‘The Hard and Wonderful Stuff of Being Human’ 

A Conversation with Author and Lawyer Hillary Behrman

BY KIRSTEN LACKO

I met Hillary Behrman on the roof deck of the Flora Bakehouse in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle one morning in June. The wind was making unruly work of my hair and notes, but the sun was shining after a day of rain. Behrman was genial and talkative, so much so that her croissant remained uneaten in front of her for the duration of our conversation.

I had read her new book of short stories, Lake Effect, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, and I had come to talk to her about it, her legal career up to this point, and what’s next for her in writing and the law. 

Behrman worked as a public defender for a decade before joining TeamChild, where she served as director of legal services for 15 years. After TeamChild, Behrman served as legal director of the Washington Defender Association. About two years ago, she switched to pro bono license status and committed to writing full-time. 

Lake Effect could be called “dark” at times, although Behrman herself is bright and welcoming. “I’m not all dark,” she insists when I ask about the bleak nature of some of her stories. The book is not all dark, either. Yes, it features characters who are struggling, down on their luck, and going through incredibly hard and disturbing stuff. It details harsh living conditions, difficult upbringings, tragic losses, trauma, and mental health challenges. It also highlights human resilience and beautiful, supportive friendships and family relationships.

Behrman’s stories are not based on real-life clients or people she knows from the legal world, she says. Because of confidentiality, obviously, but also, as she explains, “They’re fundamentally not my stories to tell.” Of course, her work still carries in it the experience and compassion of someone who spent decades representing children and clients in the legal system.

Some of her stories, in particular “Ineffective Assistance” and “The Jungle,” seem to comment on that system and its failures.

“Why aren’t you speaking up for me?” one of Behrman’s characters, named Brenda, asks her fictional lawyer in “Ineffective Assistance.” The story ends with a series of declarative sentences, each on its own line:

Because no one is listening.

Because it’s not our turn. 

Because it’s too late. 

Because everyone has already made up their minds.

But as Behrman tells me at one point in our conversation, her fiction is not necessarily a tool for advocacy. The author’s intent is not clear. And that’s a good thing, in my opinion. The book lays bare a lot of pain and a lot of joy. Behrman shows the reader a moment, a perspective, a character, and then lets it be. Her endings are not often wrapped up. 

That’s part of what makes her stories and characters so believably human. Life is like that, too: messy and dark and funny and good and entirely lacking in neat conclusions and perfectly encapsulated lessons.

What follows is a written interview with Behrman, about her legal career, her writing process, where she finds inspiration, her thoughts on the justice system, and more.

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Q. Which came first, your work as a lawyer or as a writer?

A. When I was a kid, I mean in early elementary school, people would ask what I was going to be when I “grew up” and I always said writer or artist. But by 12 or 13, I had stopped saying that. But I always wrote: journals, the occasional short story, and some pretty bad poetry in college. And I was always a reader. So yes, my work as a lawyer came much later. 

Q. When did you begin writing?

A. I began seriously writing fiction about 10 years ago, right around when I turned 50. 

Q. Tell me a little about your legal career?

A. From my early teen years onward, I knew I wanted to work in some sort of social justice or human service work. For a while I considered becoming a special education teacher, but then after college I came out to Seattle and got a job working as an advocate/counselor and grant writer at a shelter that served homeless families and single women. The job was funded through VISTA, which was basically the domestic Peace Corps. Anyway, after a couple years working with unhoused folks, it became very clear that if I was going to be effective in assisting people who are impacted by poverty, racism, and inequity, I was going to need more powerful tools. And becoming a lawyer seemed like it was a pretty powerful tool to use to help individuals and to change oppressive systems. 

I got an internship as an investigator at the Public Defender Association and then eventually left Seattle for a few years to attend law school in D.C. After I graduated from law school, I got a job as a public defender at the Society of Counsel Representing Accused Persons (SCRAP), one of the public defender offices in Seattle. I worked primarily in juvenile court doing both criminal and family defense cases. Then I went to work at TeamChild, which is a civil legal services program for youth. I became the director of legal services for TeamChild and worked there for about 15 years doing both direct service and policy work. After that I was the legal director at the statewide public defender advocacy organization, the Washington Defender Association (WDA).

