Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hannah Thurman‘s debut novel, Mercy Hill, follows four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. Richard Russo says it “will stay with you long after you put the book down.”
Thurman, who is based in Brooklyn, was the winner of the Florida Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize for Fiction, and her stories have been published in The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She has been chosen for residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
We asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, The Eye, and the Arm. It’s set in 2194 Zimbabwe and is unlike any other dystopia I can remember reading since. These three siblings get kidnapped and in their escape spend time in a plastic mine (!! In the future, plastic is… rare?), a culty retro village, and a few other wild kinda Afro-futuristic locations while they’re being tracked by the three detectives named in the title. I suspect it’s been re-released with more sedate packaging but please, do yourself a favor and google the original cover from 1994. We need to bring back maximalistic covers, can you imagine if the next Sally Rooney looked like THAT?
What book helped you through puberty?
During my pubescent years, I was – not to brag – the three-time captain of my middle school’s immensely successful Battle of the Books team. (I SAID I wasn’t gonna brag!!) We got a list of 40 books each year, which I insisted my beleaguered teammates read in its entirety by the time of the competition. (Some teams strategized by splitting the lists among team members, which cut down on reading time but was a standard to which I would not allow my team to stoop.) The BoB material I would categorize as “recent classics,” largely pulled from the Newberry lists, and pretty global in scope – The Watsons Go to Birmingham; Walk Two Moons; Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind; many selections from Lois Lowry. What got me through puberty was a crushing determination to ingest as many of these titles as possible, and help my team absolutely wipe the floor with our Martin Middle School rivals when they forgot a key fact from The Outsiders.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
Honestly, literally anything would have been better than what I was reading at 16, which was: Atlas Shrugged, over and over again. Why couldn’t Colleen Hoover have been invented earlier? It would have saved me from a very embarrassing political era as a teenage “Objectivist.”
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
When I graduated college, I embarked on a mission to go back and read all the Pulitzer fiction winners of the previous decade. Perhaps this has colored too much of my imagination, but it’s hard to say no to The Hours, Interpreter of Maladies, Empire Falls (although I’m also partial to Straight Man), Middlesex (similarly, I preferred Virgin Suicides so I might swap that Eugenides), Gilead, March, The Road, Brief Wondrous Life, and Goon Squad….
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
I did a close reading of Ann Patchett’s Dutch House to better understand retrospective; I similarly tore about (literally, like I ripped out all the pages, sorry) The Poisonwood Bible to see how Kingsolver braided together so many voices at once.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I have only recently had my ban on checking out books from the Brooklyn Public Library rescinded (due to extreme tardiness returning an Eve Babitz); waiting for me there is Lauren Groff’s new collection, Brawler, which I am extremely excited to pick up.