An Interview with Hilary Leichter

“What kind of matter will we become, when we are no longer here, and will that new matter feel a grief for us that it cannot name? I think the temp in my book is made from this apocryphal matter. She is a product of cell-level grief.”

Jobs Hilary Leichter Finds Odd:
Itemizing stray receipts
Being a “business person”
Every job

“We work to become, not to acquire,” Elbert Hubbard once said, which is, admittedly, exactly the kind of pithy idealism one might expect from a traveling salesman. Hubbard was a writer, a philosopher, and a man selling artisan soaps door-to-door. He was also a 19^th century craftsman who was one of many who helped shape our national identity as workers—work is the American symbol of dignity, after all, industry our character. More than a hundred years after Hubbard, our national obsession with labor has yet to show any signs of slowing down. What do you want to be when you grow up? is still among the first questions we get asked as children—and the same question we ask ourselves well after we’ve said to have decided. Likewise, the intrepid young narrator of Hilary Leichter’s novel Temporary believes “there’s nothing more personal than doing your job,”—and her job is filling in. She’s a temporary, descended from a long line of other accomplished, industrious temps. Yet unlike those who came before her, she longs to find a permanent placement—a purpose, even, a calling. Leichter’s narrator, like so many of us, finds herself clinging to the American Dream, despite all modern evidence that we may be out of its reach. Whether it’s the immutability of this quest or our enduring national history that makes this story feel timeless, it’s Leichter’s nimble, singular prose that makes Temporary come alive in our own.

Temporary asks us to consider how we’ve been taught to organize our lives and ourselves, and how willing we might be to embrace new change. It’s hard not to feel as if there’s something especially poignant about the arrival of this book in this new decade, an election year—if there might still be another chance to decide who we are, and want to be, all over again.

In an exchange of emails over several weeks, I spoke with Hilary about how she came to focus on work as the engine of her first novel, and how her narrator’s search for purpose emerged amid a modern world seemingly so full of caprice. 

—Ruchika Tomar

THE BELIEVER: I imagine that you, like many writers, have worked your fair share of odd jobs as you established your writing career. Temporary...