In “Audition,” Motherhood Is a Performance

As the show progresses and family tensions escalate, it becomes clear that the narrator is navigating an increasingly unstable reality. Readers are left to puzzle together what kind of story they are reading—and which version to believe. With the simmering, understated tension that marks Kitamura’s prose, Audition mines the ripple effects of an intimate disruption. It makes us question what we define as family and what narrative bonds tie one family member to another. Simultaneously, Kitamura also has us question what narrative bonds tie the narrator to the reader, calling attention to how we are continually constructing, revising, and interpreting our own internal monologues. 

As a longtime fan of Kitamura’s work, it felt surreal to interview her over the phone. We talked about the performance of motherhood, what seduction might mean for her characters, and writing in a fractured voice. 

Jaeyeon Yoo: What was the origin point of this novel? I was immediately struck by the narrative voice, which seemed to resonate strongly with your previous two novels, A Separation and Intimacies—do you see it being in conversation with them?

Katie Kitamura: I’m a very slow metabolizer of ideas. I will have a little seed of a thought, then sit with it for five or six years before I even think about trying to turn it into a book. In some ways, it’s a kind of test case: if the idea is still with me half a decade later, then it feels like something that I do need to write about. In the case of this novel, I think I had the idea after I finished a book I published in 2017, A Separation. I saw a headline of a newspaper article that said something along the lines of, “A stranger told me he was my son,” and I chose not to read that article because I had the very strong feeling that there would be a clear explanation for why this had happened. I was much more interested in keeping the idea, with all its openness and unresolved nature. 

Eventually, after I wrote Intimacies, I decided that this was the book I was going to try to write. In a funny way, it would have been hard for me to write this book before I wrote Intimacies, because the three books—A Separation, Intimacies, and Audition—have a lot of thematic similarities, The voice is very similar, an unnamed first-person and female narrator, and all three of them are very preoccupied with performance. In A Separation, the central character is performing the part of a grieving widow, when, in fact, her actual relationship with her ex-husband is more complicated than that. In Intimacies, I was very interested in thinking about the courtroom as a theatrical space and how narratives of persuasion are built through theater. And then in Audition, I finally thought I’d just tackle the idea straight on, and I made the central character an actor. 

JY: That’s really interesting how you hinged on the word performance. For me, I viewed this idea of “performance” as a triangulation between the other two themes of interpretation and translation from before. 

KK: That’s absolutely the case. To me, all three characters are the channels for other people’s language, other people’s words. And it’s very deliberately quite gendered. In Intimacies, the central character is surrounded by speaking men. In Audition and Separation, the male figures in their lives are writers. There’s something interesting about women who are in a position of speaking but who aren’t speaking their own words, and how much agency there is in the act of interpretation. In fact, I think there is quite a lot [of agency, although] I’m very interested in the idea of passivity in general; I like the idea of writing passive characters in fiction, because I think so many of us actually exist in quite a passive way. We live with the illusion of agency, but we don’t have that much agency. 

But in Audition, I wanted to write a character who would be more active than some of my previous protagonists, who would act upon the world in some way. I’ve been very interested in what you can do with first-person narration, and the degree to which, with the inherent unreliability of first person, you can create a sealed world. Everything is through the point of view of the narrator—there’s no stable ground, no external touch points. I wanted the very structure of the book to be jostled and shaped by the perspective and the consciousness of the central character. It was a question of how the will of that character imposes herself, not simply on other characters but on the mode of storytelling itself.

JY: On that note about the book’s structure, I’d love to hear you talk more about this split in the middle of the book, where the narrative itself cracks apart. 

KK: The ambition for me was to write a book that would be as open as possible. As a reader, one of the things that I don’t always enjoy is the sense of a book that has a closed, single solution: that all the pieces are falling into place and everything has been resolved. It was very important to me that Audition felt like a book that could contain multiple interpretations, and that would vary quite a bit depending on who was reading it. 

The books that I admire the most change radically with every reading. They’re not necessarily books that seem formally experimental in any way, but just books that have a depth or resonance, where you can find different things on each reading. The example that I always think of is Portrait of a Lady [by Henry James]. The first time I read that novel, I was in my very early 20s, and I thought it was about a young woman making her way in the world. I read it again when I was in my early 30s, and I thought that it was a novel about disappointment. With some books, they offer space for the reader to bring quite a lot to the text. 

I wanted to write something where a lot of the book would be dependent upon the input of the reader. I don’t want Audition to be read as a book with a solution but, obviously, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do with the book. To some extent, I suppose the two parts are part of a fracturing of the narrator’s selfhood. It’s this fragmented psyche that is coming together on the page in a way that is full of contradictions. The single narrative that a character might normally have to understand themselves, in this case, is constantly coming apart and then coming back together again. That was the basic structure of the book as I conceived of it. And this cracking, this fragmentation is fundamentally part of this character. [Similarly], there are versions of your own personal history that you rewrite retroactively. Almost pathologically, you continue to rewrite the version of the story of who you are. I was trying to call attention to that in this novel, to really look at how we write stories about ourselves and how they’re never fixed. They change over the course of our lives—but we don’t always see the ways in which we’re revising them.

