Interview With Rachel Howard, Author of The Risk Of Us

What makes a family? What makes a family risky? In Rachel Howard’s fearless and deeply empathetic novel THE RISK OF US (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; April 2019), she tackles not only what creates kinship – but what can destroy it. Told through the lens of a childless forty-something couple who become foster parents of a young girl named Maresa, readers are taken on an emotional journey with three people struggling to connect and to find unconditional love.

We’re delighted to feature this interview with Rachel Howard.

How does THE RISK OF US differ from other books about adoption? About motherhood?

I think one way THE RISK OF US may be different from other books about adoption is in the intimate voice of the novel. In my book, the woman who is trying to adopt seven-year-old Maresa out of foster care—and we never learn this woman’s name—speaks the book directly to her husband and to her would-be daughter, so that the reader seems to be eavesdropping on a very personal accounting/confession. This voice, the nameless woman speaking to her husband and to the little girl, was like a tightrope I walked while writing the book, feeling out each line for how she would actually say it if she were talking that intimately. And this problem of the woman’s “I” speaking to the “you” and “you” of the book became the heart of its conflict: How can these three people go from being “I” and “you” and “you” to a true “us”?

Another way the book might be different from others about adoption is that there’s no assurance that the adoption is going to go through. That’s because I didn’t know what the ending would be until I got there. I honestly didn’t know.

This might sound strange, but I don’t really see the book as being about motherhood. I wanted to be honest about the mixed feelings of motherhood, to be sure, but to me this particular kind of sudden motherhood—meeting a child who’s seven and comes with an intense history, and all at once she’s your daughter—to me this was a specific angle on a tough universal question: How do we make the leap to unconditional love?

How did you come to the title THE RISK OF US?

The working title was Finalizing. I still like that title, actually, but obviously it isn’t commercial. When it came time to re-title, after some excruciating brain-wracking, I remembered the passage right in the beginning of the novel when the narrator talks about the foster services agency brochure advertising for “Families that take risks.” That’s a brochure I saw in real life. And when I saw it I thought, That’s a strange thing to advertise for. It seemed to me the brochure was basically saying, Yeah, you need to be a little crazy to try this. In what other context would anyone say a child needs parents that take risks? So the word “risk” seemed to encapsulate the novel.

In your memoir, THE LOST NIGHT (2006), you wrestle with traumas from your childhood, specifically your father’s unsolved murder. How did the writing of that book inform this one?

Strangely, that memoir really didn’t inform or influence this one. The writing of this novel was so different. Writing The Lost Night was cathartic. I was writing the story of my father’s murder so that I could end that story and claim my own life. Writing The Risk of Us wasn’t cathartic, not at all. I was interested, in a fiction writer’s detached yet empathetic sort of way, in the difficult situation of these three people all trying to make the leap to unconditional love. How is that done? I was intensely curious. But not in need of catharsis.

This novel deals with extreme childhood suffering, and you’re an adoptive mother. How did you decide to engage adoption, foster care, and trauma as fiction rather than as memoir?

I was really clear that this book was fiction, before I wrote a single word. Not just so that I could invent and simplify, but because I think there’s a profoundly different kind of experience and conversation that happens when you’re drawn inside a world that has to hold together with its own internal reality, rather than appealing to the reader’s knowledge that “this really happened.” It’s a completely different writer-reader contract than memoir. (And I say that as someone who also loves memoir!) I wanted to make a space for readers to be in this tension and ambiguity of trying to become a family, but I didn’t want it to be about me. I knew that the reader would see some similarities to me in the narrator, but I’ve long been inspired by writers who welcome this kind of fiction/nonfiction ambiguity: Rachel Cusk, Marguerite Duras, Sheila Heti, Jean Rhys, Lucia Berlin. Those influences made the choice of fiction even more decisive.

The idea that “whatever a kid had gone through, a kid could get over it” with “enough love” runs through this story. Can you elaborate on this idea and what role it plays?

In foster care, all the players—foster parents, social workers, psychologists, birth parents too—are doing their best, really, even though when you’re looking at the system from the outside the impulse is to judge all the people involved for being selfish or falling short of helping this vulnerable child. And sometimes people are being selfish, and yes, they do fall short, because that’s all human nature. But my view is that people are doing their best, really. And we’re talking about an inherently very difficult situation.

