I Hope My Grandchildren Will Know Me by This Book: The Millions Interviews Patricia Henley

Twenty years ago, Patricia Henley’s novel Hummingbird House was a finalist for the National Book Award and The New Yorker Fiction Prize. Henley, a longtime professor in Purdue University’s MFA program, enjoyed the acclaim that her years of research and writing produced.

Then the novel went out of print for a decade. Henley, now 72, felt erased, as if she had to start her career anew. That’s about to change: This powerful, deeply affecting novel will come back into print in November, thanks to upstart publisher Haywire Books, which will release a 20th-anniversary edition of Hummingbird House.

Given the current crisis of immigration and detainment at the southern U.S. border, the story is as timely as ever. The novel closely follows Kate Banner, an American midwife in Central America who is caught between two worlds and rendered nearly powerless by the civil war in Guatemala. Steve Yarbrough, an author and professor at Emerson College, wrote the introduction for the new edition, calling Hummingbird House ambitious and wide reaching. Most impressive, he writes, is the novel’s depiction of the depth of human suffering, “with all the accompanying acts of malice, veniality, cowardice, courage, and humanity that one finds in places where people’s backs are constantly pressed to the wall, their character on trial every single second of every single day.”

Henley renders. She retired from teaching in Purdue University’s MFA program after 26 years there and recently spoke with about obsessive research, finding your subjects, and the winding, unpredictable trajectory of a literary life.