"There’s a machine in my head that takes an experience and transforms it"

On writing, sobriety, menopause, and brain turnips, with novelist Kate Christensen

When I started this newsletter almost two years ago(!), I wanted to make space for other voices to join me here. So whenever I can, I hop on Zoom with someone whose work and mind I admire, and then I transcribe our conversation and bring it to you. Today that someone is the writer Kate Christensen.

Kate is the author of ten books, including The Great Man, which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; the novel The Last Cruise; and the memoirs Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. She’s also the author of countless essays, reviews, and stories, published in a variety of publications and anthologies. Kate’s eighth novel, Welcome Home, Stranger, will be published by HarperCollins on December 5th.¹

I first learned about Kate, though, through her writing about food. Over a decade ago, when she was already established as an award-winning novelist, Kate did something that few award-winning novelists were doing then: she started a blog. I think it was my friend Francis who told me about it, sent me the URL and said I had to go read it right away, that the writing was so good. All of us bloggers back then were clamoring to write books, and here was someone who had written several books, real books, book-books, and she was writing for free, online, just like us, whoa.

Kate Christensen

Kate’s was not an ordinary blog. I mean, it was, in the sense that it was about home cooking and the everyday intricacies of life. But her writing had a certain sure-handedness to it, a confident ease that you could feel through the screen. It also seemed like she was having fun. I was an instant mega-fan. Reading Kate made me want to write, and to write better. Reading her, you got the sense that this woman knew how to live: how to cook, how to drink, how to love a dog, how to enjoy a long walk, how to move through the world. I don’t know if it’s actually the case, but I got the feeling this woman regularly read in the bathtub. I should have asked her when we spoke, but I forgot. Anyway, I aspire to read more in the bathtub.

We had lunch together in Seattle a million years ago, maybe we she was on tour for Blue Plate Special? Kate is tremendously easy to talk with. I’ve wished more than once that we lived in the same city. Kate lived for many years in Portland, Maine, but today she lives in Taos, New Mexico, along with her husband and two dogs.

The conversation that follows took place on Zoom on October 6, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you do, you should preorder her latest novel, which you’ll see we discuss below. It’ll be out in time for the holidays and would make a brilliant gift.

And to Kate: thank you.

---

Molly Wizenberg: I have to tell you — last night I stayed up way too late, reading essays you’ve written. First I stumbled upon a recent piece on Stratorec, and from there I slipped down a Kate Christensen-themed rabbit hole and re-emerged about an hour later, having read, like, four more essays from various years and contexts. I woke up this morning feeling very nervous to get on this call! In that weird Internet-y way, I feel like I’ve been in a sort of one-way communication with you for a long time now. It feels both exciting and daunting to talk.

Kate Christensen: There is no reason it should feel daunting, but I'm glad it feels exciting. I'm excited to talk to you too. You know, that Stratorec essay you mentioned, I feel really nervous about it. I wanted to get at something deep about the process of writing my new book, and I also needed to write the truth. And I also feel like, well, I wouldn't want to be my mother. You know that feeling —

MW: That’s how I’ve often thought of the antagonist in The Fixed Stars! The character I’ve called Nora. The book can’t exist without her, but I felt very clear while writing it, and while promoting the book, that I wouldn’t want to be her in this situation. I can’t imagine it feels good to be written about. I tried to be fair and to protect her throughout the process, but still, it’s a difficult situation to navigate.

KC: I understood that there was a lot you couldn't say, and still you managed to thread that needle. That’s what it is: threading a needle. It’s using the truth in a way that is useful to the book, while being aware of not being able to tell the whole thing. I always tell my students… well, I'm teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop right now, which is intense, holy shit. So intense. My students are brilliant. They're in this pure state that I left behind decades ago, this kind of literary purity. They're immersed in the work, the art, without the [influence of the outside] world. And us old war horses who teach them come from the world of professional writing and publishing, and all we think about is how to make our editors happy. [Laughs.] It’s refreshing, like dipping back into my youth, back into the way I looked at books and writing. I’m remembering now the headiness of feeling like it’s all ahead of you and you haven’t been disappointed by bad reviews and bad sales and come down to earth with the reality of being a writer…

MW: I didn’t get an MFA, and I’ve sometimes wondered how my life, especially my teaching life, would be different if I were in the academy. But whenever I come close to feeling like I’ve missed out, I think about the intensity you’re describing — and I feel pretty happy to be working instead with mostly full-grown adults who come to writing later, alongside many other pursuits.