JY: In this trio of books, there is this throughline, alongside seduction, of betrayal and fidelity. In Audition, it played out as a preoccupation with faithfulness to the text (of the play) and to the concept of a family.

KK: Betrayal is at the heart of my books. The narrator of Audition has this realization that the problem of the family is her. That was a moment that was really fun and interesting to write. This goes to what we were saying about seduction—I’m less interested in characters betraying other characters, than I am in characters betraying themselves. Whether it’s through something they do or their understanding of who they are.  

JY: I want to bring up translation again, which played a prominent role in the other two books, because translation is so often discussed in terms of betrayal and fidelity. Of being “faithful” to the original or “betraying” it, and so on. 

KK: There’s this line about translation in French being the word for betrayal. When I think about translation, I think it’s interesting how much is active betrayal—the very active choices you make—and then there are the questions of what language you are translating into, and what does that mean. What does it mean to be translated into English? I’m personally interested in accidental betrayal: the things that are absolute mistakes, that happen without intention. 

JY: What drew you to this mother-son relationship as this central tension in the story?

KK: I’m very interested in the volatility of relationships, and particularly of relationships that we’re conditioned to think of as stable in some way, whether it’s a family dynamic, the relationship between a mother and a child, or the relationship in a marriage. In fact, those relationships are incredibly dynamic and subject to change—as they should be. In my previous novels, I focused on that moment of looking at somebody who you believe you know quite well, and then experiencing them suddenly as a stranger. I primarily looked at that through the lens of domestic or romantic relationships, but it occurred to me that the place where that is truly turbocharged is in a parent’s relationship with their child. [Children] are changing so constantly; that experience of looking at your child, somebody you’ve known truly for the entirety of their life, and finding them change almost beyond recognition, is something that happens from a very early stage. I think this only accelerates all the way through to adulthood and beyond. Focusing on a parent-child relationship allowed me to kind of look at a dynamic I was already interested in, but in a heightened way. I also think the relationships between parents and children are very fraught. There are issues about control and freedom that fascinate me, which are brought to the fore when you’re looking at a relationship between a parent and child.

We were talking earlier about performance. The thing that I certainly experienced, and that I know a lot of my friends experienced when we became parents, was this extraordinary amount of roleplay that takes place when you become a mother. There is a culturally conditioned image of motherhood, and it’s very hard to not try to emulate that role, because you don’t know what you’re doing for the most part, especially with the first child. So you reach for the role, as you have seen it codified in culture. I think there is a lot of performance that happens in the material reality of being a parent, which happens almost unconsciously. And there’s a lot of alienation from yourself as well, which can take place because you’re quite wrapped up in performing this ideal of motherhood. You create a wedge between who you are and who you’re performing. I was not as interested in writing about early motherhood, and there’s been so much wonderful writing about that particular phase. It really struck me how those dynamics might change, but they don’t totally go away, even when a child is older.

JY: The alienation you talked about ties in so directly with the fracturing that we talked about earlier—the self cracking apart—and the different ideas that performing motherhood might lead to. One of the other themes that we’ve been circling, with discussing open readings and agency, but haven’t directly talked about is ambivalence. Could you talk more about the role of ambivalence in your work?

KK: I think all of the characters are ambivalent about family structures, relationship structures. They have a skepticism towards institutional frameworks. At the same time, they are all aware of the risks of stepping outside of those pre-ordained frames that people are told to occupy. It’s not as simple as “the whole world is terrible, family structures are terrible,” and so on. It’s about understanding the allure of those structures as well. It’s very much in Audition, this lure of playing a part that is clearly defined. It’s a seduction. It’s not only social status that’s conferred on the mother or the wife. It’s also the security of being so clearly defined. On the one hand, they’re pushing against that [security]. On the other, they have a longing for that. So they’re operating in the in-between. In Audition, playing the part of a mother and a family is something that is overwhelming. It’s clearly fraught with danger: of letting a stranger into your house, your life. But it’s something the narrator can’t resist.

JY: That’s so interesting, especially how seduction in the book is not between one character and another, but rather between oneself: one’s personal fantasy, not an external person. 

KK: Yes, now that you mention it. It is characters who are being seduced by ultimate versions of themselves. 

JY: Which, maybe, is how it works in real life. What kind of person will I become with this person? It’s not even about the other person.
KK: A relationship is something where I can become something other than what I am.

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