MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Is it possible to have a childhood that is both picture-perfect and perfectly awful? And if so, how much of the baggage will you end up carrying 20-plus years later when you have children of your own? Honor Jones explores these questions in a quietly, profoundly beautiful new novel titled "Sleep." Honor Jones, Hi.
HONOR JONES: Hi.
KELLY: Hi. I'm going to let you take the lead here on how much to give away of the secrets in your protagonist Margaret's past. So you paint us a picture of how I just described it, this picture-perfect but also perfectly awful childhood. Tell me about it.
JONES: Yeah, so she grows up - she has this kind of wonderful best friend who also follows her through life. And, you know, she has a family and a brother, and she's growing up in sort of this verdant suburban world. But something happens that's really disorienting and she isn't protected, so she sort of has to grow up protecting herself. And she's very watchful and, like, perceptive as a child but I think becomes more so for practical reasons. So she turns into, as a mother, someone very concerned with the question of how you, you know, raise children to be safe without raising them to be afraid and, like, what the right level of vigilance is, which is, I think, something that all parents worry about.
KELLY: Yeah. All right, you said something happened, and she is not protected. So I have to ask you about, to me, the other central character in this novel, which is the mother, Elizabeth. Describe Elizabeth.
JONES: Well, she's incredibly charismatic. She sort of does have this magic about her. And her daughter, like, never stops being obsessed with her. I mean, she's larger than life. She's also very domineering and...
KELLY: ...And she's mean, just to (laughter) state it plainly.
JONES: And she - you're...
KELLY: She's really mean. She's cruel.
JONES: You're right. I'm - it's so funny that I didn't, like, lead with that. She can be really cruel, and she has these expectations of the way that she wants everyone around her to be.
KELLY: Yeah. To what extent does that inform how Margaret raises her own daughters, the granddaughters in this family?
JONES: Yeah, well, I think a lot of this - she has her mother in the back of her head, I think as all of us do when, you know, the kid wants candy and you're like, yes or no? What would my own mother do? How can I do the opposite of that thing? And then you make the wrong decision, you know? So she...
KELLY: (Laughter) Yeah.
JONES: ...She's - you know, she's growing. She's raising children in the city, and she's divorced. And, you know, it's not the picture-perfect life, but it is really fun in a lot of ways, and there's an openness and freedom to it. But she's always second-guessing herself.
KELLY: Yeah. There's a scene that shot me through with recognition. I'm going to let you read it to me, but just to set us up, this is Margaret, grown-up Margaret. She and her girls are walking to school, and one of the girls spots - 'cause again, they're in New York City - spots a dead rat in the gutter. And of course, this is the greatest thing ever. She wants to go investigate. And Margaret, the mom, yanks her back, yanks her so hard she fears she has dislocated her daughter's shoulder. Would you read us those few lines, starting...
JONES: Sure.
KELLY: ...With, I want to see?
JONES: (Reading) I want to see, Jo said again, and tried to twist away. But Margaret held on to her hand. And for a moment, they both pulled in opposite directions until Jo cried out and clutched her arm. Oh, God, she dislocated her [expletive] elbow again. No, how could she let this - what kind of mother - never mind. It was fine. It was totally fine. Jo's arm was moving normally by her side. In Margaret's relief, she no longer minded about the rat. So much of parenting was this, the instantaneous lowering of expectations. Her children were safe. Nothing else mattered.
KELLY: (Laughter) I know that feeling so well...
JONES: (Laughter).
KELLY: ...The instantaneous lowering of expectations - it's exactly what parenting is. I - as a mother myself, you start out so many days, you have these high-brow aspirations - you're going to go to the museum, you're going to do something educational...
JONES: Oh, right.
KELLY: ...You're going to have this nutritious, leafy green extravaganza for dinner, and by...
JONES: Nope.
KELLY: ...The end of the day, you're like, nope, it's chicken nuggets and Cartoon Network.
JONES: Yeah.
KELLY: And it's fine.
JONES: Yeah. Yeah, you're constantly checking, like, what actually matters and being sort of put in your place about your aspirations.
KELLY: Yeah. So your writing - I called your novel beautiful, and it is. The writing is very spare, even when, maybe especially when, you're describing vast, overwhelming emotion. Do you start, Honor Jones, with a more flowery sentence and prune it back, or how does it work?
JONES: I don't. Actually, I don't know if this is, like, the editor in me, but I start incredibly condensed, and then I have to add. So I wrote things very tightly, and then I thought, oh, this - there's more to say here, or this can breathe more, and then it would get longer. And then, of course, you edit yourself back down again to something. But I did edit some things out. I think I described, like, light playing on a surface, like, 300 times in a draft. And I had to do - I did have to go through and search for the word light and then take a bunch out.
KELLY: And be like, good enough. It has refracted...
JONES: Enough, Honor.
KELLY: ...Refracted, reflected, shimmered, and we're moving on.
JONES: I've done all I can do.
KELLY: (Laughter) Honor Jones, talking about her debut novel, "Sleep." Honor Jones, thank you so much.
JONES: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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