Interviews
A Conversation Long Overdue: Jennifer Haigh Talks about Her Novel Mercy Street and the Right to Choose with Christina Fisanick
The following interview was conducted live on stage at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books at Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Christina Fisanick, writer and English professor, asked New York Times bestselling novelist, Jennifer Haigh, questions about her book Mercy Street (Ecco, 2022), which looks deeply at the issue of abortion from inside and outside a Boston abortion clinic. Less than six weeks later, on June 24, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists.
Sydney Etheredge, President and CEO at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania, introduced the session.
Sydney Etheredge: Jennifer Haigh is the winner of PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction and has been published in 18 languages. Haigh is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her new novel, Mercy Street, was published in February 2022. Just a quick excerpt from The New York Times, Janet Maslin: “For years Haigh has been peering deep into the heart of lost America, a superb unsung novelist hovering just under the radar. Abortion, guns, vigilantism, drug dealing, white supremacy, bitter misogyny, and online fetishism all figure in the tableau Haigh expertly details.” And I must say, following the Supreme Court leak that happened just a few weeks ago and the potential fall of Roe later this summer, a book like Mercy Street is a must-read now more than ever. And so, without further ado, I bring you Jennifer and Christina.
Jennifer Haigh: Thank you, Sydney, for that terrific introduction. I’m thrilled to be in Pittsburgh to be talking about this book. I grew up not so far from here, about 70 miles north and east in Cambria County, and I’ve not been in Pittsburgh since before COVID. So it’s lovely to be here in person with all of you. Thank you for coming.
Christina Fisanick: Before I ask you questions, I just wanted to say thank you so much for asking me to be part of this event and to talk about this incredibly important book. So thank you. So I want to get right to the point. Today all over the United States, including here in Pittsburgh, women are marching for reproductive freedom and our health rights. And this book, of course, takes up the issue of abortion, the psychological landscape, and the reality of abortion. The title of a review by Ron Charles in WaPo was Mercy Street may be the last novel about abortion before Roe v Wade is dismantled. And so even though this novel takes place in 2015, here we are in 2022. So how do you see Mercy Street joining that conversation?
Jennifer: Well, it’s a conversation long overdue. One thing I found in writing about abortion is how little most people know about the experience of it, even though 1 in 4 American women will have an abortion at some point in her life. So it’s a very, very common thing. It’s so common that every person in this room knows someone who’s had one. And yet the political climate is such that nobody can really talk about it. So part of what I wanted to do in the writing of this novel was just to offer up some reality, to shine a light on what this experience is, who has abortions and why, why it matters, and why we cannot afford to lose this right. So if I’ve managed to do any portion of that in this novel, I’m pleased.
Christina: So Claudia, the main character of this book, has a number of very fraught relationships with people in her family, with the men in her lives, and so on, including with Timmy, her pot dealer and, later, lover. And you’ll learn more about that. I swear I’m not going to spoil anything else from this wonderful novel. But it’s interesting because we see Claudia as this woman in 2015 who I think is in a place where a lot of women are, especially women who are educated and career-focused that have their own money wherein partnership and cohabitating and so on, is more risky than it’s beneficial. And it also, I think, allows those women to have more choice. In an interview that you did with Jess Walter, you said that many of the women in this novel, and many women in reality, don’t have a choice when it comes to reproductive rights and the decisions they make when they go to a clinic. So could you talk more about that?
Jennifer: Yeah. You know, for as long as I can remember, choice has been the euphemism we use to talk about abortion rights. We’ve avoided saying the word abortion because it’s so polarizing and people have this outsized reaction even to hearing the word. And yet choice isn’t exactly the right word either, because, I mean, as you say, Christina, for a lot of women, the choices aren’t good and they’re not balanced choices. One of the things I do in Mercy Street is look at a cross-section of all the different kinds of women who might have abortions. Unlike anything else I’ve ever written, Mercy Street draws directly on personal experience. I’m a novelist, not a journalist. I don’t really have an autobiographical instinct, which is a good thing, because I sit alone in a room for most of my life, so my own life doesn’t offer them much to write about. But some years ago, I started volunteering at a women’s clinic in Boston, where I live, and that was kind of a life-changing experience for me. I’d always been pro-choice, but until I started volunteering, I, knew very little about the world of the clinic or what it’s like for a woman who turns up as a patient. So there was a real learning experience for me in doing this volunteer work. I know I’m straying far from the question, but I think this is important background to the book.
