Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Michelle Hart's fiction has appeared in Joyland and Electric Literature, and she has written nonfiction for Catapult, NYLON, the Rumpus, and the New Yorker online. Previously, she was the Assistant Books Editor at O, the Oprah Magazine and Oprah Daily. She received her MFA from Rutgers-Newark and lives in New Jersey.
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We meet Mallory in college, in between adolescence and adulthood. What drew you to writing about this time of life?
I really love a good campus novel. There's something at once capacious and cloistered, expansive and constricting, about a college campus. College campuses are microcosms of the larger world and yet so rarely do they resemble reality. A campus is such a good setting for an affair—an insular relationship that has outsized external stakes.
The novel centers around the relationship between Mallory and the woman, but ultimately is about Mallory, who is coping with the all-consuming grief of losing her mother. Can you talk about the book in relationship to loss and learning to live with loss?
When you experience loss—especially parental loss—at a young age, it both strands you in adolescence and causes you to fumble forward into adulthood. You feel so much older than people your age and at the same time so much younger. You know too much and nothing at all. It's a very confusing, disorienting paradox that was not at all fun to live through but was endlessly fascinating to write through.
For Mallory, as it was for me, it's quite lonely. She wants love but is also wary of love. She becomes more ...
Elif Batuman’s first novel The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author ofThe Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and... (more)
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We Do What We Do in the Dark
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Shashi Bhat's fiction has won the Writers' Trust / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her stories have appeared in... (more)
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We Do What We Do in the Dark
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by Shashi Bhat
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