What Her Mother Did

The Hill by Harriet Clark (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is out.

Suzanna doesn’t remember a time when her mother did not live in the hilltop prison. As far as she’s concerned, she and her mother have never been alone together, never eaten a home-cooked meal together, never seen each other in the dark. They spend their few hours together company surrounded by other visitors and incarcerated people and guards under the harsh bright lights of the women’s-prison visiting area. The protagonist of Harriet Clark’s first novel, The Hill, doesn’t question why life is like this, and no one offers answers — until Suzanna overhears two strangers gossiping about her family at a dentist’s office: “My mother had robbed a bank, the first woman said. No, the second woman said. My mother had expropriated funds for the purpose of revolutionary struggle.” Her grandparents, whom she lives with, have their own explanations. Her grandfather says her mother had noble ideals but “took it too far,” risking it all on a “misguided attempt … to steal from the rich and give to the poor.” Her grandmother cannot forgive. She calls the crime, simply, “what your mother did.” And the punishment? “That’s what she gets.” When she wants to convince Suzanna of this, to tell her why her mother doesn’t deserve visitors, she drives her to the bank her mother was accused of robbing, points to a security guard, and tells her granddaughter, “You see that boy … She sat right where I’m sitting and waited while her friends fucked up and killed him.” That her grandmother means a previous guard, and not this living one, isn’t immediately clear to Suzanna.

In The Hill, this is how adults reveal information: indirectly, dramatically, confusingly. And this is how Suzanna receives that information: with as little analysis as possible. Raised in a haze of grown-up disillusionment — her ex–Communist Party grandparents’, her punished-for-life mother’s — Suzanna survives by keeping her eyes on what’s in front of her, terrified of the past these adults regret and unequipped to consider her own future. This novel’s first-person story is based on the author’s own: Harriet Clark is the daughter of former leftist revolutionary Judith Clark, who, less than a year after Harriet was born, in 1980, participated in an attempted Brink’s-truck heist that resulted in the shooting deaths of a security guard and two police officers. Judith was a true believer, part of a Weather Underground offshoot that saw bank robberies as a legitimate way to fund the struggle. She was handed three consecutive sentences of 25 years to life and remained in prison from 1981 to 2019, when she was finally — after campaigning by family, friends, and Andrew Cuomo — deemed rehabilitated and granted parole.

Most stories about the revolutionary left focus on youth. They run on fervor and action and conviction and passion. (Haters will call it delusion and impulse and naïveté and terror.) If radical thrills are what you’re after, there’s another book by a child of the Weather Underground out this month: the playwright Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s memoir, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, about growing up on the run with his wanted-by-the-FBI parents. The Hill is not that kind of book. The Hill takes place after the arrest, after the trial, after the crash. Though Suzanna is young — the novel follows her from around age 8 to 17 — she’s paralyzed by older people’s defeat. As she reflects, “Though previously in the family attempts had been made to act on the world, great efforts to change it, what had been communicated to me was that the world was none of my business.” She is forever indoors or heading there: on her way to or inside the prison upstate or trailing her grandmother to the New York City apartments of other old Communists disappointed by their late husbands and estranged children. Her mother, who is always thrilled to see her, can’t provide a model for growing up either; she’s proof of how damaging it can be to know and want too much. When she tries to tell her daughter about her life, Suzanna feigns sleep. “Do you go out of your way to know nothing?” her grandmother asks Suzanna. Is this a novel of the left or an obituary for it? It’s something else entirely: a novel about simple devotion. The one way Suzanna expresses agency is by continuing to visit her mother in prison, even when her grandmother wants her to stop.

There are good reasons to transmute memoir into fiction. A novel gives you permission to tell your story as you felt it. Clark pauses at moments when even a willfully oblivious child could see how badly her mother needs her, pressing on that feeling like a bruise — as when Suzanna returns to the prison after her grandmother has kept her away for several months. The scene, like all their mother-daughter encounters, takes place in the crowded visiting area that the prison calls the Children’s Center. “From the moment she entered the Center, my mother kept one part of her body on my body at all times — a hand, a foot, the side of her arm,” Clark writes. “I felt the presence of her eyes on me and how looking at me did not satisfy her need to look at me. ‘My Suzanna, always thinking something,’ she said at just a moment when I was thinking nothing.” 

These moments of contact are grounding. Still, it is exhausting spending so much time with a character who insists on her ignorance. Clark, a careful stylist, keeps her passive protagonist trapped with tautologies that preclude curiosity: “I looked where I looked; he thought what he thought,” “she did what she did,” “he is heading where he heads.” Her writing can feel evasive to the point of being precious, even when she’s just listing what Suzanna is experiencing, as on a walk where “sometimes a breeze blew and this was pleasant. And sometimes a dog wailed and, further, softer, there were faucets.” There’s got to be a better way to say that. Suzanna floats and avoids and repeats and refuses to plan further ahead than the weekend, when, once again, she’ll visit her mother. This claustrophobia may be intentional. One interpretation could be that Clark aims to put the reader in the place of someone whose life is tethered to the whims of the carceral system and the abstraction of a life sentence without parole, who feels they can depend on and hope for nothing. Suzanna notes the increasing pressures on her mother, the growing list of activities forbidden during visits. We feel the system’s cruelty and inanity and how hard families have to work to keep their connection present tense. By the time Suzanna and her mother are allowed to spend a weekend together, camping out in one of the prison’s trailers reserved for families, Suzanna is a teenager. There is a critique implicit in these details, and it’s made explicit in Clark’s acknowledgments: She thanks those who helped her mother return home and includes a list of organizations that could help other incarcerated people do the same. 

The Hill does not have a happily ever after like One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about the aftermath of radicalism wobbles in its final scene, in which a child of a revolutionary finds her own, less threatening politics, happily and nonviolently skipping off to a protest. Nor is The Hill a polemic. It’s a book about what it’s like to be small with no one to tell you how to grow up. “For me being young was like being religious,” Suzanna reflects. “I believed the life I had was the life I was meant to have, that everyone was playing a role long established for them, and that these changes in roles, however much they surprised me at the time, were also long established and thus not so surprising at all.” And this is where the knowledge that Clark has based this story on her own life provides relief, although the novel itself doesn’t offer it. We never see Suzanna achieve escape velocity. We don’t learn much about her at all. But one can assume she’ll be okay — because how else could she be telling this story?

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the May 18, 2026, issue of New York Magazine.

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