Kate Christensen
Kate Christensen
Kate Christensenis an American novelist. She won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for her fourth novel, The Great Man, about a painter and the three women in his life. Her previous novels are In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, and The Epicure's Lament. Her fifth novel, Trouble, was released in paperback by Vintage/Anchor in June 2010. Her sixth novel, The Astral, was published in hardcover by Doubleday in June 2011. She is also the author of two food-related memoirs, "Blue Plate Special"and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 August 1962
CountryUnited States of America
Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female.
Broccoli, when overboiled, produces a sulfuric stench that causes children to gag the instant they enter the house.
Broccoli gets such a bad rap. This is perplexing to those of us who love that green, treelike, stalky vegetable.
'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.
A relative of poison ivy and poison sumac, the cashew contains the same rash-inducing chemicals, known as urushiols, as its kin.
Whenever possible, I use local, fresh ingredients, just because it tastes and feels better to eat an egg or a tomato or a hamburger that wasn't flown halfway around the world, that didn't travel on a truck and get stuck in traffic jams, that hasn't been sitting in a supermarket's refrigerator case for days.
Even more than dying itself, I'm scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down.
Often I choose characters who express not my best self, but the sides of me I haven't developed or haven't expressed.
It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.
I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.
I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.
There's a certain time of day after sunset when people naturally seem to feel the urge to gather by a fire or a stove or a hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. Call it the blue hour.
My blog is a celebration of the unexpected, settled, happy life I find myself living in Portland, Maine, at the ripe old age of fifty with someone I deeply love and am very happy with. That's part of why I started the blog.
I realized that I've had a really rocky relationship with food - it has not been a gauzy, beautiful summer of ripe melons and perfectly buttered toast.