About Karen

Journalism

My first profession was journalism. I can't imagine any better school for novel writing than journalism. Essentially I was paid to talk to people about their lives--their hopes, dreams, passions, perspectives, disappointments--and then to give the right written voice to their stories. Journalism trained me to look and listen for the telling details and opened my mind wider to the extremes and surprises of life. Subeditors also quickly knocked out of me the typical tendency of the young to overwrite. As important to them as conciseness, was the meeting of deadlines. The weight I subsequently give deadlines proved invaluable in writing fiction. Writing a novel is an emotionally and intellectually grueling process and it would be easy to put it off for an activity less demanding. I come to it every day as I came to every newspaper story I ever wrote on deadline: that there can be no excuses for not writing. Getting a two-book pre-empt publishing deal with St Martin's Press for North American Rights after writing only the first three chapters of my first novel helped me in that: once I had contracts, I also had deadlines.

Yale, Random House, and Oxford

While still a journalist, Yale offered me a spot. I found myself in Heaven. Books, books, and more books, and years to do little but read. My favorite reading place then was in the stacks in Yale's venerable Sterling Memorial Library. Dusty, dim, and often deserted, I nevertheless felt up there like I was in the rare ghostly company of literary giants. I was happy: I was discovering what made my eyes shine. After graduating Yale with a BA majoring in English literature, I went to work at Random House in New York. I divided my time between two roles: Assistant Editor of the in-house literary magazine, At Random, and researcher on a book Random House's then-president Harold Evans was writing, the soon-to-become-bestseller The American Century. It was the best of both worlds for me. I was working essentially as a journalist again, while surrounded by books and bookish people. Yet Oxford University beckoned. I had deferred a scholarship to pursue my Masters degree in Oxford's English department. If I didn't take it up soon, I would lose it altogether. So off I flew to England.

Fiction writing

I'm glad I didn't start writing fiction until my late thirties. I didn't have enough to say before then, hadn't been through enough trials or had my mettle tested enough. I'm convinced that trials in life are a privilege: their lessons are life's Holy Grail. I'm not sure I would have found my fictional voice any earlier, either, or known so well what I wanted to write about. I'm currently writing my second novel, plotting my third at the same time, and I can see the common threads: I like unpredictable plots, unlikely elements intersecting; I like strong atypical characters, as I do strong unusual people; the settings are characters themselves; and I'm most interested in the underside of seemingly perfect lives, the secrets, fears, plots, insecurities, and ultimately the transcendent powers of love and perspective. All with a little humor thrown in - and in the case of The Summer Kitchen, a lot of baking, too.

"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."