HANNAH GERSEN is a novelist whose fiction ranges from the strictly realist to the gently speculative. Her first novel, Home Field, is a deeply felt story about family and grief in rural Maryland, described as Friday Night Lights meets My So-Called Life. Her second, most recent novel, We Were Pretending, leaps into today’s most pressing crises–climate change, the creep of technology–through the lens of Leigh Bowers, an at-sea single mom trying to secure a better future for her daughter and a better death for her mother, who is dying of cancer. It’s beautifully written, imaginative, and elegiac with surprising twists and turns.
Hannah is also a film critic who reviews movies made by women on her substack, Thelma & Alice. After two decades in New York City, and a pandemic spent in New Jersey, Hannah recently moved north with her family to Brunswick, Maine.
Recently The Common’s Editor in Chief, JENNIFER ACKER, sat down with Hannah to discuss her new novel’s themes and development from first idea to final draft. The two women have known each other since their first semester at Amherst College. This interview is an excerpt from their decades-old conversation about books and the writing life.
Jennifer Acker: We Were Pretending is a book that’s about parenting, climate change, AI, and the anxiety and grief that we feel about confronting all of those things. Since there are so many threads, I was curious, what was the original seed of the novel? What was the first thing that came to you?
Hannah Gersen: I saw someone from my past on Instagram, someone I hadn’t been in touch with in a long time, and they had become a guru. At first, it surprised me. I thought about it, and it didn’t surprise me. I didn’t start writing the novel right after that. It was years later, when I was off Instagram, that I thought about writing about the experience of seeing someone from the past and being surprised by their persona online.
JA: How did it grow from there? How did you develop this Instagram-lifestyle, guru character?
HG: Well, I was thinking about how I didn’t want the character to be. I didn’t want her to be very, very famous or powerful or influential. I wanted her to be someone who was just trying to get by. There are a lot of these people online, regular people, who are trying this. It’s a hustle. I wanted her to be that kind of person. I think it’s interesting the way that you then project all these things onto the hustler and give them power that they don’t have, even if you think you’re too sophisticated to do that.
JA: What kinds of things do you think are projected onto these gurus?
HG: It’s whatever you’re looking for, but certainty is a big one. And contentment. Feeling that the person has figured things out.
JA: When you thought about the relationship between the Instagram guru and the narrator, what kind of friendship did you want to portray?
HG: I don’t think it’s a real friendship. It’s very one-sided, and the narrator, Leigh, is projecting a lot of things onto her. I guess I was trying to show that Jennifer Heck, the guru, likes Leigh and even sees Leigh as someone she could have a relationship with, but she’s not someone who even has solid relationships with people. She’s not cruel or calculating or even consciously manipulative. She’s just not reliable.
JA: Right, she’s pretty self-absorbed.
HG: Yes, she’s self-absorbed. She’s also fun. And she’s very different from everything else that’s going on in Leigh’s life. She’s not a parent, she doesn’t really have a job. She seems free.
JA: One of the parts about this book that I loved was the special mushroom. Could you talk about this mushroom and its role in the book, and how you became obsessed with mushrooms?
HG: I decided that Leigh was going to have this past where she sold an illegal mushroom. And I didn’t want it to be an actual mushroom, like I didn’t want it to be psilocybin. I didn’t want it to be real because I wasn’t sure how the laws were going to be changing around that. And I also just wanted it to be more of a fantasy. Then I thought, well, I’ll just make up a mushroom. But then I realized I didn’t know that much about mushrooms, so I was like, let me just learn a little tiny bit.
I was thinking about how healing isn’t intellectual, you know, it’s not conscious, your unconscious has to be involved.”
JA: Why did it have to be a mushroom rather than another drug?
HG: I wanted the drug to be something in nature that you can pick, that grows, that’s not made from a factory, or wherever chemicals are made. The other thing is, I don’t understand chemistry very well. I definitely didn’t want to get into that! When I started learning about mushrooms, I couldn’t believe how fascinating they were. It’s bizarre to me that mushrooms can have an effect on human physiology. And I had forgotten that fungi is its own kingdom. They have qualities of plants and animals and actually have more animal qualities than plant qualities. I was blown away by how strange they were. The more I learned, the more I got interested. I read all these books. I really wanted to read a book that was just about mushroom biology, and I couldn’t really find a good one. And then that book Entangled Life came out, after I had done all my master research, and I read it, but I was like, this is the book that I was looking for. If only I had had this.
JA: What are the special properties of your imaginary mushroom? What’s it called? And what’s the role in the book?
