Kicking Off the Fall Season: Sian Griffiths and Katherine Hill Talk About Their Football Novels

During lockdown, writers Siân Griffiths and Katherine Hill got together virtually to talk about their novels and their sports. We’re delighted to share the conversation now!

Siân Griffiths: Football is central to your novel, A Short Move, but I noticed that the book is not so much about what happens on the field as the life that happens around those games, the people who support those players, and who the athlete is when he’s not being a football star. What drew your attention off the field, away from the place where the cameras are so often focused?

Katherine Hill: Oh, I love this question. With this book, I really wanted what was off the page to be as important as what was on it. I've always been drawn to art forms that make use of negative space, gaps, and off-stage action, so that was part of it. But it was also about the subject matter. Football is a sport that is already so heavily narrativized in our culture -- we just have so many stories about heartbreaking losses, overcoming the odds, and various athletic virtues -- and most of those narratives are superficial, papering over what every fan craves, which is the messy behind-the-scenes reality. I felt both that the reader could assume a lot of the standard Big Game stuff, and also that I owed it to my subject to press beyond cliche. 

SG: I wondered about whether taking the book off the field, so to speak, also opened up spaces for the women in the novel, who seem so crucial to me.

KH: Yeah, the central figure is Mitch Wilkins, an NFL linebacker, and the novel tracks his life from womb to tomb. But the book belongs just as much to the women who care for him, educate him, move on from him, and so on. So it really is a family novel as much as it's a football novel.

There's a lot off the page in your wonderful novel, Scrapple, too. The missing brother, Sean, is the absence who drives the entire plot. Can you talk about that choice? What is it about absences that create story?

SG: I think I read once that Robert Olen Butler called fiction the art form of human yearning, and I think that's part of it because my character Robert really misses and yearns for his brother, but I'm also just really curious about mysteries. This book started with a mystery from my own family that I knew I wouldn't be able to solve, a solution that maybe I yearned a little for myself, and so fiction let me write a solution for the unsolvable.

KH: Family mysteries are great seeds for fiction.

SG: I feel like this is something our books have in common. Football is in the novels, but family is the heart.

KH: Yes, definitely. That feels true to the football mindset actually -- those guys are always talking about family, metaphorically and literally.

SG: Honestly, I kept being struck by the little and large things we shared. Mitch gets a lot of his talent from his mother, for instance, as does Sean in my book. I feel like NFL commentary pays a lot of attention to brothers and fathers who play football, and both of us seem to be subtly reminding them that there's another half of the gene pool.

KH: Completely! We also both have a whole dysfunctional brother thing… And how about all of the leaving that happens? There are men in both books who run out on their family obligations. 

SG: Yeah… I played sports growing up, and I'm really interested in the differences in how male and female athletes are treated and how that trickles through their understanding of the world at large. I was thinking about those while I was writing Sean.

KH: Oh yes I'd love to hear more about that. 

SG: OK, so this is just one girl’s experience, but both as a kid who played sports and as a parent of a girl and a boy, both of whom played sports, I was struck by so many differences. For starters, in a girl’s soccer team, especially when they’re little, if there’s a tackle, the parents gasp and the game stops and everyone is immediately trying to make sure the girl is OK, even if the hit wasn’t that bad. With boys, they play on unless the kid is laid out or actively crying, and sometimes even then. Neither of these approaches is great. The girls are tougher than we expect, and the boys need a little more support and care.

And the differences only get greater as the kids get older. Even at my tiny little Idaho high school, the football players, especially the starters, seemed to operate on different rules, a kind of toxic permissiveness.

KH: Your novel opens with a gut-wrenching scene in which Robert, our fifteen-year-old protagonist and his mother discover his brother's twin babies abandoned in an apartment. That scene devastated me, and I don't think it's just because I had my first baby four months ago. Sean has left the babies for his mother, who he trusts, to raise, but without any leads on where or how to find him.  Of course she steps up. And so does Robert. Robert is sort of feminized in your book, the younger, more sensitive sibling in the shadow of the charismatic athlete. He also does a fair amount of unrecognized childcare!

SG: Yeah, with a working mother, missing brother, and deceased father, Robert ends up having to step up into the single parent role for a lot of the day -- at least until his mom gets home. I started writing this book when my own kids were small, and childcare was definitely on the brain. I kept recognizing my own privilege in having a partner who was there for me, and I kept obsessing over people who didn't have that. I really wanted to celebrate the men who care for kids.

KH: It's a wonderful feature of the book -- the way Robert uses that caregiver brain all the time.