I have two different reactions to the “love conquers all” view of foster care adoption. I do think that whatever a kid has gone through, a kid can get over it. I’ve seen it in my own life and in children’s lives—I know that it happens and that freedom from the past is possible.

At the same time, we’re being foolish if we run with a sentimental idea that “love will fix everything.” Often it doesn’t. It’s not just about how loving you are as a parent—there are so many factors and frankly a lot of chance (call it luck or call it God’s grace, depending on your persuasion). It’s tempting to buy into the “love conquers all” narrative to a degree that we fail to grasp and honor just how deep trauma runs, and fail to see times when we might even be complicit in inflicting that trauma. I feel this is more important than ever to remember as our country continues separating children from families at the borders—no one should be blithe about this. A new family is not a simplistic happy ever after, for any child.

You mention a lot of the standard advice books for new adopting parents are lacking. What do you wish you had read, or had known, before adopting a child yourself? On some level, did you write the book you wish you had been able to read?

I have one book to recommend emphatically to anyone who lives with or loves foster children, or veterans, or anyone who has gone through trauma:The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma It’s compassionate, scientific, rigorous, and mind-opening. At the end of the novel I included notes on all the books the novel quoted because I hope people trying to help foster kids will find that book. In the novel, the foster mom was surprised that none of the social workers and therapists knew of that book—that was my experience in real life.

I guess in a way I wrote the novel I wanted to read while fostering, because in my own experience I just wanted so badly for someone to acknowledge that all the surveillance of the process, though necessary, is crazy-making . . . I hope readers who are adopting out of foster care might read the novel and feel understood, like “OK, my reactions aren’t wrong or crazy.”

This is one of the first novels that portray the night Trump was elected. Why was it important to you and the story to narrate that event?

That event escalates the tension for all the characters. The shock of that election faces the characters—faced all of us in real life—with an intense decision: fear or hope? I didn’t worry that including that event in the storyline would date the book because unfortunately that event was cataclysmic.

How did you decide how to handle race in the story, specifically the fact that white parents adopted a “brown,” “Latina” girl? Does it affect their relationship at all?  

My approach to handling race in the story was the same as my approach to every other factor in this story: I tried to be honest, aware, and true to the characters. None of us can afford to be “blind” about race. The little girl in the novel, Maresa, is aware that she is brown, and she is aware of Donald Trump saying things about Mexicans, which was (still is) a horrible reality for, well, all of us. The white adopting parents try to teach the little girl the word “Latina,” and try to give her positivity about Mexican and Mexican American culture. I think it would be naïve and maybe willfully blinded to say that the parents being white and the little girl being Latina doesn’t affect their relationship. At the same time, it’s not a major conflict of the novel. Other excellent and important novels have been written with race relations at the heart of the conflict: Shanti Sekeran’s Lucky Boy comes to mind. But within THE RISK OF US, race isn’t the major factor in these three people all having a difficult time making the leap to truly unconditional love.

The possibility and beauty of unconditional love, as well as the difficulty, almost impossibility, of it, runs through the whole book, as well as many of your answers here. Can you talk more about the leap of faith it requires? Do the contours of unconditional love differ in foster adoptions from other parenting situations?

I love this tough question. I think in some ways it can’t be answered without the further question, “What is love?”, which is a really hard spiritual question. The mother in THE RISK OF US draws on both non-fundamentalist Christianity and Buddhism to navigate her life; I draw from both spiritualities in my own life, too. In Buddhism, while writing this novel, I kept coming back to the traditional Buddhist bramaviharas, or “highest spiritual abodes.” These start with “metta,” an instantaneous, easy, free flowing goodwill such as you experience in uncomplicated relationships, like with your cat.

Then there are the tougher-to-practice “abodes”: compassion (not to be mistaken with pity), sympathetic joy (watch out for the perils of jealousy), and finally equanimity. Equanimity is complicated. It’s tough. To me, it means you love with a kind of patient detachment; you accept that you can’t control the other person’s actions; you find ways to be there for them without expecting “feel good” payoff. I’m a little uncomfortable with the oversimplifications of the phrase “unconditional love,” even though I use it: It seems to suggest a Hollywood happily ever after. I think if we’re really being present in our lives, in complicated relationships like those in THE RISK OF US, it’s about finding equanimity anew, every day.

