Katie Kitamura on Subverting Tropes in A Separation

At the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival, Literary Hub went backstage to interview authors and panelists on a wide range of topics: the personal, the professional, and the political. In the below video, Katie Kitamura discusses inverting the classic trope of the dead or disappeared woman, paying tribute to life’s lack of tidy resolution, and her focus on female consciousness in her most recent novel A Separation.

Katie Kitamura: “I knew I wanted it to be a man rather than a woman [who disappeared], and I knew I wanted it to be a story about that disappearance but through a female consciousness, so it was really the female mind that was going to be the primary subject matter of the book.”