’d graduated from Yale, he had already published You Are Not a Stranger Here, to critical acclaim, and the law career—which once seemed like a more stable option than writing—took a backseat.
With Mothers and Sons, Haslett also wanted to explore the life of a single gay man. “Someone who came of age when AIDS was raging,” he says, “when sex was already laced with danger,” and is now trying to navigate hookup culture. “I wanted to get at the pain and alienation, the way it can cause division between sex and intimacy, and at the shame of loneliness.”
Whether writing courtroom scenes or exposing characters’ emotional wounds, constructing elegant, carefully paced sentences is top of mind for Haslett. “With Mothers and Sons, my goal was to create a novel that had the lyric arc of the short story,” he says. “A lot of the effort for me was trying to think, where is the reader at this beat and that beat? I’m always attuned to the rhythm of sentences. It’s what I find most pleasurable.”
His ability to capture what it means to be human, in all its beauty, mundaneness, and ugliness, is what makes Haslett a standout, according to his editor, Ben George. “Adam is unsurpassed at making you feel, on finishing a novel, that its events and characters are part of your own experience,” George says. “Not fictional but real.”
Sally Kim, president and publisher of Little, Brown, who has been a fan of Haslett’s fiction from the start, agrees. “Adam writes tender books that are also harrowing,” she says, “and has the ability to forge new ground with each one.”
Haslett says he aims to write for those who might not see themselves in other work, and describes himself as a “method writer,” one who’s trying to mirror his characters’ psychic states.
He hopes his books can act as a kind of quiet, uncluttered room for readers. “Given how aggressively distracted the culture is, how forcefully our minds are dragged away from us, I’m trying to create a space where people can become absorbed and slow down,” he says. “I want to give people the opportunity to enter into others’ lives—and further into their own lives, too.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
