CR 054: Hannah Pittard: ‘I’m interested in pushing myself to do new and uncomfortable things as a writer’
The author discusses the messy life events that led to her deliciously entertaining new novel, “If You Love It, Let It Kill You.”
As of this writing, Hannah Pittard’s marriage to her ex-husband, Andrew Ewell, has been sliced, diced, dissected, and scrutinized in New York Magazine, The New York Times, a literary short story, a personal essay, a memoir (kind of), and multiple works of autofiction.
If somehow you haven’t yet heard the saga, here’s a brief recap: In 2016, Pittard, an author, discovered that Ewell, also an author, had had an affair with her good friend, Anna Shearer, who was, you guessed it, an author. Pittard and Ewell divorced, as did Shearer and her husband, poet Ryan Fox, and soon Ewell and Shearer were married. In 2017, Pittard published a personal essay, “Scenes from a Marriage,” about Ewell’s infidelity. In 2023 she further explored the dissolution of her marriage in We Are Too Many, which was billed as “a memoir [kind of].” Then, in 2024, Ewell published Set for Life, a satirical novel that is billed as fiction but clearly mirrors his real-life experiences with Pittard. And later that year, New York Magazine broke it all down in a lengthy profile of the foursome.
Still with me? It gets better.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, while Googling information on Ewell’s just-announced Set for Life, Pittard came across a short story he’d published a few years prior. “I clicked the link and started reading,” Pittard says. “It takes place on Halloween and my first novel begins on Halloween, so I thought, ‘Oh! Weird homage. Halloween for me, Halloween for him.’ But within the first page, it becomes clear that the story is being narrated by somebody who is identical to him, and he’s got an ex-wife who is identical to me. And in the story, he’s had an affair with his former wife’s former best friend.”
All of this was fine...until Pittard got to the part where it’s revealed that the character based on her has been murdered by a homeless man. “I couldn’t shake the fact that he had murdered me and I’d never known about it,” she says. “I did what comes naturally—I wrote this little scene about a woman sitting down to Google her ex-husband and she finds out she’s been murdered. I threw in, ‘I live with a man. We own a house together. We’re everything but married.’ Over the next couple of days, anytime I had a chuckle or memory or new thought, I wrote those down, too. Before I knew it, the fact of having been murdered took a backseat to these David Sedarisesque anecdotes and scenes. They were funny. They were about daily mundanities. It became an exercise: How can I distill today into something that pushes me towards this longer project? Before I knew it, I was grappling with a lot of things that I wanted to grapple with—aging, death, my parents.”
The writings morphed into Pittard’s newest novel, If You Love It, Let It Kill You, a work of autofiction in which an author and creative writing professor, Hana P., learns her ex-husband has had a version of her murdered in his novel—a discovery that sets off a mid-life crisis. It is a book that is difficult to describe but very fun to read. There’s a talking cat, a game called Dead Body, clueless college students, conflicting literary advice, codependent parents, and deliciously witty dialogue.
I recently had a chat with Pittard over Zoom about the writing of the book, her influences, and her advice to anyone who wants to write about their personal life.
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SANDRA EBEJER: For those who aren’t familiar, can you explain the difference between memoir, creative nonfiction, and autofiction?
HANNAH PITTARD: Sure. A memoir, typically, is nonfiction. It’s true. What distinguishes a memoir from an autobiography is an autobiography is typically a person’s life, and a memoir tends to be about a particular moment, a particular trauma. Memoir, technically, could go into the category of creative nonfiction, but creative nonfiction opens up the door for lyrical essays and personal essays. It isn’t strictly nonfiction. This is not a history textbook, this is creative. It is meant to bring a personality to the text.
And then there’s the autofiction novel, where the novel draws heavily from an author’s life. For me, the beauty of autofiction is the tension between what’s real and what’s not. The author is inviting the reader to consider the author as a stand-in for the narrator. There’s a playfulness to it, a kind of push and pull. It’s a lot of fun. I think it’s a great genre.