SG: He may be the most pure-hearted character I've ever written, though he definitely still fucks up. I like that kind of complexity, which is one of the things I loved about your characters. There’s not one type of football player here or one type of parent or one type of child. Each person has distinct mannerisms and ways of seeing the world, and the collisions of these personalities drive the plot. Your epigraph from Elena Ferrante reflects this: “To be alive meant to continually collide with the existence of others and to be collided with, the results being at times good-natured, at others aggressive, then again good-natured.” 

How did these characters come to you? Are they based on people you know or did you create them whole cloth? Did they arise out of situations, or did you conceive the person first and see what trouble you could put them in?

KH: Oh that is so kind, thank you. Mitch’s oldest daughter Alyssa was the first character to come to me. She's the protagonist of a story I wrote years ago about a girl who drops out of college and finds herself working in retail. In that story -- which became a chapter in this novel -- her father is a retired NFL player who's sort of casting about for meaning. He's very much in the background there, and I guess you could say that was my first off-the-page turn. I needed to know more about him. So I wrote a story in which he was the protagonist, at age eighteen. And in that story, I met his wife and mother. So I had to write something about them, and so on. 

SG: I love that the book started with Alyssa! That feels so right.

KH: So glad you think so! 

SG: So, though the book may be womb-to-tomb and chronological, it sounds like the writing of it jumped around more?

KH: Yes, exactly. The chronology was really important to me. I wanted the narrative to move forward relentlessly, like life under capitalism, with none of the comforting, illuminating flashbacks we’re so accustomed to in contemporary fiction. But I had to get to know the characters slantwise. By the time I got to Caryn's chapter, at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, I had already met her a bunch of times at different points in life: first as Alyssa's yoga guru mother, then as Mitch's sexy college girlfriend. She doesn't necessarily come off well in those chapters, so I really couldn't wait to get into her inner life, which I knew was much richer than Alyssa or Mitch’s perspectives would suggest… Now is probably the time to admit that I love all the characters, for their warts, not in spite of them.  

SG: One of my favorite characters is that unapologetic mouth-runner, D’Antonio Mars, the rookie linebacker who challenges Mitch both on and off the field. He gives us our title, remarking, “A short move, baby. […] From your mama’s womb to your final tomb. Whatever your religion, that’s the only truth there is.” He may be the rookie, but he seems to know or intuit more than Mitch…. or does anyone who talks long enough simply stumble onto the truth?

KH: I like that. D is definitely a talker, but he's also really, really smart, and smart people stumble on the truth all the time, whether they’re talking it out or not. Football is also full of talk -- each play literally starts with the sound of the quarterback's voice, shouting a bunch of secret words -- so D was a great entryway for that. 

SG: Yes! He is smart as well as a “smart mouth”! You don't always see the intelligence of athletes on the page, and I'm so glad you made that a part of your book.

KH: Elite athletes are SO smart. Intuitively, tactically, often socially. Physical ability is also a kind of intelligence, though clumsy nerds like me don't often like to admit it.

SG: Ha! My dad was a rugby player who went on for a doctorate in Chemistry at Oxford. He was definitely a big proponent of the scholar athlete.

KH: Sean is kind of the scholar-athlete who combusts. Tries to do too much.

SG: I feel like this is part of his treatment as a star. He's developed so many skills, but one thing he hasn't really developed is resilience off the field -- especially when he's meeting the first real challenge to his football skill.

KH: Meanwhile his mother and brother are the definition of resilient.

SG: And Robert’s buddy Jerome may be the toughest of all -- not to mention the smartest.

KH: Oh how I love Jerome. He understands everything about how to negotiate his environment -- an incredible intelligence. And he escorts Robert through it. 

SG: When Robert listens, which he doesn't always. But then, that's where novels happen, right? I feel like both of our books have a lot of characters making bad decisions, but I started to wonder if these are decisions so much as they are functions of personality?

KH: Functions of personality and of environment: Philadelphia -- specifically The Chum -- in Scrapple, and football culture in A Short Move.

SG: Yes.

KH: Tell me more about Philly.

SG: Ahhhhhhh, Philly. It's the hometown I never lived in. Scrapple is my love letter to that city. We moved around a lot, but Philadelphia was my constant. My mom and her six younger brothers grew up there. My grandparents and uncles never left--or, at least, not for long. They're all still within a two-hour drive from Center City. Growing up, my sister and I went to visit for several weeks nearly every summer.

KH: I love that -- the hometown you never lived in. Your affection for the city is so palpable in this novel. 