KC: It’s really daunting. I was a student here, and then I taught here [as a visiting professor of fiction] ten years ago. This is my third time. And it’s my first time sober here. Being sober at Iowa is… well, I'm realizing how much I used alcohol to soak away the stress. 

MW: I'm glad you mentioned sobriety. I remember noticing [on social media], maybe a few years ago, that you started posting all these inventive non-alcoholic concoctions. And it stood out because your food writing, as I’ve always thought of it anyway, is full of appreciation for good cocktails. There’s so much pleasure that comes through in your writing about food and drink! And alcohol has seemed to be part of that pleasure. But it’s been a few years now, right, since you stopped drinking? How is it going?

KC: I started tapering in my early 50s. I'm now 61, and I have been sober since July 12, 2019. So just over four years absolutely sober. 

MW: Incredible. 

KC: I do find that incredible, because so much of my identity was predicated on the fact that I was a drinker. I'm fairly certain that I fit, like, eight of the ten criteria for alcoholism, but I never thought of myself as an alcoholic because I wasn't physically addicted. I had a psychological [need]. I’d started drinking for real at 27, and I really stopped at 57. I stopped drinking because I’d had my lifetime fill of alcohol. I was interested in a new experience: being sober. I had thirty years of just loving the soak and the festivity and the ritual.

It also demarcated the end of my writing day: opening a bottle of wine, and then I’m chopping an onion, and so on. So much of drinking and eating for me was to delineate the end of my work day. Writing is so intense and so cerebral and sedentary and not physical. So putting things in my body and making [food], it was always exciting. 

Sobriety, for me, is the next adventure. I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s grounding.

MW: I was intrigued by the treatment of alcohol in Welcome Home, Stranger. Rachel, the main character, starts out as a non-drinker. But then, when the story reaches this fever pitch, she starts drinking again. She drinks a lot at first, which worried me. But then she settles down, and I get the sense that I don’t need to be concerned for her. Her relationship to drinking differs from the way you’ve described yours, is what I’m saying. Will you talk about the decision to have Rachel start drinking again? 

KC: I love this question! It gets at the heart of the book. When the book opens, Rachel is self-denying in the extreme. She treats her body like a stray dog. Rachel is withholding herself from community, from friendship, from love, from warmth, from anything, anything too wonderful — because along with all of that, with desire, will come pain, frustration, all the feelings she's trying to keep at bay. Her whole life is frozen. She’s an ice core. I mean, her greatest pleasure is going to the Arctic — [laughs] — on these journalistic expeditions with scientists to find out what’s going on with ice and climate change. And at work, she’s invisible. She’s being eased out of her job. She’s fighting to keep it, but she isn’t fighting that hard. She’s like, Oh well, I’m obsolescent. Nobody cares about the climate, no one wants to read about it.

So she’s this frozen woman in self-denial — and then for her to go out, three-quarters of the way through the story, and get that Martini, well, it wasn’t about the alcohol. My drinking was 100% about alcohol. But it isn’t for her. She’s not an alcoholic. The reason she wasn't drinking was that she didn't want to feel all the things that drinking makes her feel. For her, [permitting herself to drink] is about unfreezing. 

I had a very strong image of this ice core, and it’s in menopause, on fire. She’s melting. It’s a symbolic return to the world of pleasure, the world of being open and feeling.

MW: How do you decide when to tell a story as fiction, as opposed to nonfiction? I know from your prior work, and from the Stratorec essay, that Rachel’s experiences share some overlap with yours. You’ve written novels, two memoirs, essays, all with equal finesse and mastery. So how do you decide when you’re going to tell a story directly, as nonfiction, as opposed to when you’re going to disappear — the word you use in the Stratorec essay — behind the ‘screen’ of a character you invent?

