Michelle Hart biography

Interview

Michelle Hart discusses her debut novel, We Do What We Do in the Dark, and how the mixture of grief, love and coming of age in the novel reflects her own experiences.

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 ...