So my work as a volunteer was on a hotline. I had some months of training, and after that, I would volunteer one day a week to sit in a call center and answer anonymous phone calls, mostly from women, sometimes men, but mostly women. They were questions about contraception. Often there were questions about, you know, ordinary health concerns. And in about a quarter or maybe a third of cases, they were women who were calling to schedule abortions. If you wanted to schedule an abortion at this clinic, your first stop was to talk to a volunteer like me. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a nurse. But I was trained to answer questions about this procedure. And in the process of doing this work, I talked to so many different women from different backgrounds. Before I started volunteering there, I had the sense that probably the people who have abortions are all teenagers. You know, they’re young. They probably don’t have a lot of family support. They’re probably still in school. They’re almost certainly not married. And certainly, some of the patients fit that description. But what I learned in working on this hotline was that most of the women scheduling abortions were not teenagers. They were more likely to be in their 20s or 30s. Most of them already had at least one child. Many had more than one child. Many were married. There were very well-educated professional women in their 30s and sometimes 40s.
So it was really anybody who can get pregnant could turn up in this clinic. You realize that this experience of an unplanned pregnancy cuts across all these dividing lines. There were patients from all parts of the city, from all educational levels, socioeconomic levels, people who spoke different languages, people of different races, different cultures. It was really the most inclusive, diverse cross-section I had ever seen in the city of Boston. And that leads me to talk about the cover of this book, which I love. This cover is particularly appropriate, I think because it does convey that – the diversity of the women the clinic serves. In the book, the women are pink, blue, and purple; in life, they are not, but they are different. If you look closely at the cover of the book, these are actually paper dolls cut out of construction paper. Allison Saltzman, the art director at my publisher, actually cut these out of construction paper. And if you look at them closely, you can see their heads are a little pointy – you know, when you try to cut a circle in construction paper. And the figures are the pictogram you see on the door of a women’s restroom, you know that figure wearing the dress. But I like that it conveys so much about the book in this really kind of economical, elegant way. So anyway, that’s the first thing I learned in doing this work – who has abortions and some of the reasons why.
Christina: So I want to move a little bit away from the sort of topical parts of the book to talk about the writing of this book. After I read the book, I read some reviews from just regular readers, and someone on Goodreads said, “Nothing happened in this book.” Have you read the book? You know that that’s not true. But Richard Russo, in his wonderful review of the book in the New York Times, said this about this very issue: “At this point in a rave review, critics will sometimes introduce a quibble to prove that they’re tough-minded and serious and not easily gobsmacked, so I’ll offer here that some readers may be disappointed that so many of the characters in Mercy Street get precisely what’s coming to them. They may suspect authorial – what? interference? artifice? – at work. But I’d argue the opposite: that it’s the characters themselves who have been working overtime, their entire lives, to arrive where they land. Haigh isn’t manipulating them, just paying close attention to their choices, large and small. That’s not artifice, it’s art. And I was gobsmacked.” And so my question is, you said in several interviews that you don’t always know what’s going to happen in your books and that, you know, it’s a good book when that is the case because the book comes to life. And so all of the mercy that these characters receive or recipients of, did you know their fates going in?