SG: When I started this novel, it was in an invented city modeled off Philly because I was afraid I would get the details wrong -- and I still worry about that (come at me, Philly!) -- but early readers struggled with the idea of an East Coast metropolis that didn't actually exist, so I made an invented neighborhood in a real city instead.

KH: You blend the real and the invented perfectly. I lived there for six years, in my twenties, wrote my first book there, spent a lot of time listening to local sports talk radio and hating the Eagles.

SG: HATING THE EAGLES? Katherine, we were such good friends...

KH: I couldn't turn my back on the Washington Football Team!

SG: Ha! It's a deep rivalry. I get it. We can at least share a hatred for the Cowboys, I hope?

 -- I have to admit, I don't actually follow football very closely any more, but these are family things, the belief systems I was raised on.

KH: Completely agreed there. And the Giants. And I admit I rooted for the Eagles against the Pats in 2018. Mitch spends some crucial years of his career with the Eagles, so maybe I don’t even hate them that much. I can’t believe I’m saying this.

SG: Rural Virginia really comes to life in your pages. Tell me more about that.

KH: I spent a big chunk of my childhood there, in Amherst County, the real-life version of Mitch's hometown of Monacan. 

SG: Monacan isn't a real place? I should have googled, but I just assumed it must be. It felt so real!

KH: We lived on the campus of the women’s college Sweet Briar, which was its own little bucolic universe (my mom was the president), but I went to public school, and that was football country. 

SG: Yay President Mom!!

KH: She was so encouraging of my writing, wherever we lived. A football fan too. 

I want to talk more about the wonderful mystery that drives your book. Jerome helps Robert on the search for Sean, following every lead, even as he confronts challenges of his own at school. There are so many dead ends in your mystery and so many helpful discoveries. The perfect balance, really, between the frustration of life and the satisfaction of narrative. How did you find that balance?

SG: Oh man... I think mostly just flailing away at it. I'm a fast writer at so many things, but novels seem to be the exception. I write a lot of scenes that come back out or get completely revamped. I owe a lot of readers for saying "why doesn't he just [whatever]?" and then writing to see what happened if Robert did what they said.

KH: I also want to know what sports you played.

SG: My main sports were horseback riding (jumpers and dressage), soccer, tennis, and badminton. I hate to say it, but I never really learned to throw, so I avoid anything that requires throwing. Hitting I love, which is why racquet sports are great. -- I should also stress that I'm not actually *good* at any of the sports I play, only enthusiastic. Except maybe for riding, if we use a loose definition of “good.”

KH: I'm also terrible at sports. Except yoga and dancing. Which are not sports. I was a ball girl for a college tennis tournament once and I was even terrible at that. What I am is a fascinated and appreciative fan. I could watch sports all day if it were socially acceptable. Which it is now, I guess! Classic games, I mean. Though I still fantasize that one day I’ll figure out tennis. 

SG: Both of my grandmothers were avid sports fans, and I wonder if they would have played more if it was more encouraged -- though that’s not quite accurate either. My dad’s mother met my grandfather playing badminton and both she and he were avid golfers. My mom’s parents were in a bowling league together and nothing got in the way of (let me try my Philly accent here) “lig night.” My mom played basketball and made sure to sign me up for sports. I owe a lot to the women in my life and the role models they were.

Should talk about writing while mothering! Are you finding any time?

KH: Haha. Writing while mothering. I can barely write this interview! I'm just taking silly little notes about the baby, who is exquisite. I’m reading, though, and that’s a huge part of my process. Just absorbing stories, worlds, and approaches, letting ideas marinate. I’m really proud of myself for not sweating it right now, trusting I’ll find the time again.

SG: My friend Melissa Crowe (who is an awesome poet and mother) gave me a copy of Louise Erdrich's Blue Jay's Dance when I was pregnant, and she talks about writing notes with small children, and how they were like letters to her writer self. I always loved that.

-- And you’re right! It really is a great time to watch classic games. I watched the 1998 NBA final the other day for a story I'm writing, and it felt both so normal and so very very strange. All those people! Right next to each other! All touching the same ball! And they didn't even have any hand washing breaks or ANYTHING. 

KH: I almost can’t bear to think about the loss of that kind of sweaty, crowded, contact-based existence. Life is bodies in motion, colliding. Sports are just one particularly dramatic manifestation of it. They have to return. They just have to.

(Editor’s note: They did!)

Order Siân’s novel SCRAPPLE here!

Order Katherine’s novel A SHORT MOVE here!