Kate Brody on Subverting Genre
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
*
Today, Kate Brody discusses her literary crime debut, Rabbit Hole, inhabiting and subverting the crime genre, writing sex scenes, writing men, the narrative use of a gun in the novel, what drives us to consume true crime, and more!
From the episode:
Kate Brody: I feel like the book does well with the lit fic people who are closet crime people. […] Story is just so much of who we are as human beings. I was a big crime reader as a kid; I still love a really well-written crime novel. I love the Tana French books, and the writing is beautiful. Any kind of genre fiction [in MFA programs] is the ugly stepchild, but you see books that are doing it really well, and you think, okay, there’s no reason why the quality of the writing can’t be where I want it to be, and also work in this space. I was never going to write a straight down the middle crime novel.
________________________
Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Lit Hub, CrimeReads, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, and The Literary Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from NYU. Rabbit Hole is her debut.
