The Road to Tender Hearts
The Road to Tender Hearts
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Annie Hartnett on The Road to Tender Hearts
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A cursed house and a death-predicting catIn spring 2020, Hartnett and her husband moved from Providence to Lakeville, Massachusetts, renting a house that delivered one catastrophe after another: a neighbor who stabbed her sister, lead in the water, black mold, rats in their car. Then a teenager crashed his car at the base of their driveway and died. His family held vigil there every night. That accumulation of violence and loss pressed itself into the book’s central preoccupation.
I had all these feelings about being chased by death and parenting all wrapped up together.
The anxiety that the cursed house sharpened was one Hartnett had already been carrying. The book’s acknowledgements name it directly, and she elaborated on its roots in an interview with the Heavy Feather Review.
This book was born from my anxiety about parenting, and how anyone can care for children when you have so many things to worry about all the time.
The character of Pancakes, the novel’s death-predicting cat, traces back to a real animal. Oscar was a hospice cat at a nursing home in Rhode Island who spent more than a decade curling up beside residents who were about to die. His death gave Hartnett a start date.
Oscar died in 2022, which is when I started writing this book. He predicted over 100 deaths in his time at the hospice.
Before the cat had a story, Hartnett had a simpler, stranger premise in mind. The two threads only later revealed themselves as the same book.
I wanted to write a book about a man who reads something in the newspaper that makes him want to change his life. And I wanted to write about children and a cat who can predict death!
How she wrote it
Three separate pieces and one connecting newspaperWhat became a single novel started as three unrelated drafts: one about the cat, one about PJ Halliday, and one about the murder-suicide that orphans Luna and Ollie. The object that eventually linked them was mundane: a newspaper that each piece shared without Hartnett noticing. The cat gets written up in it, PJ reads it every morning, and his ex-wife cuts pieces out of it for him. Recognizing that thread changed everything.
I realized if I could use the cat and I could tie them all together, and they could be one book. [paraphrased from audio]
Once the three pieces were unified, Hartnett still had to solve a tone problem: readers needed a signal early on that the novel’s darkness was meant to be funny. Pancakes became that signal, doing tonal work beyond the plot.
The cat is really the key that I can get away with the tone I want. [paraphrased from audio]
The title arrived before Hartnett had worked out much of the book. She named it early and let the name act as a kind of compass, a practice consistent with how she approached her debut, which also had its title on day one.
I named the book The Road to Tender Hearts early on in the draft, and sometimes the title sets me up for what sort of exploration I want to do.
Hartnett finished the manuscript in roughly two years, faster than either of her previous novels. That speed unsettled her more than slowness ever had. She sold the book on a partial manuscript and was still completing it about six months before publication, closer to the wire than is typical.
The speed with which I wrote this one gave me more self-doubts about it. It’s the only book I’ve ever cried about on the phone with my editor.
The most concentrated drafting happened in two bursts away from ordinary life: ten days at MacDowell and four days at an Airbnb twenty minutes from her house. The Airbnb stretch was the more extreme of the two.
I wrote 26,000 words in those 4 days. And took 4 baths and read an entire book.
On craft choices
Magic as permission and as emotional proofHartnett’s novels carry elements most literary fiction declines: a talking hat, vultures chanting over children, a cat who senses death. She described to the F(r)iction interviewer where this instinct comes from and what it costs her each time.
I really struggle with this, to be honest! I never know how much magic I can get away with. But I put it in because I wish there was magic in the real world, and it allows me to signal to readers: Don’t take this too seriously. It frees me up to go a little crazier in plot than I might otherwise.
The freedom is not unlimited. Any strange detail her editor cannot connect to an emotional purpose gets cut, which means the magic that survives has earned its place by carrying feeling the realistic elements cannot.
The character of Sophie, PJ’s adult daughter, cost Hartnett more than any other in the book. Writing the orphaned children came naturally; writing PJ came naturally. Sophie sat closer to something Hartnett recognized in herself, and that proximity was the problem.
The hardest thing is writing the young, young women. It was the hardest thing for me ‘cause I’m writing too close to myself or the person I once was. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Pummeling people into tendernessWhen a reviewer of her first novel, Rabbit Cake, wrote that the book sometimes veered toward the silly, Hartnett was briefly stung. She recognized the description as accurate. Rather than correct the tendency, she decided to name it and own what the joke is actually doing in her work. Her friend Rufi Thorpe gave her the sharpest account of the mechanism.
I am not a serious person. I am very sensitive and aware of all the real badness that is happening in the world, but I’m also just a person who reaches for the joke to help us all cope. My friend Rufi Thorpe said to me—‘yes, you always make us laugh. But that’s when you slide the knife in.’
At the Flyleaf Books event, pressed on why humor runs so deep in her fiction rather than being a stylistic choice she might trade away, Hartnett answered from the same place the book’s anxieties come from.
The only way that I know how to go through the world, whether it’s thinking about that we’re all going to die and everyone we love is going to die...it’s just like, how do you cope with it?...the way you do that is just tell jokes. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s emotional destination arrives in a single exchange: the orphaned child Luna asks Pancakes what’s going to happen to her and her brother. The cat answers in two words. Hartnett named that exchange as the line she values most in the book, and explained to the Heavy Feather Review why.
And that’s why, when the little girl asks the cat what’s going to happen to her and her brother, the cat answers: ‘Suffering. And joy.’ That’s my favorite line in the book. That’s really what I write about. Suffering, joy, and the human connection around both.
Across all three of her novels, Hartnett pushes characters along the same arc: from broken to less broken. She described to the Heavy Feather Review what she calls the operative force, and what she would do with it if fiction gave her a wider reach.
I think that question of tenderness is something I like to explore generally in fiction—how the difficult things that happen to us can make us closed off to loving, or can teach us how to love more. I guess I like to pummel my characters into tenderness. You know, I would like to pummel a lot of people into being more accepting and loving, but I’m only allowed to do that in fiction.