HG: I had read an article in The New Yorker by Michael Pollan about psilocybin mushrooms, and how they were used for terminally ill patients, how they sort of ease death anxiety. I wanted this mushroom to be just for that purpose. Like, only if you were dying, and you were terrified of that, then this particular mushroom would help you.
And so then, I was like, what should it be called? I needed a good common name (as opposed to its scientific, Latin name). So, I decided to just look at mythology, to see who is involved with death, and that’s when I learned about Hecate. She’s the one who helps Demeter find Persephone. She shows her where the gates to the underworld are.
JA: In the book, this mushroom is one way that people deal with a certain kind of anxiety, specifically the anxiety about death. And then, on the other side, there’s the role of AI. Your main character works for the Department of Defense, and she is developing AI technology to help soldiers deal with climate anxiety and various kinds of trauma. It’s interesting to me that you have one very natural balm, and one that’s completely artificial and technological. Was that something that you thought about when you were writing the book, that there would be these two different kinds of therapies for modern problems?
HG: I’m not sure how it evolved. First of all, AI was a very different part of the cultural conversation when I was writing the book. Many people didn’t understand why I was writing about it. I think it just didn’t seem relevant.
But now everybody has a sense of what AI is in terms of health care, and it’s basically a large language model. That’s how most people conceptualize it—that you can talk with this intellectual interface. And I guess I was thinking about how healing isn’t intellectual, you know, it’s not conscious, your unconscious has to be involved. I was also thinking about how people experience healing by going into nature. No one can really say why it is that they feel better. It’s the simplest thing that you can do in life to feel better, to get another perspective, is to just go out, take a walk, look at the stars, whatever. Technology prevents people from doing that. Most technology now seems to be about getting you to buy stuff.
JA: Technology is almost like a replacement for the physical and outdoor activities that we used to do.
HG: Exactly. So I was trying to imagine how technology could connect people to nature, like, what would it look like? Is there a way to thread that needle where technology or some sort of AI-robotic thing could bring you into nature and actually facilitate a connection that had healing properties?
I had read studies about how people feel better when they chit-chat on a computer with an LLM [large language model]. And I just thought that was interesting, that people could feel a connection to this collection of words. I guess that was what sparked my interest. I don’t understand a lot about what’s going on with AI. I did know it was out there and people were investing in it, and that it was on the horizon.
JA: Do you consider your book a hopeful book?
HG: I tried to end on a hopeful note, but I don’t personally know that you really can reconcile some of these new technologies with getting closer to nature.
JA: Maybe some Silicon Valley person will read your book and try to develop something like what you’ve described.
HG: I guess I was imagining that the technology that I invented for the book would be a one-time thing. My idea was that you would have this experience once and it would remind you of how amazing plants and nature are, and then, as a result of that treatment, you would sort of reconnect to your instinctual love for the sky, the earth.
JA: I want to talk to you a little bit about the parenting aspect of the book. You have two kids. Did you start the book before your youngest was born?
HG: No, I started it when she was four months old.
JA: What was it like working on the book with an infant, both in terms of finding the time and structuring your days? But also in terms of, you know, this book is dealing with climate anxiety. And you’re raising kids in the midst of serious climate challenges. What was that like?
HG: I did become a little more thoughtful about how to talk to my kids about it. My son was getting to the age where he was starting to hear about it. And I didn’t want to scare him, but I also didn’t want to pretend like it wasn’t something I was thinking about. Last year we moved north to Maine because of climate change, and he knows that was part of the decision. I hear people say they don’t want to have kids because of the climate crisis but I’ve never felt that way at all.
JA: You don’t worry about the world they’re going to inherit, and that things will be worse for them than it was for us?
HG: It’s still good to be alive, it’s a gift to be alive. I can fall into a very pessimistic feeling about the future, and I think anyone who has delved into science will come away feeling alarmed and grief-stricken at all that has already been lost. But there are a lot of positive actions we can take to restore ecosystems and that’s what I try to focus on.
JA: Was it important to you that Leigh, your main character, be a mother? How did that element come into the book?
HG: It was definitely useful that she was a mother because it raises the stakes for her. I mean, if she hadn’t had her daughter, she would have had more freedom of movement and that would have taken the pressure off some of her decision-making. Also, the fact that she was divorced and co-parenting, she was obliged to her ex-husband in a different way.
JA: Do you think of your book as being in conversation with any other books?
HG: I reread White Noise when I was working on it. I didn’t remember liking it very much when I first read it in college. But I had the instinct to reread it and I realized there’s a whole plot thread about the wife who takes a pill to not be afraid of death. I really liked it the second time, I found it a lot funnier.
I was also reading a lot of fairy tales and Greek myths because my son was really into mythology.
JA: Did those fairy tales and myths make any sort of impression on you as literature?