I’m fascinated by your work because I never want to divulge anything personal about myself in public, whereas you’ve written multiple books that pull directly from very personal moments in your life. Is it nerve wracking to share these stories? Is anything ever off limits?
This might surprise you, but I actually think of myself as somebody who holds my cards very close to my vest. I am an intensely private person. I think my family would say the same thing. I’m close to my family, but there is a running gag that I perform an openness, when in fact I am incredibly closed off, reserved, and private. It’s in my autofiction where my mother says something like, “Wow, you’ve really opened your kimono” after she’s read the memoir. She did say that. And so there’s this recognition of [having] opened up some, but there’s still so much more that isn’t even on the page, and that excites me, especially the older I get. I’m more interested in pushing myself to do new and uncomfortable things as a writer, but also as a person.
Is anything off limits? Probably. I think I’m like Hemingway’s iceberg as a person. There’s 7% above the surface that I’m showing, and then the rest is this heavy piece of ice that’s keeping that little pyramid afloat. There’s probably a ton of material that I haven’t even tapped into. I don’t know that I’ll ever write autofiction again. I’m not sure. All that to say, I’m sure there are things that are off limits, but I’m not sure what they are yet. Maybe we’ll find out in this interview. [Laughs]
Having written this book, do you feel as though you’ve answered some of the questions that you had going into it?
One thing I believe now is almost anyone is capable of infidelity, if pushed or pulled in the right or wrong direction. The thing that surprised me writing this is there’s an epiphany that the narrator makes at the end of the book. How she gets to this epiphany is fictionalized. It’s complete nonsense. It didn’t happen. But as I was writing the book, and as I was imagining a version of myself walking through these events that eventually provided a path to this epiphany, I really did have it as a person. There’s a contentment that fictionalized Hana P. finds herself immersed in that washes over her. There’s an acceptance of “this is my life,” and there’s also an acceptance of letting go or not being in control of your image. She ends up finding peace in that. And one of the reasons finishing this book and writing that last chapter was such a joy to write was because I was filled with the same feeling in my real life as I was trying to fill my character with that feeling. So I’m hopeful there’s quite a bit of emotion at the end, because I was feeling quite a bit of emotion at the end. I think that awareness that many aspects of our lives are beyond our control has stayed with me. It was not something I knew I was looking for, as far as a personal epiphany, but it’s quite lovely on the other side.
Can we talk about the cat in the book? I could read an entire novel of Hana having conversations with the rescued cat. Where did that character come from?
Thank you for saying that, because some people love the cat and some people are like, “I couldn’t get past the cat.” I love this cat. Listen, this is going to make me sound like I’m a total narcissist, which, who knows, maybe I am, but I just got finished copies of the book, so it is still a novelty to pick it up. My boyfriend will walk into the room and he’s like, “Are you really reading and laughing at your own book?” And I’m like, “Yes, and it is a trip over here!” And almost always, when he comes to look at what page I’m on, there’s the cat, and he’s like, “Well, it’s the cat. Of course you’re laughing.”
When my boyfriend and I were looking for a house, the one thing we wanted was a front porch. We love to say hello to people. We’re kind of shut-ins in every other way, but the socializing you can do quickly on a porch is wonderful. Plus, the people watching is cool. I wrote a lot of this book on the front porch.
Ever since my dog died in 2017, I’ve never had another animal. And I am an animal person. I can find a lot of sympathy and connection in an animal that I don’t always find in a human being. And probably a psychiatrist would say, “Wow. So the thing that can’t talk back to you or disagree with you is something that you feel really close to. We could take that apart.” [Laughs] All of that to say, my neighbors have a cat, and when they moved in this cat came over to our front porch. And I love it. Within a week, I had ordered a cat brush. I remember when my boyfriend came home one day, he was like, “Do you think a cat brush for the neighbor’s cat is going too far?” And then he noticed I bought the cat brush so it blends into the chairs. And he said, “Did you pick this color brush not so that it matches, but so that our neighbors can’t see it?” And I said, “I sure did!”
