Kate Christensen on Allowing Characters to Tell Their Own Stories

Kate Christensen has a genius for capturing the interiority of intimacy, the aromatics of place, the closest connections among couples, families, neighbors, rivals. Her PEN/Faulkner award-winning fourth novel, The Great Man, centers two authors who are writing biographies of a newly deceased figurative painter and vying for access to his sister, wife and mistress, all in their seventies and still seductive. The Astral, her sixth novel, is named after the landmark apartment building where her protagonist, a floundering poet, lived until his wife of thirty years kicked him out.

It evokes the sensory details of Greenpoint and Williamsburg down to the junk shops, bodegas, working-class bars and lumberyards. Welcome Home, Stranger follows an ex-pat Mainer who has returned home for her mother’s funeral. Step by step, the structure of the life she has built for herself, far from Portland, collapses. “Coming back to Maine is complicated,” Christensen writes. “No one is prouder or more defensive of the place than a native daughter who went away somewhere bigger to seek her fortune. But along with my pride is something else, a small quailing dread, the knowledge the I’m an outsider here.” Our email conversation spanned the distance from Iowa City to Sonoma County.

Jane Ciabattari: How has your life, including your writing and teaching, gone during these years of pandemic and turmoil? Where have you been living? In Taos? Are you teaching this semester at your alma mater, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?

Kate Christensen: The years of pandemic and turmoil were dark and difficult for me, as they were for many people. My husband Brendan and I spent 2020 and much of 2021 in lockdown in a remote New Hampshire farmhouse that belongs to his family, an hour from our house in Portland, Maine, isolated with our two young dogs in the deep countryside. (Luckily, we love each other’s company, so it never devolved into a scenario out of The Shining.) Wanting to somehow grapple fictionally with the horror of the Trump years, as well as my own intense climate grief, I had started a new novel, which I was then calling The Change, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t bring myself to make my narrator really suffer. I kept saving her from herself, probably out of a need to find answers in fiction that I couldn’t find in life.

I write viscerally, empathetically inhabiting my characters’ bodies along with them.

Then in the late fall of 2021, we sold our house in Portland and moved to Taos, New Mexico. I never wanted to leave that beautiful old house or Maine, but it no longer made sense for us to live there—Brendan is a screenwriter and needed to be closer to Los Angeles. So we stored our books and furniture in the barn in New Hampshire, packed up the car, and headed west with the dogs.

To my surprise and joy, Taos has been a great place for both of us. We’ve found a warm, close-knit, interesting community of friends, and we recently bought land and are planning to build a house there this spring. And after the move to New Mexico, I was able to write a draft of my novel that finally worked. The structure came together for me, as well as the title: Welcome Home, Stranger. Maybe I had to leave Maine for that to happen.

I’m currently in Iowa City, teaching a fiction workshop and a novella seminar at the Writers’ Workshop for the fall semester, and I’m planning to come back to teach another workshop this summer.

JC: I’m fascinated with the way you deconstruct the life of your narrator, Rachel, beginning in the wake of her return from a reporting assignment in the Arctic, back in Washington, D.C., where she works as a staff writer for an environmental magazine. When the novel opens, she’s on a plane to Portland, Maine for her mother’s funeral. How did the stages of the major changes you cover in this novel evolve? Did you plan out the plot, often driven by Rachel’s impulsive actions, in advance?

KC: The premise was clear to me from the beginning, but as I’ve said, the structure revealed itself to me slowly, over several drafts. And the evolution of Rachel’s decisions and actions, the whole idea of her as a character in free-fall, an innocent hard-working person who’s acting in good faith, who’s scrambling to keep up with the terrible shit life keeps throwing at her, came about deliberately.

In other words, her impulsiveness and desperation, her questionable choices and rash acts, are strategic choices I made, intentional and thought-out. My other first-person narrators have always been people who generated their own trouble, characters for whom problems are self-made, their own damn fault. Rachel is different. She’s in an existential crisis that’s wholly external, facing pressures bearing down on her from the world, and her internal resources are taxed, challenged, as she tries to adapt and surmount them. Once I gave myself permission to do this, it interested me greatly from a narrative perspective.

