I attended a book reading at Politics & Prose last night by Kate Christensen, author of the recent novel Trouble and also the winner of the 2008 Pen/Faulkner award for The Great Man. I hadn't read anything by Christensen before, but Trouble looked intriguing, so I decided to go.
From Amazon:
[Trouble is a] coming-of-middle-age novel that explores the sexual lives of three women in their 40s. Best friends since their college days, trust-funder Indrani, therapist Josie and L.A. rocker Raquel are like three very different but close sisters. After flirting with a man at a New York party, Josie realizes that she is sexually starving and decides to leave her husband, though Indrani thinks it's a terrible move. Meanwhile, on the left coast, the nearly washed-up ex-junkie Raquel becomes embroiled in a scandal when she's smeared as the other woman to a young actor with a pregnant girlfriend. Raquel hightails it to Mexico City and begs a less than-reluctant Josie to join her. From here the novel takes a predictable route as the women drink their way across the city, Raquel spirals further out of control, and Josie's inner vixen is awakened. The novel loses some of its mojo in the location change—Mexico City seems just out of focus—but the characters are marvelously realized, and when Christensen's on a roll, her wit is irresistible.
Here are some things I learned from Kate Christensen at the book reading:
- She didn't know where she was going with this book when she started – all she had in mind was the first scene.
- She tries not to think about her books being made into movies while she is writing. She has had books in the past that got very close to being optioned, but it hasn't happened yet, so she tries not to think about it.
- Her book The Great Man was about the power an older woman has over a younger man who has come to see her to learn about her lover, and is ultimately a portrait of older women who are "lusty and funny and alive". Trouble focuses instead on middle age female friendship, and women who are hungry and searching for something. She wanted the women in Trouble to be, in fact, in trouble – sordid, seamy trouble. She wanted them to be complicated, not heroic, not good.
- Christensen likes to write in the first person, so that she can become the characters in her book.
- Trouble takes place in part in Mexico City, a place that is "foreign, fascinating and alive".
- She also wanted to explore the tension between the private and public lives of her characters – one of whom is a therapist and one an aging rock star. Both are used to strict demarcations in their public image and private personae.
- The book explores the role of celebrity gossip blogs in our society. While she was writing the book, she became obsessed with celebrity blogs and our cruel and perverse fascination with famous women. She started to empathize with celebrities under the microscope – Britney Spears, Courtney Love – and tried to imagine how they might be affected by relentless scrutiny and coverage.
- Someone asked Christensen about her own education, given how intelligent her books are. She said that she is basically "self-educated", that she read and read and read as a child – "anything, voraciously" and learned whatever she could in dictionaries, cookbooks, National Geographic, novels, etc. She said, "As an author, you learn from reading." For her, reading and absorbing was "involuntary, like food".
I really enjoyed hearing Christensen speak – she was engaging and honest, and also very interesting, I'd like to give Trouble or The Great Man or her earlier book The Epicure's Lament (which several members of the audience had read) a try.
Has anyone read anything by Kate Christensen? Please weigh in!