Q. What does your legal practice look like now, and how does it differ from earlier in your career?

A. It looks really different. Because I used to work a lot. I mean all the time. For better or worse, the boundaries between my work as a lawyer and the rest of my life weren’t great. I stopped working full-time as a lawyer a few years ago and early last year I switched my bar status to pro bono. My life as a lawyer looks really different now. In fact, if you asked me right now what my profession was, I would say writer—not lawyer. Because my main focus and work now is writing fiction. I am working on a novel. But I felt it was very important in the current political and social climate to keep my bar license, because there is always more work to do. There is a huge need for trained lawyers in so many areas of social justice work. So, I am very glad that I have the ability to step up and do pro bono work. I am extremely lucky and privileged to have been able to make this shift. Both of my children are grown, through school, and working. And my partner is still working, so that has given me some flexibility that I am incredibly grateful for.

Q. I read your book of short stories, Lake Effect, and really enjoyed it. How did this book come about?

A. I knew I wanted to write fiction. And I knew I had a lot more to learn. I have always loved reading short stories, and when you are learning the craft of writing, short stories are a great place to start. I had written a couple of short stories and wanted to write more when I decided to go back to school and get my MFA. During the time I was working as the legal director at WDA, I was also in a low-residency MFA program at Pacific University in Oregon. A handful of the short stories I wrote while in grad school became my creative thesis and were the seed for what became the book Lake Effect. 

Q. A lot of the stories in Lake Effect are quite bleak but also seem to celebrate the wide spectrum of human existence. People are unique and beautiful and heartbroken in so many different ways. I came to adore a lot of the characters in these stories. How do you feel about your characters?  

A. So, at my book launch at Elliott Bay Books in May, one of the audience questions was something along those lines, “You always seemed like such a positive person, why are all your stories so dark?” Which is pretty funny. But I love the question; after all, being a decent human has always been a balancing game. Really hard stuff lives right alongside joy and happiness. If I am going to write stories I want them to explore both the hard and wonderful stuff of being human. I want to write stories where characters grapple with doubt, with injustice, with intimacy, with parenthood, with hardship, and with restlessness. These are the things all of us are grappling with every day.

I like to think that I share a certain restlessness with some of my characters, a seeking quality. And I do think the characters in Lake Effect are all looking for connection, for human intimacy, for a home, for a family, for a way to live in a world that is not always kind or safe or welcoming to folks who are living at the margins of our society or are people who our systems of support and care consider as outsiders. 

And I love that you asked that about my characters. I love them. I mean, I get to spend a lot of time with them, and I get to know them, and I get to grow with them. They surprise me all the time; they do and say things I never expected. 

Q. Without naming names or specifics, are any of these characters or stories based on people you encountered in your legal work?

A. That is a great question. And a very natural assumption. But no. For decades I was privileged and lucky to be able to gain the trust and respect of the children and adults I worked with in my role as their lawyer. I got to learn some of their stories. I know I was almost always just a small part of their lives and stories. I got to work with them to figure out how to tell and translate their stories for decision-makers and systems in hopes that they would be seen, understood, and served.

Sometimes we were successful and sometimes we weren’t. But the point is, those were their stories to tell, not mine. So no, Lake Effect is not a collection of case histories. It is not my clients’ stories repackaged as fiction. The stories in Lake Effect are fiction. They are the product of my own imagination. But what I can tell you is that over the almost 40 years that I have worked with people impacted by all the inequities of our society: poverty, racism, the patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, environmental injustice, etc., during all that time my eyes were open. And all of that experience is inside of me when I sit down to write a fictional story. 

What mostly happens is that a visual image of something that really happened will take root in my imagination and become the seed for a fictional story. When I was working at WDA in Pioneer Square, I would walk to work every morning along the edges of “the Jungle,” which is a sprawling homeless encampment at the base of Beacon Hill and under the freeways. I watched the city destroy unhoused people’s homes and I watched the encampments reform and repopulate, and during those walks, the characters in several of my stories came into being. 

And as you know, I write about young people a lot. And I think all the young people I represented over the years, and my own children, and all the other children I have gotten to know and love—they are all in there, mixed up and reformed, and made new and surprising. They become people I never actually knew but am so curious about.

Q. Where else do you get inspiration for your writing?

A. Place and wild and natural spaces are very important to me. And as with people, I am very porous to place. So, where I am, where I’ve been, and where I wish I could go, gets onto the page one way or the other. I’ve lived in Seattle and wandered the Pacific Northwest for more than 40 years. This place is a huge source of inspiration for my writing and looms big in my daily imagination. I moved around a lot when I was growing up, so other towns and cities are in me too, Cleveland and the Hudson Valley in particular. I’m also sort of obsessed with maps and geography. A couple of years ago, I was at a writing residency in Nebraska. I’d never been to Nebraska, and all of a sudden the character I was writing about at the time was in this small town in Nebraska. Also, I need to walk, hike, bike, and move to be creative, so a lot of my writing happens when I am outside and wandering around.

