A New Kind of Marriage Story
An author interview about politics, marriage, family, and queerness
A few months after the election (and a few weeks post-inauguration), many of us are still reeling.
I met Elizabeth Harris at a book event and immediately was hooked by the premise of her debut novel, How to Sleep at Night. A gay republican decides to run for congress in suburban New Jersey, throwing the lives of his leftist husband and reporter sister into disarray.
I wanted to ask Harris about the inspirations behind the novel and the intersections of family, politics, marriage and queerness. You can purchase How to Sleep at Night and support local bookstores at Bookshop.org. Note: This is not an affiliate link or an ad! Truly just doing this because I was so excited about the book after meeting Harris.
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Josh Lora:
I'm so excited to be sitting here with Elizabeth Harris, author of How to Sleep at Night. Happy pub day again! I'm so excited to talk to you about your novel and the intersection of politics, family, queerness, love, and marriage, all things that I'm deeply intrigued by.
My first question is, in a time of such polarization, why did you choose to write about the way politics can divide a couple versus a generational story about parents?
I feel like when we see these sorts of stories it's about the boomer parents and everyone says “it's generational, that's just how they were raised.” I was really intrigued by your decision to set it on an even playing field with a married couple where both of them didn't necessarily grow up the same way, but have the same thoughts, have the same sort of background, and how their politics diverged.
Elizabeth Harris:
That's a great question— no one has asked me that.
Where the original little germ of this novel came from is there are a bunch of couples in my family that don't agree with their spouses politically. Over the years, this has become a lot messier and more uncomfortable for them to navigate– but they're all still married.
I was wondering, how do they do it? And then I started thinking one day: “God, it would be terrible if one of them ran for office.” It would bring the most difficult part of your marriage to the center of your life. What would that be like?
One of the things that jumped out at me is that you would become famous for these ideas that you detest. From there, I tried to expand it. What are other ways we can lose the thread of our own stories?
The book follows this couple, but it also follows a woman who's become a stay at home mom by accident and feels like an accessory in her husband's life, and another woman whose career is her entire world, but it's a job she's come to hate. So there are these three people who are essentially going through the same sort of thing, thematically.
It felt worth exploring to me as a marriage rather than an intergenerational story because it is the reality of this country, right? It's not just generational. There are people who vote differently of all ages. If it's your parents, and you're an adult and you don't live with your parents, you don't have to talk to them. But if you're married and you live with this person every day, you have to figure out: can you live with this?
If you do, how can you live with this while also living with yourself?
I think we are all dealing with divisions in this country to some degree – whether it's in our own families or just that we live here and we have to figure out how we can, personally, live with it. Unless you're leaving the country, you have to figure out how to conceive of yourself in this moment. It felt like a marriage was a good way to do that.
But it was really important to me to not make this a Big Ideas book that felt heavy. It has to be fun, every page has to keep moving – it has to be a good read, or else no one's going to read it!
JL:
We've been talking for a while, and I never said I really enjoyed your book.
EH:
Thank you!
JL:
I liked that the answers to the questions in the novel weren't pat. I feel like in the age of Am I The Asshole, a lot of people would have immediately told Gabe to leave his husband. I think you did a great job of showing the foundational love and respect of a married couple, so it made it unthinkable— a real life married couple with a little kid isn’t going to get divorced because of this.
Can you talk about why you chose a more grounded versus sensationalistic approach to the novel?
EH:
Another great question!
I feel like if it was more sensational, it would have been a totally different novel. It could have been that they disagree and then it immediately blows up. I think in some ways it's less interesting that way, right?
For them to have gotten to this point where they’re still married and they have a kid and they have a life together, something has to be working. Marriage is complicated. And the way their story is written, they didn't start out so far apart. They drifted over the years. It happened slowly.
If you're worried about your kid and your mortgage and your job and getting to school on time, that's really absorbing. You can wake up one day and realize: “this is really different than it used to be.” But these two characters take really beautiful care of each other, and they work in so many ways. But there’s this really hard thing they disagree on.
JL:
One of the things that I really enjoyed (and did not expect) was that physicality was such an important element of this book. I'm thinking of the rising conservatism of Gen Z, this return of Puritan culture. Why was it important to you to keep these love scenes in the book?