So I started brushing the cat, and the cat started visiting all the time. Occasionally the cat would come over when I was writing. He’d want to get in my lap, and I’d have to push him away, and he’d look at me like he was so angry. One day, I was explaining to him why I could not let him onto my lap, and I just started writing this cat being mean to me. Once I started this back and forth with this cat, I thought, “This is amazing.” In some ways, it captures everything that the book is tackling, like my id versus my ego, my desire to be seen and not seen, caring for something that needs to be cared for, but not really wanting to care for it.
It was also a way to bring in the students, because the students are a big part of the book as well. When I was a younger [teacher], I was like, “Before you break the rules, you must learn the rules. You will not have a talking animal. Before you try to build a world, prove to me that you can write in this world.” So the minute I had this talking cat, I realized I was channeling a different type of me as a teacher. And I love this idea of, here is this traditional teacher who is pushing back against modernity and all of the cool new things that her students want to do, but meanwhile, she’s literally talking to a cat, which is something she has told them they cannot do. The next thing I knew, I had this abusive talking cat. And it was my favorite thing to write. I’m so glad you liked it. I absolutely love that cat.
I’ve interviewed many authors who’ve written memoirs, but very few, if any, have ever been written about themselves. In other words, they’ve never seen someone else’s version of them written down. You have. Has the experience of having seen yourself through someone else’s eyes on the page changed how you write about other people?
Ooh, that’s a really interesting, good question. I don’t know that it really does change how I write about other people. It has made me more reflective. I haven’t read my ex-husband’s novel; I have read the short story. In the story, there’s a flattering aspect to my character. At most she’s bourgeois, but she’s not caricatured. When I read the description of what my character would be in his novel, I realized he had moved on to a caricatured version of me, which I didn’t need to read.
What Chris Heath did in the New York Magazine profile—[that] is also me as a character, right? Even though that’s nonfiction, you could say it’s creative nonfiction. That depiction of me is just a depiction. Those are my words. Those are actual things that I said. But it’s still just a version of me. There’s a lot more to my life than the background of this book or the memoir. In fact, talking with Chris was surreal, because he was asking me to go back to a moment in my life that isn’t present for me anymore. So there are all of these pull quotes of things I’m saying, but those aren’t things that I think on a regular basis. So it is an aspect of me, but it’s not me.
What I would say is it hasn’t changed the way I write about other people, but both of those events provided this epiphany that pushed me towards, “I can’t control what other people are going to do.” I will say this—writers of autofiction should think of themselves as children, in the same way that when you’re a child, you don’t come out fully formed. One of the things you’re doing as a child is figuring out what makes you feel good and what makes you feel bad. You’re figuring out what’s your boundary, what makes you a person. With autofiction, it’s very similar. You have to figure out, what are my personal boundaries? How far will I go? What feels good and what doesn’t?
When I was in graduate school, I wrote stories about a person who was like me, but I put it in third person and gave her names like Kate and Jane. They were often doing things that I had done with my workshop friends, and in a few stories, one in particular, I went too far. I used a very intimate revelation that a peer of mine had made about her husband, and she’d made it to maybe three or four of us in the workshop. It was not mine to use in my fiction, certainly not in the context of this workshop where everyone knew who I was talking about. I’m glad I did that then, because I was in a place where my friends could tell me I went too far. Certain stories are not mine to tell.
That is a long-winded way of answering the question. I’d already figured out what my boundaries were, but on the other side, I needed to come to terms with, If I’m going to write about other people, I need to be prepared for people to write about me. And that can either keep me up at night and ruin my life, or I can say, “Cool. Someone wants to write about me. I’ve made an impression.” Maybe it’s a bad impression, but I’ve made an impression. That’s something.
Are there any writers who influence your work or you turn to for inspiration?
