Joanna Hershon

Joanna Hershon (b. 1972) sits on the floor of her father’s study in Brooklyn, a girl not yet in her teens, reading about strangers. The book in her lap is the Harvard Red Book, the volume the university sends its graduates so they might account for their lives. Her father keeps it on a shelf. He is a doctor who holds his feelings close, and for many years he tends the New York Yankees. The alumni reports run from a single line to a long private essay. The girl reads them the way some children read adventure stories. She comes from an orderly home and finds herself pulled toward the men who admit something, the ones who confess a turn their lives took. Later she will say those hours planted a seed.

She does not plan on a novel then. She trains first. She attends the Packer Collegiate Institute, studies at the University of Michigan, and earns an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University, the school where she now teaches graduate students. Her classroom carries the loyalties her fiction carries: close observation, emotional candor, a willingness to follow a scene before she knows where it goes.

She makes her debut with Swimming (2001). The Lilien family loses its eldest son to an accidental drowning, and the loss does not resolve. It spreads. Over decades it reshapes a marriage, scatters the survivors from New Hampshire toward the West, and alters who each of them becomes. Grief in her hands works as weather. It changes the climate of a family and stays. The book sets the terms of her career. Private catastrophe, and its long afterlife, return in every novel she writes.

The Outside of August (2004) follows. It turns on a mother, a betrayal, and the pull between a woman’s freedom and her duty to the people she made. Hershon builds the pressure from small shifts rather than open conflict, a method she keeps.

With The German Bride (2009) she moves into history and onto the American frontier. The novel opens in Berlin in 1865. Eva Frank, the daughter of a Jewish banker, sits for a portrait with her sister Henriette and the painter Heinrich. Eva and the painter begin an affair. The consequences fall hard, and when Henriette dies, Eva carries the guilt as her own. To escape it she marries Abraham Shein, a German Jewish merchant who has built a business in the American Southwest and come home to find a wife. Eva crosses the Atlantic and then the Santa Fe Trail, and the elegant house Abraham promised turns out to be a small adobe room. He gambles. She suffers one failed pregnancy after another. Around them a community of German Jewish traders takes root in a Catholic town under a French bishop, outsiders set against a large and indifferent land. Critics place the book near Willa Cather (1873-1947), a Western told without cowboys, an immigrant story told without the Lower East Side.

Her fourth novel reaches further. A Dual Inheritance (2014) begins on an autumn evening in Cambridge in 1963, when two Harvard seniors meet. Ed Cantowitz is a Jewish scholarship student, hungry and unguarded. Hugh Shipley is a Boston Brahmin with every advantage and little use for any of it. Their friendship runs five decades and breaks along the fault of class, money, women, and work, carrying their children with it, moving from Cambridge to New York to East Africa.

To write it, Hershon runs what she calls her crackpot anthropology. She skips much of the library and talks to people instead. She tracks down men and women who went to Harvard and Radcliffe College in the late 1950s and early 1960s and asks them long, intimate questions. She tests her invented Hugh Shipley on one of them and asks whether he rings true. The friend hears the character and introduces her to the documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner (1925-2014), whose memories she folds into the book. She never sets foot in Africa. The scenes along Lake Tanganyika come from conversations with a former schoolmate who runs a clinic on that water, and from her own imagining. The novel reaches the Jewish Book Council fiction shortlist and widens her readership.

Then comes the man on the subway. Hershon rides a New York train when a stranger starts to talk to her, and the talk turns strange enough to feel like something from another world. The encounter sits in her. She thinks she wants to write a thriller. Her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, watches her work and tells her what he sees: her gift is not the straight thriller but the dread she can raise inside an ordinary, tense hour. He is right. The book stalls for years while she raises twin sons, moves, renovates a home, and has a daughter. When the girl is about six months old, Hershon goes back to the writers’ space she keeps in Brooklyn and forces herself to the page. She drops plot. She drops craft. She writes the way she wrote in her teenage journals, chasing one image and then the next, images that come to her like Tarot cards. The sessions run feverish. The threads braid on their own, and she finds she is not writing a thriller at all. She is writing a mother who has lost a daughter to forces she cannot control.