Jennifer: I knew nothing, and this is pretty typical for me. I start with the situation and some characters, and I know there’s one event that I’m sort of writing toward, so there’s maybe one thing that happens in the book that I know on the front end, but most of it is something I discover in the process of writing it. You know, books are made by writing. For me, books are not made by outlining beforehand. I never do that. So when I started writing this book, I knew who the important characters were. The main character, Claudia Birch, is a counselor at a clinic like the one where I worked. She’s not a volunteer. She’s a real full-time counselor. This is what she does day in and day out. I knew she was the center of the story, and I knew the story would begin with Claudia arriving at work. Because this, for me, as a volunteer, was one of the most striking features of doing this work. Every time I showed up for my shift, I had to muscle my way through this gauntlet of protesters. Some days there was just a handful, other days there was a huge crowd, but they were always out there day in, day out. I was only volunteering one day a week, but I found myself thinking about what would this do to you. How would this work on you psychically, if every day showing up for work involved these strangers getting in your face and yelling at you, shouting obscenities, preaching at you, telling you you’re going to hell? What if that were your every day? And so, I knew that’s where the story would begin, with Claudia at work.
The other thing I knew at the beginning was that there would have to be some kind of antagonist to Claudia, some kind of, you know, in dramatic terms, an antagonist, a kind of archrival. And as I was developing this character of Claudia’s antagonist – in the book, his name is Victor Prine – I thought about the little town where I grew up here in Pennsylvania. When I was a kid, you could drive ten miles in any direction from my mother’s house and see a handmade sign in somebody’s pasture or planted along the highway, and there would be slogans like, ‘It’s a child, not a choice,’ or ‘Abortion stops a beating heart.’ Now, these were not mass-produced signs. These were homemade. Somebody went to the lumber yard, bought the lumber, cut the lumber, painted the sign, and then drove around looking for places to plant them. Who does that? That was the question I asked myself. And that’s what led me to develop the character of Victor Prine. He’s the guy who makes those signs. And when you first meet him in the novel, that’s what he’s doing. He’s driving around with a, you know, pickup truck with a bed full of signs, and he’s looking for places to plant them along the highway. So in this way, Pennsylvania really figures in this story, even though it takes place in Boston and this Boston is kind of a character in the book. But Pennsylvania is really important to the book as well, and it draws heavily on my childhood, growing up in a part of the state where I never knew anybody who admitted to being pro-choice until I went away to college. So when I was growing up there, you couldn’t say it. Nobody said that. And some of you may be familiar with, you know, it’s a pretty socially conservative part of the world. It’s overwhelmingly Catholic. I went to 12 years of Catholic school, and I heard about how bad abortion was before I even understood how you got pregnant. So that was the background I was drawing on in developing this character of Victor Prine. Once again, this is an answer that goes so far afield of Christina’s excellent question, but it comes out the way it comes out.
Christina: And it dovetails nicely to my next question. So as the president of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia and as a Northern Appalachian, I care very much about the region, and you talk about how Pennsylvania was so influential in this. And I really felt that in the experiences that Claudia went through, but also just in the overall flavor of this book. So, I wanted to ask you about how you represent characters like Victor and Claudia riding that line between stereotype and realness and making them characters. I think you said in an interview with someone – maybe it was Andre Dubus – you said that you try to write the character the way that he would write himself, and you were referring to Victor Prine. So how do you do that? Because I think a lot of people will struggle to find the humanity and people that seem to be unable to find the humanity in others.
Jennifer: It’s an excellent question, and it really has to do with the magic of point of view, which is something that fiction writers work with all the time. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have. When you’re writing from a character’s point of view, as I do with Claudia, but also with Victor Prine, it’s kind of like being an actor. You know, an actor doesn’t pass judgment on the character – an actor becomes the character. And as a writer of fiction, you kind of have to do that. You have to take that character’s side for the period of time when you’re writing from his point of view, even if you disagree vehemently with him about everything, as I do with Victor Prine. Victor Prine’s a misogynist. He’s a racist. He has some really warped ideas about reproduction and abortion. None of those represent my views at all. And yet, for the time I was writing Victor Prine, I had to write the world as he saw it. And it’s really a question of loyalty. As the writer, you can’t take sides among your characters, even though you agree with some of them and disagree with others. You have a responsibility to each of these characters to show them, as completely as possible, to be the people they are. And you know, none of us is a villain in our own life. I mean, we all think we have really good reasons for doing what we do and thinking what we think. And that’s true of all these characters. They all believe they have good reasons. And so, I simply tried to write them accurately without taking sides and trust the reader to come to her own conclusions about these people. You know, this is my seventh book. I know many of my readers. They’ve been reading me for 20 years. They’re really astute people, and I trust them to come to their own conclusions about these characters.