I fell in love with writing without necessarily understanding what the words meant. There were a handful of writers I was reading at about the same time. Faulkner was one of them. And when I reread his books, I think, “14-year-old Hannah had no idea what she was reading, but she really liked the em dashes.” And the convoluted sentences made sense to me. There’s also this deep drama to Faulkner. I’m from Georgia. It felt like there was still a Gothic aspect of the South in the ’80s, and it was money and race, and nobody talking about it. So if you’re a teenager who’s even remotely precocious, and there’s something that you’re seeing but nobody is talking about, you turn to literature. Faulkner was something that seemed to acknowledge what I was sensing in the world. He was giving it a language for me. So, Faulkner was one. Tim O’Brien just blew my mind. In the Lake of the Woods is a book that has this trickster of a narrator. It’s another text where there’s gorgeous language, but the narrator is playing a game of cat and mouse and he’s manipulating the reader. I loved that.
A little later Ann Beattie’s writing came into my life. She has this wonderful sense of irony, but she is not without pity. Even at times where it might seem as though she’s making fun of the world, it’s like she’s making fun of it while looking up at it and being grateful to be in it. A book that I teach every year is Walks with Men. It’s a novella, and it’s also a primer on writing. It’s gorgeous, it’s funny, it’s self-deprecating, it’s an attack on a certain way of being, and it teaches you how to write, which is why it’s so fun for me to teach it. There’s a lot of breaking the fourth wall, and autofiction breaks the fourth wall a lot. There are authorial intrusions, a kind of wink to the reader—“Can you believe I’m about to do this? Can you believe I just did that?”—that I really admire. Those three, desert island, I would definitely take their complete works, and I’d be pretty happy.
What advice do you have for those who want to write autofiction?
You have to ask yourself why. It can feel like a lot of people hate this genre, but it’s also really enticing to new writers. It can be a compelling genre because it’s more than just “write what you know.” You are the subject, and that comes with pros and cons. You’re the subject, which means you are the expert. But the con—you are the subject, which means if you do it well, you’re going to become vulnerable in a way that you are perhaps not prepared to be. You are going to be exposing aspects of yourself that might feel funny to be exposing. But that is what a reader wants from autofiction. So I would say, why do you want to write autofiction? The second thing I would say: What do you think is okay to cover? What family lore feels okay to write? What family lore doesn’t feel okay? Then ask yourself why these are on-topic, and these are off-topic.
I teach autofiction and one of the first things I ask students to do is write a true story, a page or two. Every detail is true. It is about you. I don’t care what it is. You can go to the grocery store. Don’t think it has to be exciting. This is just an anecdote. Write it in third person. The reason I ask students to do that is because it forces you to start looking at yourself differently. You are a character. You’re not you. From there, I’ll ask students, “Now that you’re in third person, do you find yourself wanting to be kinder to yourself than you typically would be? Do you find yourself wanting to punish yourself in a way that you typically might not?” From there we graduate to, “Now you’re going to tell a different story from first person, but you’re going to include at least three exaggerations or three lies. If you’re telling a story with a happy ending, give it a sad ending. If you’re telling a story with a sad ending, give it a happy ending.”
You’re slowly developing a muscle. I think of writing as I think of the body. You cannot do 100 push-ups if you’ve never done a push-up. You build to it. But if you do a push-up every day and then you add to it, within three months you can be doing 100 push-ups every day and then it gets pretty easy to start adding push-ups onto that. I know this because that was a New Year’s resolution sometime in Covid. I started doing 100 push-ups a day, but I had to build to it. Writing is the same way. It’s a muscle that you develop.
To learn more about Hannah Pittard, find her on Instagram.
To purchase If You Love It, Let It Kill You, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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Great one! Congrats!
Hannah, you are so lucky not to be with him anymore. He might have been a good friend but he's not a good person. To cheat on his wife with her best friend is just disgusting. And your best friend, she's not a good person at all. What I think is funny is that he couldn't be a successful writer on his own and was so jealous of your success. He had to right about you to become a writer. What a joke he is. You on the other hand, are amazing. Your strength throughout this whole life event was pretty amazing. Keep moving forward and good luck with your continued success. Keep those two awful people out of your life, you shine so brightly without them.