Kate Christensen, WELCOME HOME, STRANGER
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
[0:06]This 30-minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, 365 days
[0:12]a year for about 30 minutes.
[0:15]I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction
[0:20]and memoir.
[0:21]Our books are already out now.
[0:23]You can check it out on zippybooks.com.
[0:26]And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag, where we have lots of wonderful essays and
[0:30]lifestyle features.
[0:31]That's at zippymag.com.
[0:32]We have classes.
[0:33]It's a B-Classist.com.
[0:36]And I recently opened a book store in LA called Zippy's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at
[0:43]11th Street in San Monica.
[0:45]I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings.
[0:49]But this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018, and no matter what
[0:55]I do, this is basically my favorite thing.
[0:58]Enjoy.
[1:03]Hey, Kristen Sin is the author of Welcome Home Stranger, a novel.
[1:07]This episode is a little bit shorter than usual, because we had an issue with the time,
[1:11]and I can't remember what else, but we were determined to fit it in, even though it was
[1:15]short and sweet.
[1:16]This is really one of my favorite books, so please listen.
[1:18]Hey, Kristen Sin is the author of Eight Novels, most recently Welcome Home Stranger.
[1:23]Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 Penn Faulkner Award for Fiction.
[1:27]She is also published two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special, and how to cook a moose,
[1:32]which won the 2016 Main Literary Award for Memoir.
[1:36]Her essay is Food Writing, Reviews and Stories have appeared in a wide variety of publications
[1:39]and anthologies.
[1:41]She currently writes a monthly food column for French-ly called Boof.
[1:44]She lives with her husband and their two dogs in Tallis, New Mexico.
[1:48]Hi, Kate.
[1:49]Thanks so much for coming on mom's time to read books to discuss Welcome Home Stranger.
[1:53]I'm so happy to be here.
[1:55]Thank you.
[1:56]Oh, you're welcome.
[1:57]I love this book so much the way you write, the way you write about family, the way you
[2:01]write about midlife desire, and the rest of relationships that like everyone can relate
[2:06]to and family and all of it, so I'm delighted we have a chance to chat even briefly.
[2:11]So tell listeners what your book is about and where this story came from.
[2:15]I think of this book as being about the twin existential crises that sort of complement
[2:19]each other not in a good way of being postmenopausal and living in a time of what seems
[2:25]to be pending environmental breakdown.
[2:28]And I wanted to write about a woman who is angry and alive and not giving up and also
[2:34]struggling with all of it and in the wake of the death of her very problematic mother.
[2:39]And so that's another kind of existential thing to face to be a woman whose mother has
[2:44]died and to sort of feel that sense of her own mortality but also her own sort of coming
[2:51]into the matriarchy, coming into her role as a female elder and what that means and what
[2:56]her responsibilities are in terms of everything that's happening around her.
[3:01]And so for this character's named Rachel Callaway and she's 53, she's an environmental
[3:06]journalist in DC and she goes back to Maine because her mother is died and she has to deal
[3:11]with her very angry younger sister who took care of their mother while she was dying.
[3:19]And there are a whole lot of reasons why Rachel didn't but her sister doesn't understand.
[3:23]And so it's also about that sort of, I think as our parents get older, I think siblings
[3:29]have a lot of, the ones I know have a lot of struggles and a lot of sort of truth-telling
[3:34]moments.
[3:35]I think of them as like the sibling come to Jesus' moment where you understand that you
[3:40]have different relationships with your parents.
[3:42]So it's very much about that as well.
[3:45]And just sort of the realities of being a woman in her 50s, Rachel also feels invisible
[3:51]and worries about professional obsolescence and sort of, and so I take all of those that
[3:58]big ball of wax and I sort of explore it in terms of what it looks like when I throw
[4:03]a lot of other stuff at her.
[4:05]Yeah, what a deal with.
[4:07]I love it, it takes someone on the brink and push them over.
[4:12]Then why didn't I just say that?
[4:15]That's so well put.
[4:16]No.
[4:17]Go ahead.
[4:18]You can take it for now on.
[4:20]The part about the environmental sort of stuff.
[4:23]You have this very funny scene where she's talking about what Rachel is talking about
[4:27]how she can't just enjoy dinner, right?
[4:30]For her, the meal is like, I wish I don't even know if I dug your dessert out of it.
[4:34]Let me see.
[4:35]But wait, maybe.
[4:36]Yeah, this is the wait.
[4:37]I have it here.
