The Brooklyn Rail

How do we reckon with the chains that bind us to our past? And must we? These are questions that Sara Lippmann excavates in her latest novel Hidden River which follows Cass, a flailing woman in her mid-thirties stuck in her hometown, after she receives a surprise wedding invitation from her estranged childhood friend, Sally. It would be simple to say the two had grown apart as they’d grown older, yet Cass’s untold side of the story is also the source of her trouble. Her greatest—and consummated—love was Sally’s late father, Len, a relationship formed, in secret, at the dawn of Cass’s teenage years.

Hidden River is told through a series of fragments that shape-shift, growing shorter and longer, alongside the turbulence of Cass’s inner world. “I track the passage of time in entrance dings” goes the narration, unfurling the banality of routine. We learn, however, that one of those dings is destined to be an exit.

I spoke with Lippmann recently over Zoom, where we discussed power, friendship, generational shifts, complicity before the #MeToo era, and the craft of writing.

Jacqui Devaney (Rail): Can you tell me the origin story of the novel? How long has it been on your mind?

Sara Lippmann: I grew up outside of Philadelphia. It’s my hometown. I’ve known my whole life that I would always write something about the area, so this novel has always been a part of me in some way. But, in terms of the actual genesis of the book, I was working on my first novel, which took a really long time, and I had arrived at that murky middle. I was losing energy, so I took a workshop with Kathy Fish, a wonderful writer and beautiful instructor, who teaches these asynchronous generative flash workshops. I took one and generated a couple of bits—very low-stakes writing—over a couple of weeks. Those characters just sort-of took root and, eventually, the book emerged.

I enjoyed the idea of approaching it as an accrual of flash fictions. I consider myself a short story writer, first and foremost, and this structure helped get it going, as opposed to my first novel, which wove five different points of view. This process was incremental and had self-contained sections, so the novel just took off from there.

Rail: I had been thinking of the chapters as vignette-like. Do you think there is a difference between a vignette and flash fiction?

Lippmann: Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but I associate a vignette more with a mood and flash fiction with a piece of writing that has something like a takeaway, though without consisting of traditional scenes that unfold in a classic way.

Rail: How did you work through the connection of form and content? What were your thoughts on what the whitespace, or lack of whitespace, represented?

Lippmann: It was definitely something that I was thinking about, how the structure could reflect Cass’s emotional state and process. I wanted to put that emotional and psychic distance on her, though I realized it presented some challenges. For example, in the beginning Cass is stuck in a memory loop. In earlier drafts, the memories repeated even more and so much was set in the past—because that’s where Cass was emotionally since her development had been so arrested. It felt important to honor that, yet at the same time, I needed the narrative to feel propulsive. Can there be so much happening in the past? What’s the forward action? But, the shorter sections helped create that momentum. Cass was stuck in a cycle, but I wanted the reader to feel the narrative moving forward. Eventually, Cass begins to move forward in her life and the narrative reflects that with longer, sustained sections.

Rail: Cass has a singular focus—her relationship to Len and his death—but the book is about much, much more than that. It’s about friendship, class, place, queerness, trauma, the things we keep hidden, the things we don’t know are hidden within ourselves. How did you put together the pieces of this life, the life of Cass, you depict?

Lippmann: That’s what makes life beautiful, right? That it accumulates? When I write, I’m guided so much by instinct and by feel. Writers have an obligation to write an emotionally honest story, so that was constantly what I was trying to do. How do we go forward with all the shit we’re carrying? It’s classic craft, in a way. A character, to me, is the most interesting thing in a narrative. Everyone arrives with everything that’s ever happened to them inside of them at all times, right? The writer Anthony Veasna So wrote this piece on reading in the Millions and he talked about the “intimacy that accommodates for unknowability.” That phrase cemented itself into my heart and brain. How can we, as writers, honor that—that there is always going to be a level of unknowability? How do we approach the intimacy of that? So, I started with those questions about Cass and followed her while she went on her journey, moving from a compulsive stasis, where she was trying to not confront what was in front of her to eventually when she starts looking back in order to move forward. Classic Kierkegaard, right?

Plus, desire is always a driver in my work.