That book is St. Ivo (2020). Two couples gather at a country house for three hot September days. Old wounds about marriage, friendship, and a vanished adult daughter rise to the surface. The novel keeps the grip of suspense and stays inside the literary, building fear from silence and memory rather than from a crime. A reviewer for The New York Times Book Review praises the dread Hershon sustains across the short, slim book.

Across five novels the subject holds. Hershon writes about whether love ever delivers full knowledge of another person. Her people sit between hero and villain. They are intelligent adults who misread themselves as often as they misread the husband, the friend, the child across the table. She is drawn to the compromises that keep a marriage or a long friendship alive, and to the question of what those compromises hide. Time is her other great subject. A choice made in a kitchen in one decade shows its weight in another.

Her method explains the shape of the work. She does not start with an outline. She starts with an image and an instinct and writes until the story shows itself. Her marriage to Buckner sharpens this. The painter’s eye trains her own, and her settings carry feeling rather than mere scenery, the desert around Eva, the lake water near Hugh, the September light over the country house.

The output stays measured. Hershon publishes five novels in two decades and refuses to pad the shelf. Between books she writes shorter. Her work appears in Granta, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, and The London Magazine, and a story of hers reaches the O. Henry Prize shortlist. Since St. Ivo she has leaned into the personal essay and the short story. In 2025 she publishes the story “Not Yet” and the essay “Other Celestial Bodies,” both circling the ground she knows best, memory, intimacy, family, and the currents that move under an ordinary day.

She lives in Brooklyn with Buckner and their children, in the borough where she once read strangers’ confessions on her father’s floor. The girl who wanted to know what people admit when handed a page grew into a writer who builds novels from the gap between what her characters know and what they refuse to say. The drama she trusts is small and slow. A family decision. A held secret. A weekend that brings the past back into the room. She waits, and she watches, and she lets the meaning arrive on its own clock.

What Joanna Hershon Cannot Say

Joanna Hershon cannot tell you how she writes a novel. She tries. She says she drops plot, drops structure, and writes the way she wrote in teenage journals, chasing one image and then the next until the images braid into a shape. She says the sessions run feverish and that she does not know, going in, what she is making. When she finished St. Ivo (2020) she learned she had written a mother who loses a daughter, and the discovery surprised her. Her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, saw her gift before she could name it. He watched her struggle toward a thriller and told her the truth: her strength was the dread she raises inside an ordinary, tense hour, not the plot tricks of a mystery. He read her work better than she read it herself.

Stephen Turner has spent a career on this problem. In The Social Theory of Practices (1994) and again in Understanding the Tacit (2014) he argues against an idea most of us hold without examining it, that skilled people carry a shared inner code, a common stock of tacit knowledge handed down and held in common. Turner says no such collective object exists. The phrase comes from Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), who held that we know more than we can tell. Turner keeps the individual half of that insight and drops the collective reading later writers built onto it. What looks like shared understanding is many separate acquisitions that happen to perform well together. Each person builds his own habits from his own history, and the match between them is rough and inferred, never transmitted intact. Turner rejects Bourdieu’s (1930-2002) habitus and Harry Collins’s collective tacit knowledge on the same ground. And when a person makes the tacit explicit, Turner argues, he does not read off a fixed scheme inside him. He improvises an articulation for a particular listener, what Turner calls functional substitutes invented on the fly. The explaining answers the need of the Other rather than the contents of a private vault.

Hold Hershon’s account of her craft against this.

Her method is tacit knowledge in Turner’s individual sense. She performs the skill and cannot state the rule. The feel for when a scene is alive, for which image carries weight, for the moment dread should enter a quiet room, sits below words. She acquired it across decades of reading and writing, on her own path, and she cannot hand it over.