Christina: So this is my favorite part of your book. As I read this novel, I really felt very at home with these characters. And part of that is the Northern Appalachia thing, right? But part of it is I grew up in a trailer like Claudia, so I could identify with that, but mostly it was all of the 80s culture references – people she talks about, government cheese, and cancer. And if you were a poor kid in the 80s, it was like you dream of it still. [inaudible] And also, of course, the childbirth explosion, which for Gen Xers was a very defining moment for us. And so, I’ve observed in otherbooks that I ‘ve read that have tried to incorporate cultural references from recent times, and it’s not always done very well because I feel like people put so much in or they’re so unfamiliar with that time period that it distracts from the material. So how did you decide how to incorporate those details to make these characters real to us, without belaboring it, without making us feel like, you know, oh, there’s another 80s reference? You know what I mean I think?
Jennifer: I do, I do, and that can be a very challenging thing to do, particularly because I love doing research. It’s one of my favorite tasks as a novelist. I could do research for years on end very happily, and not notice that I’m not writing anything. My last book, Heat and Light, dealt with a fracking controversy in Pennsylvania, and I had to do some real research to write that book and get it right. This book was different in that I didn’t have to do a lot of research. So those, you know, cultural references to the 80s, those weren’t things that I went looking for. Those were things I already knew. Everything in this book I already knew. And so, it makes for a different kind of writing experience. The real challenge for, say, writers of historical fiction is not to show off your research because, you know, you’re very proud of your research. I’ve seen this in historical novels where the writer has spent a month researching chamber pots, and so ends up telling you all about chamber pots because she’s so proud of her research. And, you know, this isn’t that kind of book. I didn’t have to go looking for any of this stuff. You know, government cheese is in my own memory.
Christina: So my next question is another personally attached to me. So, Claudia has an unfortunate run-in with one of her mother’s boyfriends and he verges very close to sexually assaulting her, though he does not quite make it, though what he did was wrong. And as a result of that, Claudia and her mother develop eating disorders as protective mechanisms against sexual assault, future sexual assault, and in Claudia’s case, she becomes anorexic and her mother becomes a binge eater. And as someone who dealt with their own sexual assault at a young age by developing an eating disorder, one, I was very grateful to you for talking about that, because I feel like it’s not talked about enough or even at all. And I’m wondering how did you learn about that? How did you incorporate that? What was the driving force behind that? It’s not a big part of the book, but it’s a really crucial part of understanding Claudia’s mother.
Jennifer: I’m glad you asked that, Christina. And no one has asked me that question before. It is really crucial to the story – women’s relationships with their bodies, that’s what this whole controversy is all about, you know, to what degree a woman owns her own body, to what degree she’s in the driver’s seat in her own life. And in both of those cases, Claudia and her mother developed these eating disorders. In Claudia’s case, it’s an attempt to control her body and control the way other people respond to her body. And any woman who has gone through puberty understands this – that when you’re 13 years old, it’s like you have a target on your back. And I remember this very vividly – the way men respond to girls who are still children but are starting to mature physically, it’s a terrifying time. And that’s really what I was writing out of in Claudia’s case like this. You want to stop this process that has brought all this terrifying adult male attention to you when you’re still a child. You just want to make it stop. And in Claudia’s case, she does that by not eating. And, you know, all her sort of physical maturity kind of recedes because she looks like a skinny little kid. You know, in her mother’s case, that excess weight protects her from male attention, too. You know, really, they’re driven by this same need – it’s wanting protection from that kind of, you know, predatory thing.