EH:
A couple of reasons. One: it felt important to me in the evolution of the relationships to see this. It's so important to what happens, I felt like we had to be there for part of it, rather than just hearing about it in summary. Two: to be honest, they're fun, and I want the book to be fun! I liked them. I thought other people might like them. So I kept them.
JL:
I enjoyed it! I feel like so much of literary fiction is so staid and very sterile, so I didn't expect it. I thought it was fun. Thank you.
Another thing I really enjoyed was that you were able to thread this very realistic thread of people who drink, go out, and have fun while being in their late 30s, early 40s. Can you talk a little bit about why that was important for you to include?
EH:
I think that part of it is real, right? People live their lives. Not everyone just sits around pontificating. People go out and they see their friends, they go on dates. Parties are a part of life.
From a structural perspective, I don't want a lot of scenes of people just standing in a room talking to each other. You want something to be happening. It doesn't mean that in this scene, they're skydiving, and in this scene they're bungee jumping off a building. Not in a contrived way, but trying to show something a little different all the time. It's just another way to keep the narrative moving and keep a reader engaged. You’re not showing them the same scene again and again and again with different dialogue.
There are different opportunities and different parts of our lives to explore. It was a challenge for myself to just try and think about what's the most interesting thing to be doing here?
JL:
I really like that. On a scene level, there are so many little scenes that I can think of where it's: they're at a soccer game. Now they're at the supermarket. You did a good job of creating different moments that would both stick in the memory and were distinct. There wasn't a lot of sort of sameness.
EH:
I'm so delighted that you thought so. That makes me very happy.
JL:
On this same theme, I enjoyed all of these scenes of everyone drinking, partying and the very realistic nature of what it’s like living in New York. But now I'm thinking about a smaller theme: there was obviously an element of addiction present with Ethan and maybe Kate, but you didn't necessarily make it a big capital A Addiction Book.
EH:
Yes, totally.
I think there are a lot of people who really struggle with addiction and it is the fight of their lives. Then there are a lot of people who are high functioning alcoholics. There are a lot of people who are fairly functional alcoholics. There are a lot of people who just drink too much. It's not a black and white issue, and it's often treated that way.
It's a thing that a lot of people struggle to manage to varying degrees. Ethan and Kate are siblings, and there are families where someone really struggles and their sibling doesn't struggle at all, or someone struggles a lot and someone else struggles little. There are all these gradations. And I thought that the gradations were worth exploring.
JL:
I was thinking about it as well when I was going through the novel. I thought: Kate's a little drinker. But I love that it was sort of unremarked upon. There wasn't this whole transformative thing. It wasn't 28 Days with Sandra Bullock. It was just factual. It felt very real and lived in. Obviously, when someone is your family member, you're not going to sit around every day and talk about the big problem. It felt very realistic.
EH:
I'm glad you thought so. Thank you!
JL:
Okay, swerving again. You showed that there were real consequences to the choices Ethan made in his life. There were all of these little grenades that went off and you're not going to tie everything up by the end of the novel, because that's not real life. There would be real consequences to someone in your life running for Congress.
Was there a part of you that wanted to tie up everything in bows, or was there a part of you that wanted to make it a lot more realistic?
EH:
I definitely wanted to show the consequences. I think everyone in the book makes… without giving things away, very gray decisions.
How to Sleep at Night, the title, comes from the idea that people are making these decisions, and how do they live with them? Maybe they're choosing themselves over their family. Thematically, the book is really about what happens when who you are in the world doesn't match how you see yourself.
These three people are struggling to basically get their hands back on the wheel of their own life. And they've all reached a point where suddenly they just don't recognize who they are in the world. It's a terrible feeling. I think they're all trying to do something to fix it, but they aren’t simple choices. Does Gabe decide to stand by his husband while he runs for office, while he’s espousing all these things that Gabe really disagrees with? What can Gabe live with? How far can he take it and still be able to live with himself as a person while supporting this person that he loves?
In terms of tying stuff up, that's an interesting question. I would say some things never even really occurred to me to tie up. There are going to be consequences for things, and that's it, right? You have to live with them. You're making these choices. Just because it's a book doesn't mean they get to all be absolved in the end.
JL:
I love what you just said. “They're not all going to be absolved at the end.” Thinking about writing versus reading, there is this idea in fiction that everything has to be tied up with a neat little bow. You have to have the perfect ending. I liked that you sort of ended the book at a very specific point and said: “this is the end”. We're not going to find out what's going to happen 10 years in the future. It's not Six Feet Under.
