On Uncertainty, Midlife, and the Beauty of Boredom

“We rely so much on a clear narrative and finality to make sense not only of a book but of life,” says Katie Kitamura. “I’m interested in what it means to instead live in a state of uncertainty.” In Kitamura’s latest novel, Audition, a New York City theater actress is thrown into a state like this when a young man appears claiming to be her son. The book is an inquiry into psychological betweenness, exploring the roles we play on and off the stage, what we know and don’t know, and what is and isn’t real.

Kitamura was born in Sacramento, California, in 1979. In addition to Audition, she is the author of novels including Intimacies (2021) and A Separation (2018), as well as a memoir, Japanese for Travellers: A Journey Through Modern Japan (2006). Audition was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and is being adapted for the screen by director Lulu Wang; Kitamura’s awards and honors also include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize in Literature. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University. 

Kitamura talked with me about turning away from certainty, finding new possibilities in midlife, and detaching from productivity.

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Your work is very much about being in between. In Audition, the actress narrator is in a state of suspension as she tries to make sense of her suddenly destabilized existence, and readers are also in limbo because what’s going on in the narrative isn’t clear. Approaching the end of the book, we might think we’re about to discover whether the young man is the narrator’s son, and whose version of events—the narrator’s or the man’s—is correct. But that’s not what happens. What attracts you to lack of resolution? It’s such a fascinating question. The only position from which I’m able to write is one of uncertainty. My work as a writer is to turn away from certainty, on everything from a plot level to the mechanics of a sentence. For me, the question is always: What can you see when you move away from certainty, from conclusion? To me, this has an almost ethical dimension. There’s something moral about a character’s refusal of certainty.

In what way? Presuming to know is dangerous. There’s an ease to believing that you know, an ease to conviction. I see it in the world around us right now. It’s much easier to move toward the comfort of a conclusion than to sustain uncertainty. But there’s something worth pursuing in refusing conclusion.

It’s striking how we seek certainty even as we know that uncertainty is the only thing in life we can be sure of.  I don’t use AI, and I know it’s changing rapidly, but about a year ago, it was programmed to tend toward resolution. If you were trying to get it to write a scene with two characters having a fight, it would tend toward resolution between those two people. This is partly because AI is being trained on fiction, much of which has the same tendency. Myself, I’m not terribly interested in that because lack of resolution and living with a lack of resolution, which is really hard, is much truer to our experience of life.

There’s something worth pursuing in refusing conclusion.

Your parents are Japanese, and Japanese for Travellers: A Journey Through Modern Japan is about a trip you took to Japan to be with family, as well as to understand the culture more deeply. One well-known aspect of Japanese culture is the tendency toward ambiguity and open-endedness. Do you feel that this has influenced you? Definitely. A lot of 20th-century Japanese writers have been important to me, to my writing, like Kawabata, Ōe, Tanizaki. In their work, the traditional narrative arc that you tend to see in Western fiction is avoided. There’s no imposition of a story or a lesson. It’s more about a series of states and leaving things to the reader to interpret. 

In Japanese for Travellers, you say that you “always have a feeling of displaced recognition upon returning to Japan.” Do you feel like you’re in between America and Japan? Yes, I talked about this once with Salman Rushdie. We were talking about my last novel, Intimacies, which is about a simultaneous interpreter working at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The book is about moving between languages, between cultures. I told Salman that I don’t feel firmly oriented toward a single culture. I must have sounded mournful when I said that, because he said it’s a tremendous gift to be facing not toward one but toward many. I think that’s very true, and very wise.

Another kind of bardo that you’ve spoken about, and that you write about in Audition, is the between-state of midlife. The narrator in Audition, who’s middle-aged, says it’s a stage where there’s a certain amount of immutability, where things no longer change. Well, I think the book proves the narrator wrong. One of the things I noticed when I published Intimacies is that people kept referring to the main character—who experiences change—as a young woman, but she’s in her late 30s. I thought, “Oh, this is interesting. People feel that change is something that happens to young people.” But that’s so transparently not true. In the middle of your life, even though you may be settled in a relationship, or job, or family, you’re still subject to huge amounts of change. And in a lot of ways, that change is even more painful because you have all these attachments.

That’s what I was interested in thinking about when writing Audition: the fact that the middle of a life is rich with narrative possibility. For whatever reason, we’re preoccupied with the beginning and, to some extent, the end, but the middle goes overlooked, particularly for women. The male midlife crisis has been written many times, but when Dana Spiotta wrote Wayward in 2021, that was one of the first menopause novels. Now, of course, there are many more, like Miranda July’s All Fours, but the fact that menopause as something to write about emerged so recently is extraordinary. Menopause is a change as significant as puberty, yet so often, the middle of a woman’s life is presented as a kind of monotony. I wanted to write a book that was thinking about what the changes a woman goes through in midlife might feel like.

Now that you’re in the middle of your life, what shifts are you experiencing? I’m at an age where we’re preoccupied with the care of our parents, with end-of-life care. With getting our children settled in their lives. Mortality no longer feels like something that happens to other people. 

I’m feeling that I’d like to experience time more. When I turned 40, I thought I really wanted to slow time down. Not in the sense of not aging but in the sense of being more present, of being bored in the way I was as a child. I miss that boredom, because it’s so productive creatively. 

I dream about that boredom. I don’t have it in my life right now, but I remember what it was like to just lie in the grass on a summer afternoon and watch vapor trails in the sky. Or sit in a car and stare out the window for hours. Not listen to the radio, not have a conversation, just stare out the window.

I want to try to find that relationship to time again. It’s hard, both on a practical level and because it requires sustained attention. Heightened observation, a heightened way of being present. But I find myself thinking more and more about the ways in which I could do this. Reading is one of them. It slows time down, especially as a counterpoint to time spent scrolling, for example, time that’s undifferentiated. 

I’m in a Proust reading group, and we’re reading a volume of In Search of Lost Time every two months. A lot of people seem to be reading Proust—maybe it’s a response to how we’re feeling about our lives now.

I think time is something we’re all hyper aware of because it feels like life is rushing past, even though the time we have is the same as what our parents and their parents had. And that feeling is connected to our fear of death, whether metaphorical or literal, to not wanting things to end. In a novel, time is usually collapsed, but when you’re reading Proust, there’s an extraordinary distension of time. There’s an assumption that you keep reading because you want to find out what happens, but that’s not why you’re reading Proust at all. You’re reading because there’s an almost viscous quality to the way the world he creates is holding you in place. You can take a second and make it last three hours of a reading experience, which is almost the opposite of what we think a novel does. It could be this is what we’re looking for.

That said, much as I love reading—I read in line at the airport, on the subway, everywhere—there’s a part of my brain that’s thinking about it in terms of productivity because it’s so close to my work, to my ideas about self-edification. Like, “If I read a couple of books a week, that’ll be a good week for reading.” The danger is when your attachment to your idea of productivity, to being a productive member of a capitalist society, cannibalizes everything in your life. Detaching from that and just being present, looking out the window, is so important.