[4:38]I stare at my plate ravenous and stymied, seeing David has made me hungry for the first time
[4:41]in so long.
[4:42]I can't remember the last time, but I can't eat any of this food.
[4:45]It's beyond me to contravene wellness.
[4:47]I hear his horrified voice whilst the assessment.
[4:50]I hear his horrified voice loud in my ear.
[4:52]My brilliant gay former FDA scientist, ex-husband, heckering me about the tasteless invisible
[4:56]but potentially, potentially, sickening contents of every single thing on my plate.
[5:02]The factory-farmed antibiotic and chemical fed meat, the bicefinal aid tainted bicep
[5:08]probably pronounced around canned tomato sauce with gli faucet.
[5:12]I shouldn't even read this.
[5:14]So you're doing really well.
[5:15]I wouldn't know how to pronounce those things either.
[5:17]Thank you.
[5:18]Just decide how the asparagus and iceberg lettuce grown in phthalate, ester, mulch, soil,
[5:23]and watered with fracking byproduct.
[5:25]Everyone else gets to happily eat their dinners and peas and won't know what hurts them
[5:29]until they're diagnosed with cancer or have a heart attack or stroke.
[5:32]Meanwhile, I sit here with my useless overload of information, sipping my glass of sparkling
[5:36]water, which was important for middly, so big carbon footprint, but it also came out
[5:40]of a glass bottle and is the only reasonably crap-free thing on the entire table.
[5:45]I feel like a veritable lunatic.
[5:47]I love that so much.
[5:49]Thank you.
[5:50]But I had breakfast this morning and I was like, well, what is in, you know, what?
[5:56]What chemicals?
[5:57]What am I doing wrong?
[5:58]Like, what would Rachel think?
[5:59]So there's nothing really there's, well, as you know, you know what happens to her.
[6:03]She, she, she trucks it all.
[6:06]Like, how am I not going to eat?
[6:08]We have to eat.
[6:09]Yeah.
[6:10]Yeah.
[6:11]She only do so well.
[6:12]I mean, you have a whole discussion about whether, what do you do at this type of knowledge?
[6:17]What do you do when things are out of your control?
[6:19]And it's, of course, not just food and chemicals, but family and now life in general.
[6:24]I mean, it's such a timely thing to be thinking about in the context of sort of a
[6:29]people and things that are out of your control.
[6:32]So yeah.
[6:33]Yeah.
[6:34]That's, that's right.
[6:35]I was feeling like it was all out of my control.
[6:37]So I put it all into a novel looking for, I often make my, my protagonist sort of fictional
[6:45]avatars and I use a novel not as a way to work things out, but as a way to explore things
[6:51]that I have sort of worked out in my own life.
[6:54]And I think I have to do that work before I can fictionalize it.
[6:58]I always say that writing a novel is the opposite of therapy.
[7:02]And for me, writing has always been a way of taking control.
[7:06]And from when I was a little kid in a really uneasy sort of childhood, a 70s childhood,
[7:14]60s and 70s and, and everything.
[7:16]That means I felt like writing was a way to put all my anxiety and all my sense of, you
[7:20]know, as a kid, it was lack of agency, but as an adult, it's more just sometimes despair.
[7:26]And sometimes just just, I worry a lot.
[7:29]I'm a very anxiety prone person and that doesn't do any good.
[7:32]As my mother always said, you know, worrying, worrying is wasted energy.
[7:38]And so I find that that among other things, among, among so many other things, writing
[7:43]this book was a repository for all that anxiety for me in my own life.
[7:48]And I was feeling like, I feel like a lot of people feel that way.
[7:52]And I didn't want to feel alone in it.
[7:55]And I wanted to connect to readers who also struggle with these things and, and, and feel
[8:00]a lot of the same things, anxieties.
[8:03]And so I used Rachel for Rachel, I gave them all to her.
[8:10]And so this means that you have, and by the way, I completely relate to the anxiety.
[8:15]My grandmother was like, we all just have the worry gene.
[8:17]And I'm like, yeah, okay, you know, it's just a gene.
[8:20]I didn't actually realize people didn't have it until I didn't either.
[8:23]Yeah.
[8:24]I didn't realize it was a waste of time.
[8:26]I thought I could like change the outcome of things if I worried.
[8:29]Yeah.
[8:30]I'm not sure it's a waste of time.
[8:31]You think it's a waste of time.
[8:32]Thank you.
[8:33]Maybe it's not.