I just realized I haven't really talked about Nicole. I love the way that you wrote about children. There was a mundanity to Nicole's days, but I like that you wrote about children as real people and not nuisances to get around the plot or plot devices. In a lot of books, especially divorce fiction, characters will have kids that are puppets. They'll stand there, they'll say one thing, and then you never think about them or see them again. But there was a real care to the way you wrote about being a parent. Why was it important for you to include this aspect of parenthood?
EH:
I have two kids, they're six and nine, and they're wonderful. Parenthood is such a crazy fucking experience. It's so wonderful and meaningful and hard and mundane, it's all of these incredibly extreme things all together. And it's also just deeply weird.
You bring this child home from the hospital and you're responsible for keeping this baby alive! Parenthood is both really mundane and really surprising all at the same time. My kids constantly surprise me. It's delightful. I think I wanted to have both of those things in the book: have it be difficult and consuming but also the best part of her life.
I think in a lot of books, kids are this cardboard cutout that are there for a minute and then get thrown over the side. But kids are people with their own personalities from day one. My two kids are so different. You think you're shaping your children— you're not. They are who they are. You fuck them up to varying degrees, but they come out with their temperaments and personalities from the moment they're born, and it's just fun to discover who they are. I really loved writing this book and I had a lot of fun writing all different parts of it. But I think the kids were the most fun for me because I was able to try and pull out different parts of parenthood, and tried to make sure I had these three children who are actual human beings.
Also, kids are super weird. They do really weird things that adults just wouldn't do, and they're funny. It's just fun to get to enjoy that on the page.
JL:
I talked about this on Tiktok, but the Motherhood Novel is having a real moment. Nightbitch just premiered on Hulu and had a lot of mixed reactions. I think it was very focused on the mundanity, right? This woman is miserable and it's very different because her kids aren't older. She gave up her career to be a stay at home mom.
I think in our culture it's so taboo to say: “I'm bored a lot of the day, but I love my kid.” I'm at the age where everyone is having kids now. I feel like a lot of parents don't want to tell people about that aspect of it. They're thinking if they tell people how boring it is, no one will ever have kids again.
EH:
Totally. There's so much guilt around that too, you know. Parenthood is hard for a lot of reasons, but when they're little, that's one of them. There's a lot of sameness. Kids need routine, which to an adult can seem like monotony, right? People can be really hard on themselves for having all the emotions about parenthood, but it's such an intense thing in all the ways. The joy is so intense, but so is the frustration. You have to become this completely different person when you become a parent because you're someone's mom or dad or whatever all of the sudden. It's a real shift in identity, and it's totally possible to disappear into it.
For so long, it was impossible to talk about the ways parenting was hard and didn't make people happy. I think it's great that people are able to do that now. I was trying to both talk about the ways in which it's hard, but also the good stuff, because it is both.
JL:
My last question is more identity focused. One of the conversations that was happening on social media (sorry to bring it back to the discourse) was about the distinction between queerness and just being gay. I have very close queer friends who are married and have kids, and a lot of the people I know want to get married and have kids.
Then there's this Bushwick contingent that's saying if you want to get married and have kids, then you're not upholding queer values. In the book, the pictures of the family keep popping up as a recurring theme. I think the character of Chloe [Ethan and Gabe’s daughter] is so important. Why was it important to you to frame Ethan and Gabe's marriage in this so-called “traditional” way?
EH:
I think that there's no one right way to be queer or gay or whatever. Everyone's an individual. Everyone's going to do it differently. I personally wouldn't want to tell either side that they're doing something wrong.
I think in terms of framing them as traditional, these are the characters that appeared to me, and I followed them, and this is what happened. But also, there are more queer stories now than there used to be, but there still aren't a lot. And there are almost no queer parent stories. How many queer parenting books can you think of? We don't really see them a lot, but I'm a queer parent. There are a lot of us.
It did feel important for me to show people that this exists, that we're real, and we have lives just like everybody else. We have families and we have kids and all of those things. I felt that I could bring something to this that hasn't been done a lot, and I think it matters that people can see it. It's still rare in terms of what's out there in books. Which is a shame because we're awesome.
JL:
Thank you again for doing this!
Elizabeth Harris is a longtime reporter at The New York Times where she covers books and publishing. She lives in New York City with her wife and kids. Her debut novel, How to Sleep at Night is out now.
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