IN THE SUMMER of 2016, novelist Hannah Pittard made a painful, world-altering discovery—that her then-husband was having an affair with her best friend. As a human being, she reeled; as a writer, she began to process the experience in the only way she knew how: by translating it onto the page. What she ultimately wrote, the wry, genre-bending We Are Too Many: A Memoir [Kind Of] , published in May by Henry Holt and Company, is an unflinching account of a formative betrayal, but it is also a surprising (and often surprisingly funny) meditation on time, truth, and grief. The book is split into three sections: “Remembered Conversations,” in which the events surrounding the affair and its discovery are relayed solely in dialogue, like a stage play; “An Imagined Exchange,” a kind of postmortem in which literary avatars of the former spouses argue, reflect, and reminisce; and “A Coda in Pieces,” an affecting series of vignettes from the safer vantage point of the present day. As the story progresses, shapeshifting in form and tone, it mimics the fascinating ways in which memory and fantasy, fact and fiction, can fuel and complicate one another. Influences and allusions include Linda Rosenkrantz’s cult-favorite found novel Talk (1968), from which the book gets its name, and American classics like James Salter’s Light Years (1975), among other nods to the long-standing literary tradition of writing about heartbreak and betrayal. But the narrative also remains grounded in specificity, as we follow a narrator in crisis processing and finally healing from a shattering loss. I first knew Hannah when I was an undergraduate writing student of both her and her ex-husband, and I have followed her career eagerly for the past decade. In that time, her work has expanded in scope and ambition, from the quietly simmering thriller of marital discord Listen to Me (2016) to the sprawling, expansive Visible Empire (2018), an exhaustively researched literary reimagining of the disastrous 1962 crash of Air France Flight 007. We caught up by phone about her first foray into memoir, a departure for the author in form and […]
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