‘I had a lot of trauma in my system’: Kate Hardie, the actor turned novelist writing her own trigger warnings

Kate Hardie’s ‘This Is Where We Live’ may be the most gripping account of motherhood since Rachel Cusk’s ‘A Life’s Work’. She talks to Nick Duerden about ‘unforgivable’ characters, giving up acting, and why her father Bill Oddie hasn’t read her book

Kate Hardie: ‘I’ve always been obsessed with unlovable and unforgivable characters’ (Andy Lowe)

At the beginning of Kate Hardie’s debut novel, This Is Where We Live, there is a disclaimer. “In this book,” it reads, “there is talk of self-harm and harm to others. Unsafe parenting and scared children. Suicide, transphobia, misgendering, birth trauma and postnatal depression. Broken families and absent fathers.”

This isn’t the work of a sensitivity reader, but rather the author’s own initiative. “I’m not a massive fan of sensitivity readers,” Hardie tells me one July morning, Zooming from her home in North London. “And so this is just me giving trigger warnings, and being aware that we need to respect one another’s lived experiences.”

It takes merely a few pages of reading to confirm that the book’s warning is entirely warranted. This Is Where We Live tells the story of a single mother, with a teenage child, who “wakes to blood in her mouth and flesh under her fingernails”. She struggles to ascertain what in life is real and what is not, and spends much of her daily existence feeling either great fear or, its counterpart, rage. Occasionally, she is moved to bite chunks out of her arm and spit the entrails down the toilet bowl. A sample sentence: “There’s raw ripped flesh between my teeth, torn skin and drying blood.” Another: “The smashing, the ripping, the tearing and the screaming. No remembering of love, no deep breathing, no gratitude lists or happy-baby yoga pose, just the rushing in of something too full, too furious.”