Domestic Labor

Justine Kurland: Ezekiel Stark, the gentle narrator in your novel Men and Apparitions (2018), is an ethnographer who studies family photographs. Why did you want to write a book about photography and family?

Lynne Tillman: I didn’t set out to write so much about Zeke’s family. But as I built his character, it made sense psychologically that his interest in photographs and photography would have begun early. So I expanded the family’s interest, from his father’s passion for Polaroids to, on his mother’s side, the character Clover Hooper Adams, a nineteenth-century woman, the wife of the historian Henry Adams, and a professional photographer.

In my own family, my father was the photographer and home-movie maker. I was the youngest, and quite younger than my two sisters. I liked to look at photographs of them and my parents from before I was born. Trying to figure it out—them, my place in the family—in some way, I suppose.

JK: That sounds like a kind of terror, because before you are born is the same oblivion as after you die. It must be chilling to see your immediate family doing happy family things in photographs, regardless of your imminent arrival. Chronophobia is the fear of passing time. Did you set out to write a book about time?

: It wasn’t chilling. I was driven to