“I began with eating
and moved on to cooking just as I began with reading and moved on to writing.
…Eating a good meal, like reading a satisfying novel, has returned me to myself
during times when this disconnect was a profound internal chasm.” Kate
Christensen
Author Kate Christensen’s has published six novels that
according to her “…engage in some way with the same themes – struggling,
loneliness, floundering, and excess, as well as food, love, art, marriage, and
family.”
“All of my novels are about, in one way or another, people
whose lives are changing whether they like it or not, people who are faced with
some degree of external crisis and have to scramble to deal with it. My
protagonists are men and women, young and old, but they all share this. The
older I get, the more my own life feels implicated in my own novels, and the
clearer it is to me that all my characters’ concerns come directly from my own
experiences.”
Ms. Christensen goes on to explain just how her beginnings
began to intrude on her life. Putting
aside the novel she was writing she began exploring her own experiences and
memories. At age fifty her writing turned autobiographical. It was time to
personally explore the themes that she had so consistently visited in fiction.
Her earliest memory is a sunny Berkeley morning and a
breakfast table littered with soft-boiled eggs and buttered toast. Seated at
the weekday table with her mother and younger sister there seems to be no
warning that life can turn ugly in the seconds it takes to make a request. Her
two year old mind is unable to process the abuse or the suddenness of the
attack. It will take 40+ years of living, searching, writing, and reflection
before she truly understands who she is.
Ms. Christensen is a hardworking writer (her goal is 1,000
words a day), who shares her life and her recipes in a way is inspiring and
thoughtful and honest. If you’re curious about your own relationships,
successes and failures and what to do with them perhaps you will find yourself
and your story among these pages.
Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, Dark Places and
Sharp Objects calls Kate Christensen a great American writer and has this to
say about Blue Plate Special: “It’s an expert guide on inspiration, ingenuity,
heartbreak, buoyancy, home, love, family, screwing up, bouncing back, and perfecting
the bacon-cheddar biscuit.”
(Doubleday Books © July 2013) A heartfelt thank you to Doubleday Books for
the Bound Galley sent my way for review purposes. I had not read Kate
Christensen before; she is however, now on my radar. I’m looking forward to
reading her novels. Her blog is here: http://katechristensen.wordpress.com.