JC: Welcome Home, Stranger takes place during springtime in Portland, Maine, which you describe in a blog post in 2015: “Spring in Maine is always like a protracted gasp of apology that feels sexually dysfunctional but really, really hot—I’m sorry I hurt you, baby, I know that snow was deep, I know you were cold, I know it was dark, but look what I’m doing now with my rich green grass and unfurling buds and vibrantly feathery, bursting blossoms, smell this sweet air, baby, you know I love you, I’ll never do it again. I fall for it every year.” You once lived in Portland, Maine—for how long? Maine inspired How to Cook a Moose, your food memoir. How did Maine inspire Welcome Home, Stranger, which, by the way, also describes food and drink vividly?

KC: I lived in Maine for 10 years, from 2011 to 2021. It’s a very particular place. There’s that famous stoic reserve among Mainers, a sweetly laconic sense of humor and stubborn work ethic. Characters in my novel occasionally refer a little defiantly to the “real Maine,” as opposed to the coastal Maine of summer people and huge shingled “cottages,” meaning a place of hardscrabble provincial community, claustrophobic landscapes circumscribed by thick woods, where people live in small Cape houses with vinyl siding and assume an attitude of resentment toward wealthy outsiders, practice a centuries-old survivalism and adapt to scarcity and hard times.

The character of Aunt Jean in particular feels very Maine to me—she is the landscape and culture brought to fictional life, an Acadian elder, almost 90 years old, who hasn’t slowed down at all in terms of physical work. There’s a hitch in her step, but she never complains or acknowledges that anything hurts. She shows her family she cares about them by shooing them out of the way so she can cook them a greasy, cheap, functional meal. Aunt Jean embodies that very Maine spirit of utilitarian pragmatism, a kind of belief system that encompasses an understated, almost subliminal kind of passion and generosity.

JC: Rachel describes herself as a “middle-aged childless recently orphaned menopausal workaholic.” How does the life she has created for herself reflect the upbringing she is fighting against? Is regret one of the mechanisms driving her narrative?

KC: Rachel escaped a childhood of deep poverty and neglect—a junkie father, a mentally ill mother. Her ambition and intelligence saved her, got her out of Maine, but they also define and limit her in middle age. She finds herself alone and lonely at 53, married to her work, divorced from a husband she loved but who turned out to be closeted and gay. Maybe trying to escape a difficult past is ultimately a limiting way to move forward, to feel as if you’re running from instead of toward something. In going back to Maine, she’s forced to confront all of this. And maybe she finds a new way of moving forward, now that her mother is dead, a way that involves more conscious choices, decisions that might lead toward actual emotional fulfillment.

JC: Rachel describes her late mother Lucie as a “kook,” who “came at life with a cosmopolitan woman-of-the-world confidence, jaunty and arrogant, whether she was tying on a gauzy, tacky Ren’s scarf or professing undying admiration for a famous but mediocre artist or proudly bringing to the kitchen table a deeply terrible dish.” Their relationship has been at a stalemate for a decade. Returning to her home town for her mother’s funeral sets up to an in-depth exploration of their fraught relationship.

KC: The novel is haunted by Lucie’s ghost, the residue of her powerful presence, in the wake of her recent death. In inheriting and dismantling her mother’s house, sifting through all her possessions, inhabiting the space her mother lived in, sleeping in her bed and looking out her windows, Rachel has to reckon with her mother as a person separate from herself. It’s a kind of act of empathy, really, to allow a dead parent to have a kind of life in your own imagination that they could never have when they were alive. For the first time, Lucie becomes fully realized for Rachel. And then she can let her mother go, find a kind of hard-won peace, forgive the damage she did as a mother through understanding why she was the way she was.

JC: Rachel’s younger sister Celeste, an aspirational woman who was closer to their mother, has maintained a life in Portland, marrying a man who inherited wealth and raising twins, now teens. How were you able to delve into the nuances of sibling rivalry and sisterly love so expertly? Do you have sisters?

KC: I have two younger sisters as well as two older half-sisters, my father’s daughters from his first marriage. Sisterly love is, in my experience, a powerful, passionate, complex thing, colored by judgment, competitiveness, disappointment, yearning, guilt, misunderstanding, and anger. And I definitely drew on my own experiences in writing about Celeste and Rachel, although their relationship is different from mine with all of my sisters. I would say that the truth between them, that shifting and always receding horizon of emotional closeness that never seems to stabilize no matter how hard Rachel tries or how much she yearns for it, the sense that Celeste resents and even hates her sometimes, is very much drawn from my own experience with my younger sisters.