All that said, there is definitely a leap for the characters to make in THE RISK OF US. A lot of it has to do with what people now call “attachment,” but if you take the jargon away, it’s bonding. Primal bonding. If you’re hoping for a bond with a seven-year-old you’ve just met, a seven-year-old with lots of understandable anger and mistrust, you don’t have the advantage of that deep primal bond between infant and birth mom. Getting to that bond takes dropping a lot of reasonably developed defenses. It is possible, though. And yes, so beautiful when it happens.

Did you have a specific audience in mind when you were writing? What do you hope readers will take from this story?

This might surprise people, because I think there’s a supposition in our culture (an unfortunate and sexist one) that books about family life are written for women. My first readers for THE RISK OF US were the members of my writing group: Two forty-something men. They were hooked and did not feel that the book wasn’t for them. And that was important to me. I wanted to write this novel for men and women both. I hope both men and women will read it.

I hope readers will take a sense of just being with truth and reality in all its complexity. That they’ll feel they inhabited a space, within these pages, where pain and beauty exist side by side, and where truth is complex.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RACHEL HOWARD earned her MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and is the author of a memoir, The Lost Night. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and her fiction, essays, and dance criticism have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

THE RISK OF US

What makes a family? What makes a family risky? In Rachel Howard’s fearless and deeply empathetic novel THE RISK OF US (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; April 2019), she tackles not only what creates kinship – but what can destroy it. Told through the lens of a childless forty-something couple who become foster parents of a young girl named Maresa, readers are taken on an emotional journey with three people struggling to connect and to find unconditional love.

Maresa is generous, funny, and artistic, but her past is full of trauma that disrupts the couple’s tight-knit world. The narrator is convinced Maresa is meant to be her daughter, but is the feeling mutual? As they navigate the foster care bureaucracy, the couple has a year—during which Maresa approaches the age at which children become nearly impossible to place—to decide whether or not to finalize the adoption. Or, perhaps the best path forward is the unthinkable—giving her up.

Drawing on her own experience as a foster parent and as someone who survived extreme childhood trauma—her critically acclaimed memoir THE LOST NIGHT (2005) is about her father’s unsolved murder when she was a girl—Howard’s voice is shrewd and lyrical, and she brings a singular perspective to the literature of modern motherhood.

ADVANCE PRAISE

 “An emotionally complex and amazingly suspenseful novel about love and fear.”  — Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation“Though rooted in memoir, this is compelling fiction, trenchant, heartbreaking, ultimately hopeful.”— Booklist

“Rachel Howard’s The Risk of Us (so accurately titled) is a novel of deep pain yet also laughs—lots of them. Nothing is easy in this book, and that’s as it should be. With risk comes a kind of awesome grace. A wonderfully written and candid examination of what it means to be a family.”— Peter Orner, author of Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge and Love and Shame and Love

“I’ve never read anything so beautiful about the intricacies of adoption—the process itself, and the seldom-talked-about aftermath. The prose is elegant and compressed; I often had to stop reading to catch my breath. Anyone who has ever loved a child, in any capacity, should read this book.”— Jamie Quatro, author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon

“Rachel Howard has given us a portrait of family-building and attachment that is at once beautiful and painful, serious and funny, page-turning and insightful. I was deeply moved by this novel, a powerful reminder of the risks we take on whenever we love anyone.”   — Belle Boggs, author of The Art of Waiting

“The Risk of Us is a spare, poetic, and fearless narrative that explores the question of what makes—and keeps—a family together. Be prepared for an absorbing, unflinching chronicle of the formidable difficulties and vast rewards of love.”

— Krys Lee, author of How I Became a North Korean and Drifting House

“This book reads like a thriller. A beautiful story about connection and love despite and beyond trauma.”— Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land

“Howard works with an elegant complexity, rendering family life with its necessary cocktail of pain and humor and pathos. She’s the kind of writer I admire most: an unflinching, savage, and ultimately tender eye trying to make sense of all our confusions.”— Joshua Mohr, author of Termite Parade

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Interviews, On Writing