KC: I don't think it's a conscious decision. There are times when I feel urgently that I have something to say that's autobiographical, and that I don't need to fictionalize it. I want to address it, head on. It's a particular feeling, the sense that this is something I need to say bluntly, just me to the reader, without any intermediary. My food writing started with a blog —

MW: I wanted to ask you about that blog! What made you want to start a blog? You’d already had so much success in, like, publishing-publishing —

KC: For pure fun! Just fun! You could write a 1000-word thing and just put it up, and there it is for people to see. There was something about the immediacy of reaching readers right away. That felt in keeping with why I was writing about food, which was a sort of upwelling from years of reading about food and loving food-writing and loving to eat. I was in my late 40s, at a certain time in my life that I think of as my autobiographical era. It’s when I wrote [the memoir] Blue Plate Special. [That book] came out of the blog. It wasn’t conscious or willed. It just demanded to be written. Like, “You will write me.” Some books are like that. 

But autobiographical writing was never something I wanted to do. It’s not like writing novels, something I want to do very badly. I think of myself as a novelist, but then there’s this — this autobiographical urge. Mostly it’s been when I’m writing about food, which is so visceral and personal and also universal. But I always put food in my fiction, too. I can’t not. People eat, just like they talk or have sex. There are writers who don't put food in their books, and I can't fathom it. Like, why would you deny yourself that fun in writing? There's nothing more fun to write about than food. 

But, to get back to the novelistic impulse, I also feel like I can be more honest in fiction.  In memoir, there are these living people walking around. In fiction, I have the plausible deniability of characters that I've invented — even if they are based, you know, on people in the world. Like painters use color, we novelists use the people that are around us in ways that we can't always control or mitigate. So here I am, writing [in Welcome Home, Stranger] about a woman who has a sister and whose mother has just died. Well, I have a mother who's still alive, and I have two sisters and two half sisters. I have people in the world who might read this book and think, Oh my god, she's writing about me.

When I write fiction, it’s like there’s a machine in my head that takes an experience and transforms it — maybe not into gold, but it’s also not straw. What I’m trying to write isn’t the literal truth of my relationship with my mother, or my relationship with any of my sisters. What I’m trying to write is the feeling. Feelings that I’ve had, that I give to my character. Or aspects of relationships between mothers and daughters or between sisters, things I’ve experienced, that I use to create fictional characters. I am not writing about myself or my mother or my sister. But I am writing about how it feels inside those relationships, some truth at the core of these relationships that I feel everyone can relate to in some sense. It's hard to take care of your parents when they're old and sick. It's hard to be the parent who is old and sick. It's hard to have a sister who's really different from you, who you love more than anything. All of these things are true of my own life. But the beauty of writing fiction and the reason I love it more than anything is that there's an essential truth that I can tell in fiction that I can't tell in memoir. There are all these things about myself that I can reveal in fiction, because it’s not me.

MW: I feel such envy of what you’re describing. I love that you use the word “impulse” to talk about the decision to write a novel versus a memoir, or vice versa. That’s a word I’ve reached for too, but in my case, it’s what I don’t seem to experience. I’ve never felt an impulse to make fiction. I don't feel like my brain moves that way.

KC: Some people aren't fiction writers! I think it takes a really weird kind of brain to write fiction. 

You know, it's amazing how writing works. I think writing is amazing. It's like having extra shit in your head that you need to put out in the world because it's, it's — too many lives. I mean, sometimes when I'm teaching, I'm talking about writing, I'm talking about [student] work, I'm relating it to other works that it reminds me of and pulling all these things together, and my brain goes into hyperdrive. When you’re working on a book, when you’re working on something, it’s like a whole other world that’s attached to your head, and you’re carrying it around. Where do these things come from? It’s like a bubble that grows in your head and you have to extrude it out into the world because it’s extra stuff. You finish it, and you cut it off, and it floats off into the world. It's like writers have brain growths. Polyps.

MW: Some of us experience them as, like, teratomas. They’re monstrous.

KC: Mine feel more warty, and dense, and elemental — but edible, like turnips. I grow turnips in my brain. They’re nutritive, but they’re weird.