She teaches at Columbia, where she earned her own degree, and the paradox of the writing program runs straight through Turner’s argument. A program cannot transmit the thing it exists to teach. There is no shared craft to download into a student. Hershon’s teaching shows she knows this in practice. She presses observation, candor, and a readiness to follow a scene before its destination shows. She gives her students occasions and feedback, exposure and response. Each one then rebuilds the tacit feel alone or not at all. The skill regrows in private. It does not pass from hand to hand.

Her research makes the same point from the other side. For A Dual Inheritance (2014) she ran what she calls her crackpot anthropology, interviewing men and women who had been at Harvard and Radcliffe a half century before, absorbing their talk, then building characters from it. She never went to Africa, yet she wrote the Lake Tanganyika scenes from conversation and imagination. She did not acquire her sources’ tacit knowledge of those rooms and that water. She manufactured a functional substitute that performs on the page. Turner’s phrase fits her trade. The novelist invents, for a particular reader, a working stand-in for experience she never held.

Buckner naming her gift belongs here too. The tacit shows from outside through performance while it stays dark to the one who has it. An observer infers the disposition from the output. The painter watched the novelist work and read the pattern she could not see. Turner’s account predicts this. The skill lives in the doing, not in the doer’s report of it.

A novel, on Turner’s account, is the tacit made explicit for a stranger. Hershon does not transcribe a settled understanding and mail it to readers. She improvises a shape that answers what a reader needs to feel and to follow. Each book is a fresh articulation for an audience she cannot meet, built on the fly, tuned to the Other. This explains why she resists the outline. The outline assumes the meaning sits ready to be copied out. Hershon’s practice assumes the opposite. The meaning arrives only in the act of articulating it, and she finds her subject by writing past the point where she could have named it.

Turn the same frame on what she writes about, and a second track opens. Hershon’s permanent subject is the gap between two people who assume they share an understanding and find they do not. Her marriages and friendships run on a presumed common code, and the code turns out to be two private codes mistaken for one.

Swimming (2001) sets a family around a drowned son. Each survivor grieves alone, and the shared grief they imagine binds them resolves into separate griefs that never matched. The German Bride (2009) marries Eva Frank to Abraham Shein, two strangers who reach for each other across need and guilt. They love, or at least require, each other, and neither reads the other right. The marriage runs on proximity taken for understanding. A Dual Inheritance gives Ed Cantowitz and Hugh Shipley a friendship across a class divide that ensures their tacit worlds never overlapped. Each man assumes he knows what the friendship means. The decades prove the assumption fragile. St. Ivo asks the question in the open, whether we ever know the people closest to us, and answers through a daughter who has vanished from her mother’s life and a marriage thick with what goes unsaid.

Turner supplies the diagnosis. The sense of a shared understanding is an inference drawn from smooth interaction. While the surface holds, two people read their separate acquisitions as one common possession. When the surface breaks, a vanished child, a betrayal, a secret surfacing over three hot days, the divergence shows, and the characters see that the code they trusted was never held in common. Hershon does not preach this. She stages it. Her plots are controlled failures of the assumption Turner spent his career puncturing, that the tacit is shared.

The two tracks meet in a single claim. The tacit is private, embodied, and unsharable, visible only through performance and never transmitted in full. Hershon’s method instantiates the claim. She owns a craft she cannot state and rebuilds her understanding new with each book. Her material dramatizes the claim. Her people own private understandings they mistake for shared ones and pay when the mistake comes due. The novel, for Hershon, is the one form that takes something no one can hand over and improvises it for a stranger. She works at the edge of what she can say, on both sides of the page, and trusts the meaning to arrive in the writing rather than before it.