Christina: And in that case, she did this not just for herself but for her daughter because once she becomes what she thinks is unattractive to men because she’s gained all this weight, then there’s no more boyfriends that could potentially take advantage of Claudia. So I really appreciate that part of the book, and I don’t think it’s just talked about enough. So this next question is the professor in me asking this question. So being a Wheeling, West Virginia girl, I am very familiar with Rebecca Harding Davis, who wrote ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ and recently a lot of scholarship has started to give her credit where credit is due as the founder of American realism. And there are many, of course, men that we know that have been considered part of that movement. But I believe that the women who have been absolutely foundational contributors to American realism, like yourself, aren’t really tied to that canon or that understanding. And so, my question is, what are we missing out on by not recognizing those women writers from the past, but also from the present as being part of American realism?
Jennifer: You know, it’s a frame of reference I simply don’t have. I am not an academic. I teach once in a blue moon. I’m a visiting writer right now at UMass Boston. But in terms of how my work is viewed or how other women’s work is viewed, you know far more about this than I do. I really don’t know. I really don’t know. \
Christina: I feel like you should be studied alongside all of these other American realists, Steinbeck and the rest. I mean, I think your work is so important in deftly describing and fairly describing and detailing the American experience for everyday people and their realities that we need to study you more.
Jennifer: Oh, Christina. That’s wonderful.
Christina: So the next question is about humor. No one expects a book about abortion to be funny. And yet there is a good bit of humor in this book. Can you talk about that seemingly odd thing to be in a book about abortion? How does that work?
Jennifer: Well, you know, abortion occurs in a life and lives contain all of that. You know, even when you’re in a moment of crisis, the world doesn’t stop being complicated. And so, you know, Claudia and the other characters, they’re people living their lives and they’re all, to me, very funny at times. I was highly amused by all these characters, as I always am by my characters. And I think it has maybe something to do with my worldview, but I found them all deeply amusing. Even Victor Prine, who is, you know, without a doubt the villain of the book, and I thought he was screamingly funny at certain points. He’s a guy who’s always deadly serious. He would never imagine he’s funny, but he has, at times, made me laugh. So, you know, it’s just that life is complicated. We can feel many things at one time, and we do. And for these characters to be fully human, you know, they’re experiencing all of that, that the world doesn’t stop being funny when it’s sad.
Christina: Yeah. And in a way, I mean, we can see Victor is being ridiculous, but you don’t make them ridiculous. And the humor is real. I mean, it feels very real, as well as the moment of mercy, I think, for him, when he’s being cared for by Ernestine in the rehabilitation center. And her laugh is music to him, you give him that. And he needed that more than any character in the book, I think.
So I have a question about the weather because the weather in this book is its own character, and it takes place in the winter of 2015, and this area got hammered pretty hard too. But Boston really got it. So do you want to talk about that?
Jennifer: Oh yes. Boston Winter is maybe the main character in this novel. So I grew up in Pennsylvania. I know for snow, I’ve never been afraid of winter. I always thought that, until the winter of 2015 in Boston, which is still remembered as the Snowpocalypse. People who lived in Boston during that winter really have PTSD from that experience, myself included. Now, when the first snowflake falls, I feel myself tensing. It’s happening again. This winter was so unreal. It just simply never melted. So we’d get these whomping Nor’easters, these storms that come up the New England coast would dump two feet of snow in 24 hours, and then we’d get another one in 5 days and it didn’t melt. And if you lived in the city, there was simply nowhere to put it. It felt like we were being buried alive. And so, when I started writing this story, I knew that it would be set during this winter, and it had something to do with the isolation of living in Boston at that time, where we were all marooned. It was COVID before there was COVID, you know, we were all trapped in our houses. So the novel opens at the beginning of that winter and ends when the winter ends, it ends when spring comes. And it really goes to that feeling of isolation. These are all lonely people. I think more than any book I’ve ever written, this is a book about lonely people. There’s Claudia, there’s Victor Prine, who I’ve talked about a lot. There’s also Timmy, who Christina mentioned, who’s Claudia’s weed dealer. He functions as a kind of first responder in Claudia’s life. You know, I thought about how does a person get through her life when you work under these conditions. This is a real pressure cooker environment. You know, this clinic has had bomb threats. There have been shooter threats. You know, it’s constant. There’s this constant feeling of being under attack. It’s a feeling of being under siege. And the winter seemed to me to reflect that. So that’s why it became so central to the book.