MW: You’ve written that, in writing fiction, it’s like your imagination sort of does a task that your conscious brain is ill-equipped to carry out. It’s similar to what you were just saying, about how your brain creates this thing and then has to push it out in order to do whatever it needs to do next. For some reason, what you’re saying about fiction makes me think of a doll house. A place where you can play out these things that your subconscious is working on… 

KC: Ah! You said “dollhouse,” and I was just brought back to when I was a little kid and had stuffed animals and weird little dolls and figures and whatever, and I used them to tell stories. And [the stories] were not always rosy! There was a lot of thorny shit that went down in my family, and my escape was to use these little figures. I think this is the fictional impulse in me, and this is sort of where it comes from. When something happens that upsets me in my life, literally I comfort myself by imagining that I’m typing. I only became aware of this recently. And then I realized I’ve been doing this [since childhood]: when I was little, I would comfort myself by going outside and whisper-telling a story to myself and walking around the yard.

This storytelling urge, I mean, it's ancient. It's human. It's what we do. We make stories to make sense of things. And I think children need stories, need dark stories like fairy tales, where the darkness is in an imaginary world but it relates to what they're experiencing — and the same impulse was in me when I used my little figures, moving them around and making them interact in ways that somehow soothed that part of my brain that was disturbed and upset and had no agency because I was a kid. 

And as an adult, it’s the same exact thing, the same exact mechanism. I’m taking things that upset and disturb me, like climate change or the incredible physical transformation we call menopause, and trying to make sense of them. What does it mean? What does it mean to be postmenopausal? What is my purpose in life? I mean, I never had children, but I was plausibly reproductive for most of my adult life. And what does that mean when that ends? With this book, those were the questions. How do I go on in the face of climate change as a postmenopausal woman? How do I face what I see as a looming breakdown of civilization – an existential threat to everything alive? How do you contain that in your head, if you choose to face it? How do you reckon with that? 

I needed Rachel to be my proxy — my little figure in my little game that I’m playing in my room, because I’m upset and I want to wrestle with [what upsets me]. I wrestle with it using Rachel as my avatar in the world of the novel.

MW: By the way, as someone who is on the threshold — I’m pretty sure — of menopause, I loved reading a character who is grappling with it. I mean, she’s grappling with that and more. This is a little novel in which a lot happens, and in only 200 pages.

KC: Thank you. Short books are getting more and more interesting to me. Like, how short can I make it? I put this story through a rigorous process of getting rid of anything that didn’t need to be there. I knew I ran the risk of putting too much into it, but I also needed to keep that thrumming thread of tension in Rachel. It’s short because it’s urgent. 

MW: As I was reading it, I was aware that it’s entirely in the present tense. Will you tell me about that choice?

KC: Actually, it was my husband's idea. I was writing it in the past tense. I never thought I would write in the present tense. It always felt not literary enough, in my high-minded way of thinking about fiction. But my husband is a screenwriter, and he said, “What about present tense? It’s really an existential novel. And it’s about the present. You want that immediacy and urgency, a sort of one-to-one correspondence between now and now.”

[The story] is set before Covid, in the early years of the Trump administration. I was writing it in a state of total nihilistic despair, but not willing to accept nihilism as an answer. The menopausal woman can't afford nihilism as an answer. The menopausal woman needs adaptation. I think of the menopausal orca Gladis. Did you read that amazing piece in Harper’s Bazaar, that essay on climate change and menopause? Gladis for president! [Laughs.] I read it and was like, Mic drop. It’s the essay I wish I had written. 

MW: I have one last question. I’m always curious about this: what does your regular day look like? Are you a writer who writes every day? 

KC: Well, not since I've been teaching [at Iowa]. I haven't written a word. But yes, I do. Only because when I'm not writing, I flail around. I don't really know who I am. A lot of what I write never sees the light of anything. I don't keep a journal, but I usually am working on something. But it’s not that I’m so disciplined or so productive!  The reason why I write everyday is selfish: it makes me know who I am. It anchors me in myself in a way that nothing else ever can or will. 

I used to write every day from three to seven. I had a daily word count, 1000 words. This was all through the early aughts. Now I feel like I’m in retirement in some ways, even though I’m not. I just write, you know, in between doing other things. I walk the dogs. I write some. I cook a thing. I write some…

MW: That’s a good life.

1. All Bookshop.org links are affiliate links. If you choose to buy from somewhere other than the retailers I’ve linked to, please give your money to the independent bookstore of your choosing.