Photo by Jon Lewis
Kate Christensen
Issue #23
The Good Girl’s Lament: The cult novelist discusses the importance of not being earnest
By Margaret Wappler
Published: March 1st, 2005 | 3:40pm
Raised in Berkeley in the 1960s, New York-based writer Kate Christensen has written some of the most quietly clever and underrated novels of the past few years. Her 1999 debut In the Drink, about a literary assistant-cum-ghostwriter unraveling day after day at the bottom of a shot glass, quickly established Christensen as a favorite cult author. It also earned her membership in the newly developing chick-lit genre, but Christensen, wittier and darker than chick lit would allow, quickly shrugged off the trend with Jeremy Thrane, a studious, polished novel about a late bloomer who finally finds his way after his closeted Hollywood boyfriend sends him packing.
Fascinated with loser lit, a niche genre she detailed in a Salon.com essay — including Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, and Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys in its ranks — Christensen wrote what may be her swansong to the sad sacks of the world. The Epicure’s Lament, recently released in paperback, is the diary of Hugo, a 40-year-old recluse and misanthrope dying of a rare disease that could be halted if only he’d give up his beloved cigarettes. “A dazzling, daring novel,” according to Time magazine, The Epicure’s Lament proved that Christensen is a writer blessed with an ear for dialogue as sharp as an ice pick, and an insatiable, infectious love for the most incorrigible of characters.
On a Friday afternoon, Christensen was coming down with the flu and felt inarticulate, but she generously shared her trials as a writer, including her troubles with the third-person point of view, and especially the exhausting task of breaking down the “inner people-pleasing, get-an-A good girl.”
You moved to New York City when you were 27. What drew you to the Big Apple?
Ever since I was a kid and knew that it existed, I couldn’t wait to move to New York. It felt like where I belonged. I think a lot of New Yorkers say that. They come here from other places, but they are New Yorkers the minute they arrive.
What did you do when you got there?
I got a job at William Morrow as an editorial assistant. Working in publishing was like being a maid in a house I was hoping to own someday. I lasted almost a year, and then I worked as a personal secretary for the Countess of Romanones. She was born in New Jersey and she married a Spanish count. She was fascinating and it was a dream job for a writer because she inspired me to make it on my own. She was a bestselling writer of spy memoirs, a term I use very loosely. [Laughs] Then I became a secretary in a law firm in the World Trade Center. It was one of the best times in my life. It was incredibly romantic being in the World Trade Center and I had just met my husband Jon. I had a lot of down time and I wrote much of In the Drink there.
How did the idea for In the Drink come to you?
I had an image in my mind of a story I wanted to tell, but the real struggle — and this is with every single novel I’ve written, including the one I’m doing now — is combating earnestness. I feel like I have something to prove. I feel this pressure. The only way I got Claudia’s voice was to jettison all of that. I had to let her talk through me, not control her. It was like going back to eighth grade when I wrote my first novel. I wrote it to make my crush laugh. I would pass him pages in class and hearing his laughter was the most gratifying thing. I’ve spent all this time trying to write these earnest works, first a coming-of-age novel and then all the other obligatory stages. It made me gag eventually. Some people can do it, they can do it well and get rich from doing it, but I’m not one of those people. Just thinking about it makes me itch and that feeling is so adolescent, but it’s how I’ve written all three of my novels, by reaching that breaking point.
Can you bring me through writing Jeremy Thrane?
I had just published In the Drink and I was setting out to write something else. Again, it was very earnest, very good girl. I was trying to tell it in third-person omniscient and I couldn’t do it. There’s just something about third-person omniscient that rubs me the wrong way. So I completely resigned, thinking, Oh, I’m never going to write again. And then one night I got a flash of a gay male character. And I thought, Oh, OK! The next day I started it, and it just kept coming. Jeremy Thrane was almost like writing in a diary. And it’s the most purely autobiographical, in a way, of all my books.
On the surface, Jeremy Thrane isn’t like you: He’s a gay man. Did you ever balk at the idea of writing from these different perspectives — a gay man’s perspective, and this recluse’s perspective in The Epicure’s Lament?
No, I didn’t at all. Once it hit me, I embraced it with excitement and inspiration. I felt like, “Oh, good. It’s going to be fun.”
In Jeremy Thrane, pop culture plays a big role. There’s that one part where Jeremy and his friend trade NPR announcer names back and forth. With pop-culture references, how do you know what’s just enough?
I think Jeremy Thrane as a character regulated that. I think he was so supremely unaffected by pop culture and almost disdainful of it. Now I’m nothing like that, and I embrace pop culture with all of my heart, but when I was younger I was sort of culturally elitist. It was our way of distinguishing ourselves in Arizona. We didn’t go to church. We were really different from everyone. That was our identity and I think that’s what I put into Jeremy Thrane.
How did Hugo come about?
I had a really earnest scenario, and I’d been exploring it from so many different angles. I was writing about Dennis and Marie divorcing but once I got to Dennis’ brother Hugo, once I got into his mind, I thought, ‘now this is fun.’ My husband had read what I’d written, and he was trying to be encouraging, saying, “I’m sure you’ll find the voice, it’ll come.” And I said, “Here’s what I think: I should just tell it from Hugo’s perspective and make it his journal.” And then we looked at each other and laughed. It was like, “Oh, yeah. I can do that!”
In both In the Drink and The Epicure’s Lament, I noticed the characters soothe themselves with food and drink. Do I sense a latent food writer in you?
You know, I feel the specter of M.F.K. Fisher around me all of the time. I just read her biography and I found it absolutely fascinating. I feel like there’s some sort of food book in me, but so far I’m sublimating it into fiction. I would love to write about it. I’ve just got to figure out what I want to say about food and how I would approach it.
Any other books waiting to come out?
Well, this one I’m working on right now — it’s my cult novel. I’ve been talking and thinking about it for years. I’m doing a lot of research into apocalyptic, evangelical thinking, but where it will go, I don’t know. But I feel like I have a cult novel to write. I don’t want to write loser lit for the rest of my life. I think it’s something I had to get out of my system and it was fun, but I think The Epicure’s Lament is my loser lit homage. Now I can move on. To what else, I don’t know but I think it’ll happen when a character takes over my brain and I start getting really interested in whatever that person is struggling with.
Have you ever thought about writing straight drama instead of comedy?
I don’t write comedy on purpose. I think a lot of that came out of youthful rage, frustrated ambitions, and also humiliation in my personal life. I had to show all these people who had humiliated me throughout my life, and there were many, what I was made of. I think that now I’m sort of past that — and thank god that’s not the feeling I’m writing out of anymore. Now it’s more about what’s really interesting, what’s going on in the world, and what kind of characters can embody the feelings I’m picking up from the world. It’s becoming less about me and more about what’s interesting to me. I’m hoping that this will give rise to a different kind of novel. And if that’s straight drama with third-person omniscient, then I would be especially thrilled.
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