Christina: I remember that winter here and you’re having snow rage. Every time I looked outside and just hit this and started throwing things because it was snowing again and again. So my last question, and maybe our audience has some questions for you. What’s it been like reading from this book, taking it on the road, given the recent leak of the draft and so forth with Roe v Wade? How have people responded to you and what’s it been like for you to be talking about this book right now?
Jennifer: You know, it’s a very complicated answer. I will say that when I was about halfway through the writing of this book, it sort of hit me, ‘Oh my God, I got to publish this thing.’ And you know, when I’m writing, I really wear horse blinders. I’m trying to very deliberately avoid thinking about what reviewers will make of the book, what my editor will make of it, and what my mother will make of it. If I thought about those things, I would never write another word. So I really have to pretend to myself, that no one’s ever going to see this but me. And I spent a couple of years on this book when it sort of dawned on me, ‘I am going to finish this thing. It is going to get published, and I’m going to have to deal with people’s reactions to it, whatever they may be.’ And, you know, a lot of people are crazy on this subject. And when I felt this impending publication, I started to slow down in my writing. I really didn’t want to finish it because I didn’t want to publish it. I believed in the book, but I was really alarmed at the prospect of having it go out into the world and dealing with people’s reactions to it. Had I known there was going to be a global pandemic that would keep me from ever leaving my house, I might not have been so scared. You know, normally I go on a book tour.
For my second novel, Baker Towers, I went on a 40-city book tour. There aren’t 40 cities, I will tell you right now. So you get sent to all sorts of random places. But I did a ton of traveling, and that’s pretty typical for me. But with this book, I couldn’t for the first couple of months. The book was published on February 1st. Omicron was still raging. My publisher didn’t send me anywhere, so I was doing Zoom events from my study in the house in Boston, and I didn’t meet any readers at all. So it’s only in just the last few weeks that I’m starting to get out into the world to meet readers, talk to them about the book, and this happens to coincide with this leak, this Alito leak. So it is far more charged and more urgent than I imagined it would be. You know, writing a novel takes a really long time. And if you tried to write something this timely, you could not possibly do it. There’s no way I could have known five years ago that we would be on the precipice of losing Roe v Wade. Nobody knew this. So it is just a horrible confluence of events that this book turns out to be as timely as it is. So I sort of backed into it, and now I’m very glad I wrote it. I’m very glad for it to be out in the world because I want these conversations to happen. You know, this is one of those issues where nobody is neutral. Everybody has an opinion about abortion. If you don’t believe me, ask around. Everyone has an opinion. And yet, so many people have no real understanding of what this experience is like for women.
So I feel that if you’re going to have an ironclad opinion on any subject, you should do your homework and know what you’re talking about. And I don’t know that this book is going to change anybody’s mind about abortion rights, although I would love that. That’s not really my expectation. My hope is that people will walk away from reading this book with a much more complex and nuanced understanding of what this is all about, and I think that would be progress if people could be open enough to learn more about this issue before deciding they already know what they think.


Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Since then, she has published six more critically-acclaimed works of fiction, most recently Mercy Street — named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and winner of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Published in eighteen languages, her books have won the Bridge Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the PEN New England Award in Fiction, and a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Guggenheim fellow, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University.
Dr. Christina Fisanick is the president of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia (WANA) and the co-host of WANA LIVE!: The Reading Series. She teaches expository writing, creative nonfiction, and digital storytelling at Pennsylvania Western University. In addition, she is the editor or author of more than thirty books, including the memoir The Optimistic Food (MSI 2016) and Digital Storytelling as Public History (Routledge 2020) with co-author Robert Stakeley. Her latest book, Pulling the Thread: Untangling Wheeling History, is forthcoming from North Meridian Press. Learn more about her work at christinafisanick.com.