HG: I think that I was reminded of how foundational they are to all storytelling. And they also reminded me that the book I wrote is more symbolic, it’s not really realistic. Myths made me see everything in a more symbolic light. And it made me worry less about whether or not the technologies made any sense, or even the plot. I don’t know if the plot even holds up in the real world.
JA: When you write a book over many years, it can be hard to remember what the revision process was like. But if you do remember, can you tell me, are there any major differences between the first draft and what you’ve ended up with?
HG: It was difficult because in February 2020 I had reached a point where I was starting a third draft, and I remember I had all the scenes written out, in an outline, and I was gonna rearrange it all and fix it. And then it was impossible to do that kind of work after the pandemic hit. My plan went out the window. And when I finally finished that third draft, it still had a lot of problems. The biggest was that there was too much about Leigh’s job, because I had gotten really interested in alternative therapies and the placebo effect. And I was just trying to bring in the placebo effect, and all these ideas that weren’t relevant to the story. And it was just a little bit too much. I streamlined it so that Leigh is now working on a very specific project at the beginning of the book, just to make it simple.
JA: We are just about a month out from the release of the book. How are you thinking about trying to celebrate this and make space for it at a time that is filled with so many news emergencies and political coverage?
HG: That’s funny, I sent my newsletter today, and at the beginning, I apologized, because I was like, this feels ridiculous to be promoting a book. And someone wrote back right away, and he wrote back, “Fuck news. Make books.” I put that on a sticky note by my desk. But in general, lately I’ve been reading a lot.
JA: You’ve been reading a lot of fiction?
HG: Yeah, a lot more than usual, which is nice. People need stories. If you like books, it’s an easy way to step away from the news and take a break.
I was reminded of how foundational myths are to all storytelling.”
And I think I just have more of an appetite for reading fiction than I have had for a while. Partly I want to see what’s being published this summer, at the time my book’s being published, so I’m very curious. Normally, I don’t always keep up with contemporary stuff because I want to read what I want to read, not what happens to be published.
JA: Does it feel different to be launching your second book than it did launching the first one?
HG: With my first book, it was all so new, and I thought that it was gonna change my life or something and it really didn’t. It was actually kind of disappointing, and I didn’t enjoy it very much, and then I felt bad that I didn’t enjoy it. It’s a privilege to publish a book and to have readers. But it’s very different from writing. It’s so different from writing. I guess that’s a better way to put it: It’s a whole other job and it’s not what I signed up for, or am that interested in. I know that going in this time.
JA: So, what does that mean you’re doing differently?
HG: I don’t expect it to be as fun or as fulfilling as writing. And that’s fine. It doesn’t have to. It’s not for me, it’s for the readers now.
JA: Have you started working on something new over the last year or more?
HG: Yeah, I’m working on two different things. One is connected short stories and the other is an autobiographical novel that I’ve been fiddling with for a long time.
JA: Is that normal for you to be working on more than one project at a time?
HG: Yeah, definitely. And I also have a long, epic post for my Substack, where I review movies made by women, that I’ve been working on for over a year that I really want to finish.
JA: How do you organize your writing life when you’re working on so many projects? Do you just sit down every morning and go where inspiration takes you?
HG: I’m not that organized. I wish I was more organized. During the pandemic, I was in this tenuous real estate situation, and my schedule was always changing with my kids’ schooling. I lost my routine. I feel like the biggest change in my writing life is that I write on my phone now. I write on my notes app. I have so much writing on my notes app that I do when I’m waiting around.
JA: I know other parents who do that. They write in notebooks or on their phones when they’re waiting in the car to pick up their kids. Even those of us who aren’t parents still have dead time when we’re waiting for things, so it’s a good thing to remember.
HG: I have a lot of things started and in various stages, on my laptop, on my phone, in notebooks, and then I write notes to myself about where the different pieces are. And now that I’m describing it, it sounds insane. But it works in the end. Like with this big, long essay that I’m going to do, I’m going to gather all the notes that I have written in various places, and then I’m going to print them all out, and then I will type them into the document. And then I will just memorize everything in the document and move it around, keeping everything in my head for a week or two or however long it takes. And then I will promptly forget everything that I wrote.
Hannah Gersen is the author of Home Field and We Were Pretending. Her fiction has been published most recently in Electric Lit, Visions, The Southern Review, and New England Review. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, LitHub, Granta, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She reviews movies for The Common and writes a monthly newsletter, Thelma and Alice. She lives in Brunswick, Maine, with her family.
Jennifer Acker is founder and Editor in Chief of The Common, as well as author of the debut novel The Limits of the World, an honoree for the Massachusetts Book Award.