Rail: Let’s talk about Cass’s desire for Sally’s father, Len. Early on, we read that “the most alive [she] ever felt was with Len Sellers.” How was the process of writing into the nuance of that situation? And specifically into the feeling that Cass held onto, that it was consensual?

Lippmann: It presented many challenges but, for me, what was paramount was being a product of Gen X. In Gen X, we were raised in this culture of complicity in the overt sexualization of children, from fashion ads to TV and movies. It was so normalized, from Brooke Shields films to MTV videos. Of course it’s chilling to see this all coming up again in 2025.

One of the challenges of writing this novel was honoring that psyche, honoring someone who had internalized those messages, who didn’t have the language we have today. Someone who was raised in a younger generation read a draft early on and one of her comments was that Len was never brought to justice. But that was the point! It was our whole friggin’ culture at the time. I wanted to resist moralizing. We have this clarity now, but what interested me was grappling with the situation during a time when we didn’t have the psychological tools to work through it.

Rail: There is a sense, too, that this novel traces the failings of adults. Of Cass’s mother, Rosie, and of Len, as Sally’s father. This is juxtaposed by Tracey, Cass’s present-day co-worker, who is dealing with her own son's trauma but is choosing to direct her attention toward it, rather than take the path of avoidance that was so prominent in the sections of the book set in the 1990s. Was that something you were thinking about? Avoidance versus attention?

Lippmann: That’s also something that feels very Gen X to me. Things happening right under your nose. It’s the cloak of suburbia, too, where things are packaged in a certain way to seem more socially acceptable. Nobody is paying attention. Danger doesn’t necessarily look like danger, right? That was interesting to me.

On one hand, I could say that Cass suffers from a sort-of arrested development. She’s stuck. But, really, where were the adults? It’s also interesting to see that carelessness extends to Cass in her own adulthood. It’s cyclical, right? Mirroring the carelessness that other people treated her with when she was younger.

Rail: It’s different for the friendship between Sally and Cass, which is all about attention, particularly the attention Cass gives to Sally and the ways that Sally doesn’t notice those attentions. Despite those attentions, their friendship is messy.

Lippmann: One thing I thought about a lot while writing was, who's doing the looking and who's being looked at? It’s all really wound up with power. Cass is longing, longing, longing. There’s a lot of envy for what she doesn’t have. The power dynamics are embedded in the gaze.

Teenage friendship can be so fraught. I think that age is so fascinating, because of identity and competition. The ways in which we prey upon others and others prey upon us. Those levels of betrayal. Cass might be a great observer on one hand, yet there’s always that undercurrent of we see what we want to see. That goes back to the central question. What’s going on in Sally’s house, you know? What did Cass decide she didn’t want to see about Sally and her dad? Selective looking feeds the structure. It’s fractured in a certain way, because there is a level of incompleteness here and there. Dealing with first person narration can be tricky when you want to suggest or implicate beyond what the first person narrator is able to see.

Rail: The reader needs to decide what Cass is unwilling to see.

Lippmann: Right. And we could talk about shitty friends for, you know, a long time. But, I want to bring up two books that were on my mind as I was writing, both dealing with toxic friendship. One was Marlena by Julie Buntin and the other was Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. Those two books were in play for me when I was thinking about the ways in which supposed friends can be really, really, really shitty to each other. That era is endlessly generative, because it’s so formative. They’re all like love. Or like affairs. They’re so intense. And I wonder if it was generational, too? They were so intense without being mediated through social media or other digital forms.

Rail: A defining aspect of Cass and Sally’s friendship was their class difference. Can you talk about class and this novel? Especially class as it relates to place, Philadelphia here, specifically?

Lippmann: The book is set quite strategically and intentionally in a very wealthy suburb outside of Philadelphia known for its terrific schools. Cass’s mom moved around a lot, but was quite strategic in wanting to make sure they were situated to benefit from the public school system, which was in this grossly materialistic town, where class divisions feel quite clear. So, Cass grows up in the proximity of the wealth of her peers, but doesn’t have any of her own, which drives the narrative in a way, because she’s overwhelmed with a sense of longing for a different kind of life. This primes her for being groomed by Sally’s dad.

I wanted to hold up a mirror to this town and have it play through their friendship. Cass was set up to want what she was offered and it’s really fucking chilling.