Katie Kitamura's 'Audition' is a puzzle, but she says it's not meant to be solved

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

In a Manhattan restaurant, the narrator of Audition meets a young man for lunch. Everyone has a different understanding of the pair's relationship, including the narrator herself. Katie Kitamura says she got the idea for the story after coming across a headline that said, "a stranger told me he was my son." That headline turned into the premise for her latest novel, which experiments with the idea of contradictions to destabilizing effect. In today's episode, Kitamura joins NPR's Ari Shapiro for a conversation about her decision to cut the book in half. They also discuss other media that's split into two parts – like the films Vertigo and Shoplifters – and Shapiro shares his interpretation of the novel.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The second I finished Katie Kidamora's
0:07.2	new novel audition, I immediately flipped back to page one and started reading the first chapter again.
0:13.1	It's one of those books where the information you learn throughout the novel changes your perception
0:18.8	of what is actually going on in the beginning.
0:22.1	At the end of the day, it's a family drama, but the writing is so, I don't know, tense that
0:28.0	I wasn't surprised when in this interview with Empire's R. Shapiro, Kedomura says she was thinking
0:33.3	a lot about horror when writing it. It's an interesting talk about narrative and structure, and it's coming up after the break.
0:40.5	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:45.3	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
0:49.7	On our new show, Sources and Methods, NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,
0:55.6	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
0:59.2	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:04.6	The new novel Audition opens with a scene in a Manhattan restaurant.
1:09.3	The narrator is meeting a young man for lunch,
1:11.7	and everybody has a different understanding of their relationship.
1:15.4	The woman, the man, the waiter.
1:18.1	They might be parent and child.
1:20.0	He could be her admirer.
1:21.6	She might be paying him for a date.
1:24.1	This sort of ambiguity is at the heart of Katie Kittemore's novel.
1:27.2	She told me she got the idea for the book from a headline she saw years ago. This sort of ambiguity is at the heart of Katie Kittemore's novel.
1:31.5	She told me she got the idea for the book from a headline she saw years ago.
	...

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