Kate Christensen Quotes:

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

source: - FaceBook post by Kate Christensen from Apr 16, 2013

Topics: Animal, Connections, Strange

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency...

source: - Kate Christensen (2009). “Trouble: A Novel”, p.32, Anchor

Topics: Consistency, Thank God

To taste fully is to live fully. And to live fully is to be awake and responsive to complexities and truths--good and terrible, overwhelming and miniscule. To eat passionately is to allow the world in; there can be no hiding or sublimation when you're chewing a mouthful of food so good it makes you swoon.

source: - "Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites". Book by Kate Christensen, www.npr.org. July 9, 2013.

Topics: World, Taste, Hiding

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

Topics: Sunshine, Color, Weather, Birdsong, Wreckage

Starting the blog was a way for me to generate this nonfiction first-person voice naturally, gradually, without feeling performance anxiety. It felt a bit like keeping journals when I was younger, but connecting to an instant readership without having to wait for publication made it also immediately satisfying.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Voice, Waiting, Anxiety, Keeping A Journal, Performance Anxiety

Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!)

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Stars, Book, Writing

As an adult I generally feel this pressure to be thin, not from men, but from other women. As a silent or not-so-silent competition, a constant monitoring of who's thinner, comments about it - either compliments or veiled insults doesn't matter - it always drives me nuts.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Men, Nuts, Competition, Monitoring

When you're sixteen and struggling to forge an identity out of a morass of hormones and daydreams, remarks like that cut a deep groove in the brain. I trace the ongoing, victorious-feeling semi-starvation of my twenties directly back to adolescence - as a way of showing those assholes that I could control my appetites... Which is so sad, in retrospect, because of course no one cared.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Struggle, Cutting, Feelings, No One Cares

The pressure to be thin, which causes guilt and obsessiveness around food, is terrible and starts so early. For me, it started at sixteen when I left home and gained weight for the first time and was told by a slightly older boy, out of the blue, that I was "too plump." The shock of that lasted a good long time.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Home, Boys, Blue, Good Long

I wanted to capture time through how food and I were getting along at any given moment. That necessitated writing some dark stuff, some sad stuff, and a lot of painful memories, because my life has often been dark, sad, and painful. I didn't want to sugarcoat anything.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Memories, Writing, Dark, Painful Memories, Getting Along

I was also writing in a tradition and trying to do something different with it, something that hadn't necessarily been done before, which was a risk, but it made it interesting. My relationship with food has been complicated and rocky and not always wonderful, and it's a lens through which my entire life and identity are refracted.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Writing, Interesting, Risk

So many of my memories are generated by and organized around food: what I ate, what people cooked, what I cooked, what I ordered in a restaurant. My mental palate is also inextricably intertwined with the verbal part of my brain. Food, words, memories all twist together, so it was the obvious way to structure my life. Each memory of food opened up an entire scene for me, it was the key that unlocked everything.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Memories, Keys, People

Now that I no longer feel lonely, and now that my own past feels resolved in a whole new and very deep way, I am excited to write about the real world, to stay in it. Fiction is an escape, a parallel life, and it was a powerful source of comfort for me when my own life was raw and uncomfortable. I don't feel the burning need to disappear into a fictional character these days.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Lonely, Powerful, Real, My Own Life, Parallel Lives

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Writing, Self, Notion

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Real, Writing, Exercise, Violinist

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Writing, Voice, Ease, Personal Essays

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Book, Pay, Blogging

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Book, Hard Work, Writing

Blogging is different from both journal-writing and writing for print. It's more fun than either of those. The freedom to write whatever I want and the unmediated connection with readers are the payoff.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Fun, Writing, Want, Journal Writing

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Husband, Real, Writing, Ex Husband