Photo by Clayton Cubitt

Arts & Culture

What really scares Katie Kitamura

Ahead of Harvard visit, author talks performance, privacy, and horror inspiration for latest novel

Max Larkin

Harvard Staff Writer

April 21, 2025

7 min read

On Tuesday, the Mahindra Humanities Center will host the novelist Katie Kitamura, in conversation with Claire Messud, the Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction in Harvard’s English department.

Kitamura published her fifth novel, “Audition,” earlier this month. Like several of her past books, including 2021’s acclaimed “Intimacies,” it’s taut, engrossing, and occasionally eerie — this time revealing the uncanny underside to life in middle age, inside and out of a family’s New York City apartment.

Kitamura was recently named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Hari Kunzru. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

This latest book takes place under a cloud of uncertainty. In midlife, the central character may be very successful, or headed for a fall. She may be a mother, or not. She may be keeping secrets; her husband may be, too. It’s unsettling — is there any chance you’re becoming a horror novelist?

I love this question. With my last three novels, I’ve always thought of a genre as I was writing them. I wrote a novel called “A Separation,” and I thought of it as a missing-persons novel, a kind of mystery. And then I wrote a book called “Intimacies,” which is set in a war-crimes tribunal; I thought of that as a courtroom drama.

With this one, when I started writing it, I thought I’d like to be in conversation with horror, as a genre. The book that I had front of mind was “Rosemary’s Baby,” by Ira Levin — another book about troubled motherhood and New York real estate. These characters, this family: They’re trapped inside this apartment, and things grow increasingly frenetic.

There are also these uncanny moments — is this really my son? Is my husband all that he appears?

I think the really frightening moments in horror are when you look at something that you believe you understand, and you see something that is strange. In Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” one of the characters looks out the window and sees a part of the house she shouldn’t be able to see. Something about the entire geography and architecture of this home has changed.

I wanted to try to create that kind of feeling here: The central character is looking at people she believes she knows, and they seem like strangers to her. That, to me, is a very horror-adjacent feeling.

“The central character is looking at people she believes she knows, and they seem like strangers to her. That, to me, is a very horror-adjacent feeling.”

It’s been remarked that this novel has a pandemic feel to it. Was that conscious on your part?

Well, there’s not a single mask, or vaccine, or virus in the book. But it was written during the pandemic, and it was only really in the last couple of weeks that I realized in some ways it is very much a pandemic novel: a small apartment with family members coming home, not having enough space and really driving each other up the wall, on some level.

That was not my intention at all. But my feeling is that as a writer, you can’t help but breathe the air you breathe; all of it, everything in the sociopolitical atmosphere, it ends up on the page in some way.

The title is “Audition.” Your central character is an actor — very attuned to other people’s performances, altogether off-stage. And performance has been a theme of yours for a while — the essential malleability, or adaptability, of who we are, how we are with each other.

Yes. And I think people might read my work and think I’m writing a critique of that — that I’m pointing to those performances to say that they’re artificial in some way.

But it’s almost really the opposite: I think we learn how to be through performance, in a fundamental way. When I look at my children, I know they’re learning what it means to exist in the world in part by mimicking things they’ve seen around them. That’s very natural: to play different parts in different situations.

I just think as a novelist, I’m interested in those moments when the crack between parts starts to show, or the script wears thin. And for a brief moment you see something that is not as contained or controlled — and that can be frightening.

We might live with a spouse, a child, a parent for years and years — and never see some whole parts of them. It feels like you ask here how well we can really know each other.

To me, a successful relationship is one that allows the other person a certain degree of privacy.

I think this idea of full disclosure between two people is a kind of myth, and I’m not sure it’s a particularly healthy one. There are parts of myself that I want to have only to myself, that I don’t feel a profound need to share with my partner. And similarly, I believe there are parts of himself he should be able to keep for himself.

Your novels tend to reveal a real love of language and performance, of literature and visual art. And not only are you writing, but you teach writing at New York University. In the AI moment, in a time of ecological crisis, why does it seem so important to you?

The day after the election, my students came into my workshop and they said, “What is the point of writing fiction in times like this?” And I thought, there’s never been a moment when it feels more crucial to me to write fiction.

The way I put it to them is if books were not powerful, then why would they be being banned all across the country? If they don’t pose some kind of threat to power, why would they be continually under attack? To use language with precision and care, to have control of language, that’s going to be tremendously important over the coming years.

One purpose of fiction is, of course, to observe reality as it exists and as we see it. But part of it is also to imagine a different kind of reality. And if we can’t imagine a different kind of reality, there’s no way that we can bring it into being.

So you’d stick up for the English major.

I would! I was an English major, and I felt like I was able to go lots of different places with that. But also, when I think about my day, I think, the most optimistic thing I do every single day is to read a book.

When you read a book, you open up your mind to another person, and that’s actually quite profound. We are easier to subjugate when we’re divided, when we’re atomized. And books are actually a tremendous force of connection. If you are one of the people who is tending the fire, keeping that connection alive, that is really not nothing at all.