Here’s why the author of the just-released novel Reunion should be on your radar.
Jeremy Lawson / courtesy of Hannah Pittard
Long before we get to the point at which Hannah Pittard makes a joke about her flailing arms, I've already scribbled on my notepad: talks with her hands. The author is animated in a way you wouldn't think possible over a Google Hangout interview, and she acknowledges this, like she acknowledges most things over the course of our conversation, with charming self-deprecation.
"If you were here with me, you'd see that my arms would be all over the room," she says. "I would've hit you a few times accidentally by now. I like to think that I'm a very tiny person, but I'm very long."
We arrive at this moment because she's comparing herself to her dog — a boxer/blue tick hound mix named Elmer T. Lee, after the bourbon — and his tendency to both underestimate his size and misunderstand his surroundings, bumping into trees and knocking over signs. But Hannah's motion is less clumsiness and more excitement, and the effect is both disarming and comfortable: not unlike her writing.
Pittard's debut novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way (Ecco, 2011), caused a ruckus before it was even published; three agents vied to represent it, and 10 editors entered a bidding war to claim it. The book, which uses a collective narrative voice to tell the story of a 16-year-old suburban girl who goes missing and the boys that miss her, met critical praise at its launch. The Washington Post called it "chilling and touching" and Pittard herself "harrowingly wise about the melancholy process of growing up"; the New York Times referred to her "grace[ful] prose" and its emergent "exquisite details that translate instantly into memory." It has haunted me since I read it three years ago, to such an extent that I snatched (and devoured) an advance copy of her second novel, Reunion (Grand Central), the second I saw her name attached to it.
Her books are the sort that leave you reading the blurbs, scanning the small print, and prolonging the reading experience as long as possible. She's the kind of writer who gets in your head and makes you evangelize to all of your friends — wide eyes, quick gasp: "Do you know about Hannah Pittard?" If she's not on your radar yet, she should be. Here's what you need to know.
Reunion opens with professor and failed screenwriter Kate Pulaski on a plane, finding out that her estranged father has killed himself. It then follows her and her adult siblings over the course of four days, during which they return to Atlanta, confront their understanding of their father, their relationships with each other, and their respective failings in their separate lives. Kate — self-destructive, self-centered, quick-witted, complex — is not Pittard, though Pittard unapologetically admits their similarities. ("I often tried to imagine myself, and then have her make an even more terrible decision than I might have made, or make the decision that I might have made five years ago. It was fun to do. It was cathartic.")
Even the tragic circumstances of the novel are based in reality. Pittard's family does come from Atlanta, and it was a suicide (her grandfather's, a man with whom she had a "difficult relationship") that brought her and her two older siblings back there. "This is my most autobiographical novel," she says. "I think that it will be the closest that I ever come to writing about me."
The sibling bond — that complicated and often inexplicable love that Pittard so expertly encapsulates in Reunion — comes directly from Pittard's relationship with her own two siblings, both older. Kate goes back and forth between feeling understood and alienated among her older, more successful brother and sister, and manages dueling desires to both prove herself as an adult but also be taken care of. It's a disconnect that will ring true for anyone who has navigated the changing relationships within families into adulthood.
"We start looking so much at ourselves and we assume that these people who are in our lives, and who know us better than anybody," Pittard says, "we assume that we still know them in the way that we did when we were children. And, of course, we all grow up, we move out of that same house, and we have our own lives. It's so easy to forget that their own lives, or those other lives, have their own problems."
Posts
Hannah Pittard Is The Writer You Won't Be Able To Stop Talking About