[8:34]Maybe my mother wasn't always right.
[8:36]I don't know.
[8:38]I mean, I don't know.
[8:40]I don't know that it's a waste of time.
[8:42]I think the jury is out.
[8:45]You're prepared.
[8:46]You're always prepared.
[8:47]I mean, it doesn't necessarily stop it, but I feel like it's worry itself is something
[8:53]you can do.
[8:54]Also, don't you come up with solutions when you worry?
[8:56]Yeah.
[8:57]Totally.
[8:58]Don't you look at every side of something and, and, yeah, yeah, I mean, without the
[9:03]all the what ifs, how could you write?
[9:05]Anyways, that's why I think so many authors have had in this podcast, do you know
[9:10]do have anxiety because it's, it allows you to go off on all of those things deeply.
[9:15]What if this?
[9:16]What if that?
[9:17]I don't know.
[9:18]I think the way the novel is mind works, because we do have a sort of spiraling, there are
[9:25]all kinds of decisions you make in the course of writing a novel in every little scene,
[9:29]every little micro scene, every, every sentence.
[9:32]And I think the worrying brain is also the contingency brain, like we allow, I'm speaking
[9:38]of we is the vast array of novelists who all write very differently, but I do think there's
[9:43]this thing that, that in the brain of the novelists that maybe isn't quote unquote sort
[9:48]of normal, but it is, it is a multifaceted way of imagining the world, not just looking
[9:57]at the world, but also imagining it, so that potentials.
[10:00]proliferate in every second. They just exponentially branch off. And you follow one. And you know,
[10:06]it's like the multiverse, but you only allowed to be in one at a time. I keep using these video
[10:11]game metaphors, but I'll put my avatar through a multiverse. Wow. Okay. I don't know where that came
[10:19]from. You play video games? No, I don't. Okay. All right. You never know. I mean, so a lot of
[10:24]people do. No judgment. Anyway. So which where exactly did this start? Did you realize you
[10:33]had come to terms with how to deal with the environment and then said, okay, now this book or did
[10:38]was it Rachel who came to you or or what? I was thinking a lot about adapting and thinking a lot
[10:45]about how to and also myself as an elder. I'm 61 and I feel like we're not an elder. Are you kidding?
[10:53]coming into that time in my life? I'm sort of at the threshold. And I feel like 10 years ago when I
[11:00]was 51, I was I was still young. I still felt psychologically. I'm talking about I felt myself still
[11:06]in the world of sort of with a lot of time ahead of me and thinking in terms of, you know,
[11:12]adventures and et cetera. And now I'm thinking pragmatically in a way that I never have before and
[11:19]proactively and not not so much about myself. And I think there's there's a really kind of wonderful
[11:25]I'm really loving being this age. I will say it's my favorite age I've ever been. And I think it's
[11:31]because I feel the strength of mind coming out of menopause with clarity. Thank God those hormones
[11:37]are gone. And also a sense of responsive. I don't have kids. So I didn't raise kids. I have dogs
[11:43]which is different. But I feel a sense of wanting to sort of help the next generation. At the
[11:50]moment, I'm teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop and it's exciting because my students are so
[11:56]brilliant and ambitious. And I'm just giving myself over to them in a way that when I taught here
[12:01]10 years ago, I didn't in the same way. And so I am feeling this sort of three or 50s. You kind of
[12:08]go through a I don't know what to call it. I mean, it's menopause, but it's something deeper.
[12:12]It's like a deeper sort of, okay, maybe the word elder is premature. But I will use the word,
[12:20]I mean, okay, I think a lot about adapting to what's coming and helping others. And earnest
[12:27]as it sounds, that's sort of where my priorities are now. And I think that that's kind of where
[12:33]Rachel ends up out of despair, which is a good thing. It's a sort of it's deeply pragmatic. Like
[12:40]well, I'm still alive. I have work to do. Kate, I know this is a really abridged episode. But
[12:47]I'm glad we at least got to talk a little bit about it. I was going to be so disappointed because
[12:51]I really loved this book. So anyway, hopefully we can continue in some other form because I had
[12:56]lots more to discuss. But I'll just say I really enjoyed it. And thank you for coming on and
[13:02]more to come in some way, shape or form. Thank you so, so much. Okay. Have a great day.
[13:08]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[13:15]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[13:20]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club
[13:25]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[13:29]in fact, Texture Sound for the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for
[13:33]providing this fantastic intro and outro music.