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“I don’t really know what ‘authentic’ means,” Katie Kitamura admits. She’s sitting in a nondescript hotel room in Tennessee, where she’s staying as a faculty member for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as she talks me through the genesis of her upcoming novel, Audition. But the questions at the root of the book itself steer us into more abstract territory, which is why the National Book Award-longlisted author continues: “When you take away all of the role-playing, all of the performance, what is left? I don’t know if that’s your authentic self, or if it’s a profoundly raw, destabilized, possibly non-functioning self.”
Perhaps no line of inquiry better introduces Audition itself, Kitamura’s latest beguiling novel after 2021’s critically acclaimed Intimacies. Like Intimacies and A Separation before it, Audition—the cover for which ELLE.com is revealing today—concerns an unnamed female protagonist, one whose life’s work is itself a form of interpretation: In A Separation, Kitamura’s protagonist is a translator; in Intimacies, an interpreter at The Hague; and in Audition, an actress embedded in the New York theater scene.
At the outset of Audition, this narrator is a conservatively successful thespian who “believes she understands who she is, and the reader believes they understand who she is,” Kitamura says. But when she arranges to meet with a young man for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant, it quickly becomes clear that their relationship means one thing to him and another to her—and yet another to the waiters and patrons surrounding them. This man, whom Kitamura names Xavier, thinks he might be the narrator’s son. She considers that an impossibility. As the novel continues, Kitamura introduces two seemingly competing narratives, bifurcating the book itself: Who is this actress? Is she a mother? What would it mean if she were? What part is she playing, and is she aware she’s playing it? And even if she is aware, is she any good in the role? When I ask if Kitamura would describe this actress-protagonist as an unreliable narrator, or, rather, someone for whom reality itself is unreliable, she smiles and replies, “I think she is an unreliable narrator because she’s someone for whom reality itself is unstable.”
The idea for Audition first occurred to Kitamura seven or eight years ago, she says, when she came across a headline that stated, “A stranger told me he was my son.” She didn’t click on the link itself, but its mystery lit a subconscious fuse. In 2021, after Intimacies’ release, she finally started writing this “are you my mother?” tale, which would become Audition. “I’m fascinated by the idea that there can be a moment, an interaction, an exchange with somebody, that can completely overturn your sense of who you are and what your place in the world is,” Kitamura says. “And I think the novel is really about the aftermath of that encounter.”
Here, “aftermath” is something of a misnomer: Once the protagonist gets to know Xavier, no event or character in Audition is quite the same as they were when Kitamura first introduced them—least of all the narrator herself. This narrative shift isn’t necessarily a comfortable one for the reader, but the vertigo it inspires is essential to the novel’s impact. And Kitamura believes the experience is true to life: “When you look at somebody whom you know intimately, and they look like a complete stranger to you…it’s not just that you think, ‘Oh, this person has changed,’ or, ‘My understanding of this person has changed.’ I think it’s that your entire sense of reality, for a moment—it’s like the world spins around you. That destabilization is something I’m always interested in exploring in fiction.”
Kitamura says she wrote the book so that audiences would have “a couple of different interpretations that are maybe even mutually exclusive, but that are, I hope, coherent and true.” Having read an early copy of Audition, I can confirm I’ve changed my mind about my own interpretation at least three times since turning the last page. (Even the book’s cover, with its euphoric pastel colors and chopped typeface, made me question myself.) But by being forced to assess and reassess those interpretations, I’ve come much closer to understanding Kitamura’s theories about authenticity and performance. As she puts it: “People often talk about the performative aspect of social media or self-presentation as if it’s inherently superficial. I actually think we find ourselves through performance. We find we exist in performance.” She concludes, “We’re performing all the time.”
Audition is out April 8, 2025 from Riverhead Books.