How Innocence Plays Out in Stories Told Inside and Outside Prison Walls

John J. Lennon read Harriet Clark’s novel The Hill this spring, shortly after publishing a Mother’s Day essay in Esquire about spending twenty-five years in prison and being unable to show up for his own mother as she grew old. The novel follows a girl named Suzanna who grows up visiting her mother in a prison on a hill. Lennon was surprised to see some of himself in Suzanna — her abandonment, shame, helplessness.

The novel deals with a kind of inverse of Lennon’s own situation. Suzanna’s mother was part of a revolutionary group, the getaway driver in a bank robbery that left one guard dead, and she was sentenced to life in prison. Suzanna’s grandmother, who raises her, antagonizes the situation and tells Suzanna that her mother chose a political cause over her responsibilities as a mother.

But the real story behind The Hill is not fiction. In 1981, Judith Clark drove one of the getaway cars in the notorious Brinks armored truck heist. By the end of the doomed plot, a Brinks guard and two police officers were shot and killed. Judith wound up with 75 years to life. Harriet was eleven months old when the robbery went down, and, like Suzanna, grew up visiting her mother in prison. Unlike Suzanna, Harriet was also raised and mentored by people in her mother’s collective.

Clark went to Stanford, got an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, received a Stegner Fellowship in fiction. She taught creative writing at Stanford for twelve years, and edited fiction at The Paris Review. She lives in New York with her wife and son.

Fiction As Exposed Life

Lennon called Clark from Sing Sing and exchanged emails with her through his publicist. Their conversation, about mothers, writing, abandonment, and prison, was published as “A Question of Innocence: On Writing About Real and Imagined Lives In and Outside of Prison.”

In the interview, Clark said fiction offers a kind of literary immunity — that’s Suzanna, not me! — but she found that immunity did not hold. “My hope was that setting the book in an imagined realm would protect my family’s privacy and the privacy of the women at my mother’s prison,” she said, “but the truth is that sharing what I’ve imagined feels as exposing as sharing what I’ve experienced.”

She brought her narrator to the scene of her mother’s crime, something she was never brought to in life. “So fiction exposes my unlived life, which feels just as intimate as my lived one,” she said.

Catharsis Or Something Else

Clark said the book did not provide catharsis either. She worked on the project for twenty years, and the feelings it forced her to return to were not pleasant ones. “There’s a set of feelings the book allowed me to access — forced me, even, to return to, day after day, year after year,” she said.

Those feelings included incompetence, helplessness, overwhelm, and shame. She suggested she needed to keep working through them, but did not think she had fully wrung them out. “I’m not free or purged of those feelings now, but on a good day I feel more at peace with them; we’ve become longtime companions,” she said.

The Mother Who Introduced Fear

Lennon’s own book, The Tragedy of True Crime, includes a passage about a beating his mother gave him. He wrote, “The first people who introduced us to fear and pain and violence were the ones who were supposed to love and protect and nurture us the most.” His Esquire essay, “Happy Mother’s Day, from Prison,” was tender and harrowing, and Clark told him it felt very brave to write it.

When asked what her biggest concerns were when writing about her mother, Clark said she worried about protecting her family’s privacy. She also worried about the women at her mother’s prison. The novel sets the story in an imagined realm, but the emotional material remains raw.

Writing Inside Prison

Reading Lennon’s essay, Clark thought of young-you waking up alone in the night. She thought of grown-you, returning to those nights in order to write the piece. She wondered about Lennon’s writing routines — where he writes, what he does after writing an upsetting scene.

The Story That Had To Be Told

Clark said The Hill was “the one story I had to tell.” She added, “I hope that one can feel the truth and necessity of personal responsibility in the book — the mother has contributed to loss of life, the mother has left her child.”

“But the greatest source of suffering in the book, the suffering that impacts the most people, is the prison,” she said.

The Long Companion

Clark’s description of her feelings as longtime companions is striking. She has not purged them, but she has made peace with them. That is a different kind of resolution than catharsis — it is acceptance, not release.

The Book’s Central Wound

The novel’s central wound is the prison itself. Clark said the greatest source of suffering in the book is the institution, not just the individual losses. That is a specific artistic judgment — the system hurts more people than any one person could.

The book also asks readers to hold two truths at once. The mother has committed a violent act and has abandoned her child. But the prison, which separates them, is the engine of the suffering. That tension is the novel’s subject.

A Writer’s Responsibility

Clark’s work ethic is notable. Twenty years is a long time to return to the same feelings day after day. Her willingness to expose herself through fiction — both her lived life and her unlived one — is a kind of bravery.

Her description of her feelings as longtime companions is also generous. She does not pretend the work fixed her. She simply said she feels more at peace with them now.

The conversation between Lennon and Clark is a rare glimpse into how writers process trauma through fiction. It is not therapy, exactly, but it is a way of carrying the weight.

The book is the one story she had to tell. She told it, and she told it honestly.

fiction · memoir · mother-daughter · prison · writing