Harriet Clark's Debut Novel 'The Hill' After Two Decades

Harriet Clark's debut novel 'The Hill' has been published after more than twenty years of writing and revision. The novel draws on Clark's early experience: her mother Judith, a member of the Weather Underground, was sentenced to life in prison for driving a getaway vehicle for an armed robbery, and was released on parole in 2019 after nearly forty years. Clark was raised by her maternal grandparents, once prominent Communists. The novel is not autobiographical but a fable crossed with a nineteenth-century novel, exploring childhood and family separation. Clark won the Plimpton Prize in 2022 for a short story extracted from the work-in-progress, and received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Stanford's Wallace Stegner program, and MacDowell residencies. She describes the book as a tribute to novels by Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Paula Fox, Grace Paley, and Leonard Michaels. The book was influenced by the Trump family separation policy and migrant caravans, which helped Clark see her protagonist's journey as heroic. Clark aimed to avoid coercive prison narratives and instead create a mythic, dreamlike atmosphere. The novel's structure honors the ritualized, non-progressive experience of a child visiting a parent in prison.