And their mother’s part in the two sisters’ lifelong inability to solidify the very real, very deep love they have for each other, the way Lucie plays them off against each other by comparing them, competing with them, and blocking their bond by always needing to be the center of attention, is familiar to me as well. Sisterhood can be so painfully complicated, but in moments of real connection, there is almost no greater joy.

I like to get at people’s secret hungers, give them free rein, set them loose and see what happens.

JC: Returning to a former life means revisiting lovers past. One of the first shocks Rachel faces at dinner at Celeste’s her first night in town is the presence of her longtime lover David—who arrives with his new wife. The scenes in which she and David reconnect push further plot points, reminding us that the body doesn’t necessarily synch with small-town norms of proper behavior. How do you write so well about erotic attraction and sensuality? Are there pitfalls you make sure to avoid?

KC: I write viscerally, empathetically inhabiting my characters’ bodies along with them, feeling what they feel, hungers and sensations, cravings and pleasures and pains. I don’t personally have a lot of interest in (as you put it so well) “small-town norms of proper behavior.” Fiction is a place where that kind of small-minded morality runs counter to dramatic energy. Whatever is most interesting and true, that’s what I’m after. Rachel has real reasons for doing what she does, and these reasons have everything to do with how people actually behave rather than what I think a moralistic reader will approve of.

I like to get at people’s secret hungers, give them free rein, set them loose and see what happens. For most of her life, Rachel has been tamping down and denying her sensuality and appetites because she’s afraid of how unfulfilled they are. For her to give in to them, as she does, little by little, through the novel, feels risky and dangerous. But the fact that she takes these risks, the fact that she cracks her own shell open to allow life in, is the key to the novel’s ending. Her behavior serves an essential purpose for the entire underlying thematic movement of the novel.

JC: Rachel muses frequently about her fading youth, and details the shifts in those she knew when they were all younger, including David (“David, my wild boy, has become an old man”), her sister Celeste, her brother-in-law Neil, whose drinking has taken a destructive turn. What appeals to you about the narrative lens in which Rachel, older now, recalls younger days?

KC: Well, I’m 61. I share it. I’m deeply engaged right now in acknowledging and fully experiencing this new phase of my own life, here at the threshold of becoming an elder—accepting this shift from prolonged youth to impending old age, embracing this newfound sense of responsibility and evolution in myself. It’s a real change in the way I feel in the world. Instead of wanting to fulfill my own ego, I primarily want to give back to younger generations now, share what I’ve learned, my decades of hard-earned knowledge and perspective.

I’m finding an outlet for that here at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, working with so many young writers, most of whom are in their twenties. I can feel both how distant I am from them in terms of years, and how pleasurable it is to have this opportunity to give them whatever I can to help them move forward and succeed: encouragement, criticism, information. I see my younger self in them, and that gives me pleasure, too—the connection between older and younger writers, passing a torch.

JC: You’ve lived in many places—Arizona, Berkeley, France, Oregon, Brooklyn, Iowa, Maine, New Mexico, where else? Reading this novel, your eighth, makes me wonder, what have you learned about home? Is it possible to ever truly leave home? Or find home?

KC: I said jokingly to Brendan a while ago that for me, home is wherever he is. I’ve had a very peripatetic life. My family moved every couple of years throughout my childhood, changing houses and towns and schools. As an adult, I repeated this pattern, although my moves became less frequent. Along with this physical unsettledness, I was always lonely. Ever since I met Brendan fifteen years ago, no matter where we’re living, I feel at home in the world, because of our bond. So home for me turns out to be more about connection and love than place or geography.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

KC: Because teaching is taking up all of my time and attention, I’m not working on anything at the moment, but I plan to start a new book as soon as we get back to New Mexico. There’s a short novel I want to write next, working title Good Company, about a particular dynamic between men and women, and it’s strongly based on my own experiences. I can envision the structure and the characters already, so I hope it won’t take nearly as long as my last book.

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