Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

Harriet Clark (The Hill)
Anna Konkle (The Sane One)
Hafeez Lakhani (Abundance)
Ashton Politanoff (Dad Had a Bad Day)
Kayla Rae Whitaker (Returns and Exchanges)

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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Harriet Clark: Prison, death, growing up, cats.

Kayla Rae Whitaker: Money. Going from working class to (moderately) rich. Going from (moderately) rich to “Can I pay for this root canal?” Working retail. Falling heatedly, inextricably in love. Fun old ways men can talk down to women. Fun new ways men can talk down to women. Pissing contests. How much your mom can carry. Heartbreak. Revival. Rejuvenation. Ham.

Ashton Politanoff: The comparing-business-cards scene from American Psycho, but instead of business cards it is tennis racquets and tennis club ladder stats.

Hafeez Lakhani: How much of our lives do we control and how much is destined for us?

Anna Konkle: As a child, knowing where one begins and ends in relation to one’s parents (especially amidst loud, unpredictable hippies) is like palming through a bucket of rice for a single grain. Maybe a lot of this is about looking for us in the bucket.

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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Anna Konkle: Art that mirrors back life as a series of absurdly funny and unpredictable mundanities (while covertly swelling, ready to drown me!) is what I like.

Ashton Politanoff: Pro tennis meltdowns. The Ben Affleck bad-day photo. Parenting toddler boys. The midway tonal shift of a Scorsese movie. What if John Cheever played competitive tennis, was still alive, and wrote a book today?

Harriet Clark: Prison, death, growing up, cats.

Hafeez Lakhani: I wanted to write a children-of-immigrants American Muslim story. At the same time, my mother was diagnosed with a life-threatening liver disease, curable only by a transplant, which she adamantly refused—she wanted to live life out as it was intended for her. A similar health emergency became the engine for Abundance, with the other family members’ personal lives—and conflicts—adding further layers.

Kayla Rae Whitaker: The job at Big Lots I had in college. Planter’s Cheese Balls. Thumbcaps. Network commercial breaks from 1977–1990. Frye boots. Shucky beans. The American Dream as lived out by our grandparents. Tusk by Fleetwood Mac. Optimal department-store layouts of the early 1980s. Loretta Lynn. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. That mechanical buzz when you left a door ajar on a pre-1990 sedan. Ric Flair.

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Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Kayla Rae Whitaker: Teaching The Scarlet Letter. Grading papers. Grading papers that were written (badly) by ChatGPT. Marriage. Mortgage. Three moves. Two root canals. A broken toe. Hilarious hormonal shifts that made my curly hair go wavy.

Hafeez Lakhani: Over 12 years: met my wife, fell in love, had three kids in three years; my mom received two liver transplants, getting to live long enough to meet my wife and three small kids; she passed away while I was working on a second draft.

Anna Konkle: It took four years, so going back
I pitched it like there was no first baby in me but
Even when I couldn’t get to it or was guilting myself for taking an acting job instead of finishing the paper baby, while breastfeeding warm baby, the book was close to my heart, but I was also scared, with my dad not here to make approvals and me acting like I knew when it isn’t a

Harriet Clark: Twenty years.

Ashton Politanoff: Daddy daycare. League tennis. Uncrustables. Flushables. Losing sleep over a tennis match. Joggers, slip-ons, & a trucker hat as daily outfit. Three-day stubble. 1 p.m. espresso. Writing at the tennis club bar.

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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Ashton Politanoff: When readers pine for a morally “good” character or seek a moral resolution. That seems really boring to me and is antithetical to what I view as good art.

Harriet Clark: At this point, I’m just happy to have readers.

Kayla Rae Whitaker: Well, once I had a guy who was interviewing me about my first book start with, “Why you?” Does that count? I also read a review once that said my writing “lacked pizzazz,” which—well, just try saying that phrase out loud to yourself and see how much self-respect you have after.

Anna Konkle: A TV show I co-created was often called a cringe comedy, but we tried to write an honest R-rated traumedy about two tween girls—if bloody undies is cringe, then we live cringe every month, every day, every second! I guess it’s the idea that truthfulness is cringey—it makes me sad. But I get it.

Hafeez Lakhani: Immigrant fiction. My identity is American, my characters are American, having emigrated from India ~40 years ago. These characters should not be made “other” but rather their stories celebrated as universal.

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If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent), what would it be?

Hafeez Lakhani: High school English teacher, igniting a love of stories!

Kayla Rae Whitaker: I’m already a high school English teacher. That’s a gig I know, and it’s one that makes me happy. Funeral director’s always an option. At one point, I actually considered going back to school for that one. And something tells me I have a good skill set for working at the DMV. I could be a horribly decent bureaucrat.

Harriet Clark: Retirement.

Anna Konkle: Medicine or scientific research in relation to music & art. Something in hospice. First-grade teacher.

Ashton Politanoff: Surfboard shaper so I could make my own boards.

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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Harriet Clark: I love writing dialogue for grumpy old ladies who were formerly in the Communist Party, but this is a fairly limited craft element in most texts, so I should get better at the other stuff.

Anna Konkle: Maybe finding comedy in tragedy and vice versa. I’d like to evolve to be less wordy.

Kayla Rae Whitaker: I love the messiness of character—character tics and flaws, character ephemera, character insecurity and resentment and secret joy. Getting to cultivate these people on the page and spend time with them is the best part of writing fiction. My challenge tends to be structure and momentum, both of which simply take time, or trial and error, to nail down. I watch a lot of film and read a lot of craft books about screenwriting (and have, indeed, been screenwriting), and I think reflection and practice have helped, as they tend to.

Ashton Politanoff: My strong suit is the short sentence. I’d like to get better at the long sentence. See—I should have used a FANBOY to combine the previous two.

Hafeez Lakhani: Strengths: tension, moving back and forth in time, voice and vernacular. Get better at: efficiency, writing characters that are further from worlds I know.

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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Hafeez Lakhani: Someone once told me the first generation after immigration breaks their backs working; the second makes money; and the third becomes artists. I dare seek that artist-state early, with the crazy idea that there are universal truths to be mined in the American Muslim, child-of-immigrants South Florida world from which I hail.

Anna Konkle: If I haven’t heard or seen a ton of frankness around subjects that bring me embarrassment, it’s reassurance my own experience may be worth sharing.

Kayla Rae Whitaker: Oh, don’t you worry about me. Like any writer, I balance my hubris out with a whole host of deep-seated insecurities! Another good coping mechanism: I bend my knees and listen to the thousand-twigs-snapping sound coming from within and am reminded that, someday, I will go the way of all animals and die. So why do anything, including writing a book? Because it makes you feel joy, my friend. Hubris be damned.

Ashton Politanoff: I start with myself, as in would I want to read this. I build up excitement before I even put words down. I have to. I can’t write cold. The idea must want to burst out of me in order for the writing to begin. This can take a very long time.

Harriet Clark: I’ve talked too much for my entire life, so I have a lot of practice at just going for it.