The Doctor’s Daughter

Joanna Hershon sits on the floor of her father’s study in Brooklyn, a girl with a heavy book in her lap. The room is orderly. Medical journals stand in rows. The phone in the house might ring for her father at any hour, the man who keeps the New York Yankees on their feet, who reads the films and sets the bones and says little at dinner. He fights death with his hands. The girl does not yet know she will fight it with sentences. The book is the Harvard Red Book, the alumni reports her father keeps, strangers accounting for their lives in a paragraph or a page. She reads it the way some children read about explorers. She wants to know what a person admits when handed a blank space. Years on she will say the hours planted something.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave the house its theory. His argument runs simple and hard. The human animal knows it will die, and the bare knowledge stops a man cold, so he learns not to look at it straight. He builds a hero system, a scheme of values that tells him how to earn a significance the grave cannot erase. Becker calls the private version an immortality project. The general dies into his nation. The believer dies into God. The father in the study holds death off one patient at a time and leaves behind men who walk because of his hands. Every culture, Becker argues in The Denial of Death (1973), is a machine for making heroes, a codebook for the feeling that a life weighs against extinction. Escape from Evil (1975) adds the cost. Hero systems collide, and the heroism that saves one man reads as vanity, or as evil, from inside another man’s code.

Hershon picks paper. The novel is her immortality project, and she is precise about the kind. She does not write to instruct, or to win an argument, or to record some great public event. She writes to fix the perishable. A marriage’s long silence. A child gone from a mother’s life. The grief of one family in one decade. These vanish. People die and the texture of their days dies with them, unrecorded, and Hershon’s work, start to finish, refuses that second death.

Two fears drive her, and Becker names them both. The first is extinction. Her career opens on it. Swimming (2001) begins with a boy who drowns, and the drowning does not end on the page where it happens. It spreads through a marriage and across decades and out into the West. Her father’s trade taught her young that the body fails and the doctor loses some of them. The second fear runs quieter and, for Hershon, worse. It is the fear of dying unknown. Not unfamous. Unknown. The terror that a man can share a bed and a table with another for forty years and never once be read, that he can go down into the ground sealed inside his own skull, having reached no one. Becker set the urge to stand out beside the urge to merge, the wish to be a singular hero beside the wish to dissolve into something larger than the self. Hershon feels the second fear as the failure of the merge. Two people who cannot reach each other are two deaths, not one.

Here the shape of her heroism shows. Becker says every hero system narrows the terror to a stage a person can act on. Hershon’s narrowing runs severe and deliberate. She subtracts the battlefield, the senate, the trading floor, the frontier shootout. When she writes the American West in The German Bride (2009) she tells it without a single cowboy, a frontier novel emptied of the frontier’s usual heroes, the gunmen and the marshals, and refilled with a German Jewish bride in an adobe room counting her failed pregnancies while her husband gambles. When she runs a friendship across continents in A Dual Inheritance (2014), from Cambridge to Tanzania, she keeps the camera on two men and what passes and fails to pass between them. She strips scale. She keeps the kitchen, the sickroom, the country house over a long weekend. The domestic interior is her chosen ground, and on it she means to win the only significance she trusts.

A hero system runs on sacred words, and the same sacred word means different things on different stages. Becker’s point about colliding systems lives here, down in the everyday vocabulary. Take three of Hershon’s.

Attention first. For Hershon attention sits close to a sacrament. To watch one ordinary woman with full care, to record the exact way she folds a letter or holds her contempt behind a polite face, is to lift her out of oblivion and grant her weight. Attention, given, confers significance. It is the writer’s gift and the writer’s worship.

Stand other people on the same word.

A combat photographer crouches behind a wall in a burning street. Attention to her is the shot she cannot miss, the half second when the man falls, the frame that will run on the front page and force a country to look. “You point the lens at the thing everyone turns from,” she says. Attention spent on the large catastrophe, on history as it breaks.

A high-frequency trader watches six screens in a cold room. Attention to him is milliseconds and the edge buried inside them. “Blink and the spread is gone,” he says, and means it. Attention as extraction, the eye that turns a gap into money.

A Carmelite at prayer empties her attention of every object until nothing remains but the attending. Attention to her is the road out of the self and toward God, the reverse of Hershon’s road, which runs deeper into one particular self and stays there.

