“I was a child psychologist’s wet dream.”

Talking with Johanna Lane and Mike Harvkey

On April 15, Mike Harvkey’s first novel, In the Course of Human Events, will be published by Soft Skull Press. Five weeks later, on May 20, Johanna Lane’s first novel, Black Lake, will be published by Little, Brown. Mike and Johanna are married. To each other. They met in the fall of 2001, on the first day of the Columbia MFA program, two weeks before September 11. Last summer they left New York to travel for a year, starting in Indonesia, finishing in Portugal, with long stays in six other countries. For this interview, conducted while the couple were housesitting in Berlin, they tried to ask each other questions that they’d never asked before—no easy task given how long they’ve been together—and agreed not to discuss the answers outside of the interview.

I. ANXIETY

MIKE HARVKEY: How many times would you say we’ve read each other’s books?  

JOHANNA LANE: It’s funny, because we were talking about this the other day with friends and I heard you say that I’d read yours twenty times or something and I thought, What? No, more like five. In my head it’s five. I don’t remember the first read, but the last was in December to check the copy edit; I feel almost as much responsibility as I do for my own book.

You worked on your novel for about six years, but you said the other day that its profanity still shocked you and if you were to write it again, you might ease up on that. Why the shift in perspective, other than the fact that your parents are going to read it now? 

MH: It’s just the parents. Specifically, it was what my mom said when I told her I’d sold a book. Neither of my parents knew that I was still writing fiction, so it was a surprise. My mom can’t see anymore, but she listens to audio books all day long. And she told me that my dad had promised to read my book to her. So when I was going over those proofs, I kept hearing my dad reading the most aggressively profane, offensive lines. I kept hearing him say these things out loud—or more likely not say them. I imagined him beginning to read these things and then clearing his throat and making those “skipping ahead” sounds. Then I imagined my mother, not too far into the book, shaking her head and saying, “No more.” 

Last year, when we were in Bali, it took you a month to write the same number of words that, in the past,...