Kate Christensen
Kate Christensen
Kate Christensenis an American novelist. She won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for her fourth novel, The Great Man, about a painter and the three women in his life. Her previous novels are In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, and The Epicure's Lament. Her fifth novel, Trouble, was released in paperback by Vintage/Anchor in June 2010. Her sixth novel, The Astral, was published in hardcover by Doubleday in June 2011. She is also the author of two food-related memoirs, "Blue Plate Special"and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 August 1962
CountryUnited States of America
apparent books due fact fiercely lit loser losers love might odd readers rejected screw seems type whom
At first blush, it seems odd that loser lit books are rejected initially, then go on to be fiercely loved by legions of readers. This apparent contradiction might be due to the fact that if they didn't screw up their lives, most losers would be the kind of power-elite, Type A go-getters whom readers love to hate.
address claus diet highly increasing originated poultry processed refined regional visionary
The New Nordic diet originated in 2004, when the visionary chefs Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer called a symposium of regional chefs to address the public's increasing consumption of processed foods, additives, highly refined grains, and mass-produced poultry and meat.
english nostalgic phrase plate
The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.
consistency thank-god
Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency...
world taste hiding
To taste fully is to live fully. And to live fully is to be awake and responsive to complexities and truths--good and terrible, overwhelming and miniscule. To eat passionately is to allow the world in; there can be no hiding or sublimation when you're chewing a mouthful of food so good it makes you swoon.
stars book writing
Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!)
sunshine color weather
My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.
memories writing dark
I wanted to capture time through how food and I were getting along at any given moment. That necessitated writing some dark stuff, some sad stuff, and a lot of painful memories, because my life has often been dark, sad, and painful. I didn't want to sugarcoat anything.
writing interesting risk
I was also writing in a tradition and trying to do something different with it, something that hadn't necessarily been done before, which was a risk, but it made it interesting. My relationship with food has been complicated and rocky and not always wonderful, and it's a lens through which my entire life and identity are refracted.
memories keys people
So many of my memories are generated by and organized around food: what I ate, what people cooked, what I cooked, what I ordered in a restaurant. My mental palate is also inextricably intertwined with the verbal part of my brain. Food, words, memories all twist together, so it was the obvious way to structure my life. Each memory of food opened up an entire scene for me, it was the key that unlocked everything.
lonely powerful real
Now that I no longer feel lonely, and now that my own past feels resolved in a whole new and very deep way, I am excited to write about the real world, to stay in it. Fiction is an escape, a parallel life, and it was a powerful source of comfort for me when my own life was raw and uncomfortable. I don't feel the burning need to disappear into a fictional character these days.
writing self notion
I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.
writing voice benefits
Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.
fun writing connections
Blogging is different from both journal-writing and writing for print. It's more fun than either of those. The freedom to write whatever I want and the unmediated connection with readers are the payoff.