Meet Jennifer Haigh, winner of the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Prize

The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award is an annual honor given to a work of fiction that tells an American story in a distinctly American voice. Supported by the generosity of novelist David Baldacci and administered by the Mark Twain House & Museum, the MTAVL awards a $25,000 prize to the winning author. Last year’s winner was Jennifer Haigh, for her novel, Mercy Street.

Mercy Street weaves together the stories of four related characters into a web centered on the Mercy Street Clinic for Women’s Health, a Boston facility that provides abortion services. The novel’s characters include a social worker at the clinic, a devout Catholic who protests there, and a white supremacist on a disturbing crusade. MTAVL panel judges praised Mercy Street for its “vibrant” narrative voice, calling it “impactful and grounded in the ordinary… a novel that explores a burning American issue with intelligence, sympathy and skill.”

Haigh, 55 and a Boston resident, is the author of five previous novels, including Mrs. Kimble (2003), which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Outstanding First Fiction, as well as Baker’s towers (2005) and Heat and light (2016), both set in the fictional town of Bakerton in western Pennsylvania. Rand Richards Cooper, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Mark Twain House, which oversees the MTAVL Prize, recently met with Jennifer Haigh and discussed her award-winning novel.

Rand Richards Cooper: Jennifer, we are very pleased to have you join us as a judge for this year’s Mark Twain Prize! As we prepare to dive into this year’s excellent book list, I’d like to look back to last year, when your novel, Mercy Street — which I had the pleasure of rereading recently — was our winner. The judges found much to admire in Mercy Street. One thing was how you skillfully weaved what appeared to be in-depth reporting into the day-to-day workings of the Women’s Health Center into your story. Can you talk about what happened in the research Mercy Street?

Jennifer Haigh: He probably has the less I’ve never researched a novel I’ve written. This book is the result of my personal experience, which spanned several years as a volunteer counselor at an abortion clinic in Boston, where I live. I underwent extensive training, during which I learned to answer calls on a hotline, as Claudia does in the novel. If a woman wanted to make an appointment for an abortion, her first step was to speak to a volunteer like me. I explained the procedure to him and answered his questions. While manning the phone lines there, I heard so many stories – stories that ended up fueling the writing of Mercy Street.

That said, I want to make it clear that I didn’t start volunteering there with the intention of writing about it. It was the last something I wanted to write about, because it’s such a polarizing topic. I was very aware that I would alienate half of my readers by writing about abortion rights. It seemed like a crazy thing to do. But after a few years of volunteering, I realized that it was the most interesting and compelling thing in my life. Writing a novel about anything is really difficult, but if it’s not about what you care about most, you’ll never finish it. It was a novel that pushed me to write it.

CRR: When was it?

Jennifer Haigh: I lived in Boston for 20 years, and that was around that time. I’m a little leery about this because I don’t want to name the clinic, et cetera.

RRC: Did you take notes?

Jennifer Haigh: No, I never have. Confidentiality is at stake whenever you deal with patients. I couldn’t write directly about a specific person I spoke to. The callers in the book are not actual calls I received at the center, they are made up, but they are absolutely inspired by things I experienced. Certainly, if I had never volunteered there, I would never have had the idea to write this book, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

CRR: You mentioned how polarizing this topic is. I think another impressive thing is your even-handed sympathy. I mean that both in the sense of personal sympathy, but also in the broader sense of sympathetic imagination. Even the characters who are on the other side of this issue, from you and most of your potential readers—even the characters who seemed angry enough about abortion that they could ultimately do harm—are given their due as human beings. Can you say anything about the general sympathy that the novel elicits?

Jennifer Haigh: For me, that’s the whole point of writing novels. The novel remains the best technology we have for penetrating into someone else’s consciousness. You can’t do that in journalism, you can’t do that on film. Only literary fiction can truly get inside another person. Probably the most unpleasant character in the book is Victor Prine – a guy I would disagree with on the color of the sky. But in any character, you have to take their side, at least while you’re writing them, even if they believe things you categorically don’t believe. As you write the character, you must make common cause with them and see the world through their eyes. That’s what actors do: you don’t judge your characters, you become Your characters. As a fiction writer, you need to do the same thing. With Victor Prine, it was a little easier because he’s from where I grew up, from Pennsyltucky, in western Pennsylvania. I feel like I’ve known this guy forever.

CRR:I have never heard this sentence.

Jennifer Haigh: Pennsylvania? That’s what we called it in our family. That’s what my father called it. He was born and raised there, I was born and raised there. My mother still lives there. This is mining country, or at least it was. There really isn’t any mining anymore. When I was growing up there, if you walked five miles in any direction from my parents’ house, you’d see some kind of handmade anti-abortion sign in someone’s yard – “L ‘abortion stops a beating heart’, all these slogans and images of fetuses. I grew up surrounded by that. It’s a socially conservative place, very Catholic. I went to Catholic school for 12 years, so I heard all the arguments against abortion. I didn’t know anyone who was openly pro-choice until I started college. So when I wrote Victor Prine, it was clear to me that he was from my hometown. I’ve known this guy my whole life.

CRR:Each book presents its own unique challenges. You have written many novels. What was the most difficult part of writing? Mercy Street – and what did you like the most in the end?

Jennifer Haigh: The hardest part was anticipating people’s reactions. A lot of that has to do with my background and the attitudes I’ve internalized. Abortion was a taboo subject when I was growing up—not just in my family, but in my community. I know how strongly some people are opposed to abortion, and I’m sure this book disappointed and alienated some of my readers. But if you start thinking about that, you’ll never write anything. I’m pretty good at putting blinders on when I write. So I just had to get through it.

RRC: Obviously you couldn’t have known Dobbs was coming.

Jennifer Haigh:No. Truly, the book comes at a terribly opportune time, in a way I never could have predicted. I spent four years writing it, and it was published four months before the Dobbs decision.

CRR: There must be some sort of schadenfreude-like expression for “taking grudging pleasure in bad things that happen, which happen to serve your own interests.” There must be a German word for that.

Jennifer Haigh:You know there is. There is a compound noun for literally everything in German.

RRC: Last thing. I know you’ve won many awards over the years. What are your thoughts after winning this award? Is Mark Twain an important writer to you? If so, how?

Jennifer Haigh: It goes back to what I was talking about earlier, this extreme empathy that I think is at the heart of writing any novel—I think Twain was the first writer I read who did that. That’s what I’ve always responded to in his work. I particularly like the fact that this award is very specifically for an American voice. Everything Twain wrote was voice-driven, just like Mercy Street – far more than anything I’ve written before. So I love that resonance.

RRC:Can you tell me what you are currently working on?

Jennifer Haigh: I just finished a new novel, Moon Rabbit, which will be published next April. This is a story I wrote largely in Shanghai, where I spent several months on a writing fellowship – without a doubt the coolest thing I’ve ever had. opportunity to do as a writer. It is about an American couple, acrimoniously divorced, who travel to China when their ex-daughter, who teaches English there, is hit by a hit-and-run driver. This is absolutely unlike anything I’ve ever written.

RRC: I can’t wait! In the meantime, thank you very much for this interview. I can’t wait, when we meet, to hear about the husband you found – quite recently I think, right?

Jennifer Haigh:Yes, it’s been a little less than a year — so it’s still under warranty!