Q. I like how many of the stories operate in the same world, with the same characters, just seen from different perspectives. What is your writing process like?

A. I love when a character is not done with me and creeps back into another story or a minor character from one story becomes the protagonist of another. I love the process of climbing in and out of someone else’s skin. I love shifting the point of view. I love deep imagining. I love attempting to really experience what it would be like to be someone other than oneself. I feel like that is the whole point of fiction. Yes, it is about empathy, but it is different than that. It is more about really trying to inhabit another human’s consciousness. That sounds very “woo woo,” but it is what I hope for. On a more concrete level, my first drafts often come out in bursts and are a mess, and then I revise and revise and revise and rewrite. 

Q. Do you draw from your own life when you write, and do you feel your work is reflective of you, personally?

A. Yes and no. Most of my stories aren’t very autobiographical, but then at the same time life creeps in. Someone I know or love will say something in real life and it might end up in the mouth of one of my characters. There are a couple stories where my son’s words have crept into a character’s mouth. I have talked to him about that, and he has read the stories and given me permission before I sought publication of them. Sometimes it is just a phrase or a little anecdote from real life that gets transformed on the page. 

There are a few stories that draw from actual events in my own life that then get transformed in fiction. People who know me well and read the book will certainly recognize certain aspects of real life. 

I spent so many years as a lawyer and advocate molding and adapting myself to be persuasive, palatable, and relatable to a particular audience or decision-maker in my oral and written advocacy. And I’m pretty much done doing that on the page and in real life, too. I want to show up as authentically as possible. I can’t believe I just used that word, “authentic.” It is so overused and weaponized, but it is the right word for what I am trying to convey. 

Q. It was also interesting to see my own neighborhood (Beacon Hill) reflected in some of these stories. Where are you from, and how long have you been in Seattle? What drew you to Seattle initially?

A. I moved to Seattle when I was 20 years old. This place is fully woven into my DNA now. It is home and it also continues to delight, surprise, disappoint, and move me. After college everyone kept asking what I was going to do. And I had an undergraduate degree in English lit, and I wanted to work in social justice. I came out to Seattle with my backpack and started looking for a job. I had enough money to live for about six weeks, before I started waitressing again. And at the beginning of the fifth week here, I got a job working at a shelter on First Hill. I was drawn here because it was far away from Ohio. I was drawn here because it was close to the mountains. I was drawn here because it was a queer-friendly city. I was drawn here because it was the first place I ever moved to that I got to decide I wanted to be there. And also, because you know, Seattle is great. As a kid I lived all over the country. I was born in Baltimore, moved to Portland, Oregon, then to Chicago, then to New York, then to Cleveland, and finally to Seattle. My kids were born here; we never left.

Q. At the WSBA, we talk a lot about eroding faith in the legal system and how to restore trust in institutions. We also talk about some of the failures of the legal system and the state of public defense in Washington, and the myriad issues there. I see echoes of those topics throughout the book, particularly in “The Jungle” and “Ineffective Assistance.” How do you feel about the justice system today?

A. Oh, that is not a simple or easy question. I still believe that our legal systems have the potential to do both great good and great harm. They have always been that way. I think as lawyers, as people with privilege and power, we need to continually be turning a productive and critical eye in on ourselves and the systems we have created and perpetuate. We need to not be afraid to admit that we have made some mistakes, that we have done harm, that we can do better. It isn’t all bad, but it isn’t all good. As you can see, I am still drawn to the gray areas. I have worked with so many compassionate, smart, hardworking, and impactful folks in legal services, public defense, the judiciary, the Legislature, and at the grassroots and community level in this state. But we need to do better. We need to be more willing to give up our power and privilege, and to remove the barriers and gatekeepers to educational and professional opportunities at all levels. We need to stop using incarceration as the default tool to solve social problems, poverty, and mental health. Oh, we need to change so much. 

Q. What’s next for you? In your legal work and in your writing?

A. I am working on a novel and some new short stories. And I am going to continue to seek out more opportunities to do pro bono work locally and beyond.

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