In her memoir, novelist Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and the The Astral Hotel, has undertaken to organize her lifestory around food. It is an interesting concept, a theme, around which to make sense of a lifetime. If the memoir is, as Rainer Maria Rilke said of poetry, a momentary order, then Kate […]

In her memoir, novelist Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and the The Astral Hotel,  has undertaken to organize her lifestory around food. It is an interesting concept, a theme, around which to make sense of a lifetime. If the memoir is, as Rainer Maria Rilke said of poetry, a momentary order, then Kate Christensen has done just that.

“Kate Christensen always remembers what she ate, what was served, what was cooked, what she cooked, what it tasted like,” reads the book jacket. “…much of her life, she describes herself as being ‘a hungry lonely wild animal looking for happiness and stability.’ Having found them at long last, she finally feels able to write about her search.”

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An Appetite for Writing

Perhaps more telling for me is the commitment to story telling that runs through Kate’s lifestory. In that sense, writing is perhaps the greatest of her appetites exposed in Blue Plate Special—the food being a metaphor for that urge to write. I had the great pleasure of both hearing her in person when she this in January 2014 at Bates, College in Lewiston, Maine, and then to interview her for the second month of the Master Memoir Writer. The interview is included as the featured author of the second month.

“I wake up thinking of writing,” she shares on the Month Two’s featured MP3, “And I don’t feel good until I have written my quota for the day.” She goes on to say that she will do anything to avoid the feeling of going to bed knowing that she was not faithful to her writing. “It’s an awful feeling those day when I don’t write.” Elsewhere in this blog I have labeled that as “showing up to write.”

No showing up, no writing. It can be as simple as that.

How to handle discouragement

When I asked if she ever deals with discouragement, which I know is a plague to many memoir writers reading these pages, she shared that she deals with her discouragement by writing. “In order to get a book done, you have to come to it every day, you have to keep the ‘lava’ warm. Otherwise it hardens and fights you and it takes days to get back to the writing.”

Distance Needed

“You can’t both write a memoir and be in it at the same time” There needs to be some distance between the experience of life and the lifewriting. How else to get perspective? “Every day, I would leave my daily life behind to visit the past and then I would return to my daily life, carrying with me the dark stories from the past.” How well we all know this!

Kate Christensen is the author of six novels. In 2008, she won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her bog is katechristensen.wordpress.com. She lives in Portand, Maine.