Childhood, Interrupted: PW Talks with Hannah Thurman
How did you come to write about a mental institution?
I grew up in 1990s Raleigh, N.C., the time and place where Mercy Hill is set. Back in the ’80s, my mom worked as a speech therapist in a similar institution, Dorothea Dix, that was near our house. She left it for private practice, but she’d always tell us stories about it and mentioned that some staff raised their families there. As I was growing up, I saw all these headlines about institutions closing. I started thinking about an alternate history that could have happened to a family like mine.
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