One word. A sacrament, an act of witness, a tool of extraction, a ladder to the eternal. Each makes full sense only inside the system that holds it.

Scale next. Hershon holds that the largest human drama happens at the smallest scale. The breakfast table is her Gettysburg. A held secret is her revolution. She believes this with the steadiness of a creed, and it sets her against the loudest hero systems we have.

A space-program founder stands under a rocket he paid for. Greatness to him is scale and reach, the launch, the hundred million users, the colony on another world. “Nobody builds a statue to the man who stayed home,” he says. The domestic to him is the antechamber, the place a man rests between the acts that count.

A four-star general reads a map at midnight. Heroism to him is the nation and the campaign, lines moving on terrain, the treaty signed at the end. A marriage is private weather under the real history he is making.

To Hershon both men have it backward. The launch and the campaign pass and harden into dates in a book. The marriage is where a life is won or lost, hour by unwitnessed hour, and almost no one writes it down. She writes it down. That is her wager against the men with the rockets and the maps, that the unrecorded interior is the realest theater there is, and the one most in danger of vanishing unmarked.

Permanence last, and here the collisions cut closest, because permanence is the heart of every immortality project and people disagree on what lasts.

For Hershon the book is the durable thing. The body fails, the family scatters, the grief fades from living memory, and the novel holds the shape of all of it after everyone who lived it is gone. She publishes five novels in two decades and refuses to pad the shelf. Each book is a stone set with care, meant to stand. The slowness is part of the worship.

A jazz trumpeter on a Tuesday night calls that a betrayal. His hero system worships the vanishing. The value is the live take, the solo that exists for ninety seconds and then is gone for good. “If you can play it again, it wasn’t the thing,” he says. To him permanence is a cage. The recording almost cheats.

A hospice chaplain sits with a dying man and finds permanence nowhere near the made thing. Not the book, not the building, not the record. The body and its works fall away. What lasts to him is the soul, and the made thing is dust with a longer lease.

An architect signs off on a tower and means permanence in the most literal way, mass and steel standing a hundred years over a moving city.

The same sacred word again. The thing fixed on paper, the thing that must vanish to be true, the thing beyond all things, the thing in stone. Hershon’s permanence is the rescued moment, and she will not trade it for the trumpeter’s flame or the chaplain’s eternity, because both, to her, let the particular human being slip away unrecorded, and that slipping is the death she cannot bear.

Set the two fears beside the one art and the design comes clear. Fiction is the single move that answers both of Hershon’s terrors at once. Against extinction, the novel preserves. The drowned boy, the bride in the adobe room, the friendship across the class line, the vanished daughter, all of them outlast their originals and go on being read. Against the fear of dying unknown, fiction performs the impossible thing. On the page, for once, one human being is known in full by another. The reader enters Eva Frank and knows her from the inside, knows what her husband never learns. The isolation that terrifies Hershon in life she dissolves on the page, where the private interior of a stranger becomes, for the length of a book, open ground. A reader closes St. Ivo (2020) on a train and knows a woman who never existed better than he knows the man asleep against his shoulder. Hershon builds, book by book, the rescue she cannot count on in life.

Three coordinates locate her. She places death at the center, less a subject she chose than the pressure that shaped the choosing, the drowning at the start and the doctor-father behind it. She places the reader where most writers place posterity or the prize, in the seat of the one who at last does the knowing, so that her immortality project hangs on a stranger she will never meet completing it. And she places her own name without weight. The singular hero who signs the book is the smaller half of her. The larger half wants to disappear into the characters and the family and the ordinary day, to merge rather than to stand out, to win significance by giving full attention to lives the size of her own. She fights the grave with a kitchen and a long marriage and a held breath. Becker tells us it is as serious a war as any fought with rockets or maps, and that she chose her ground well, because the ground she chose is the one almost everyone else leaves undefended.

About Luke Ford