Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kate Brody. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Kate, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

My parents were both big readers. We always had books around the house, and my mom would take my sisters and me to the library to pick out any other books we wanted. Not only did they not police my reading choices, they would often encourage me to read adult literature. In some cases, the books my dad recommended were WAY over my head (i.e. reading A Separate Peace in grade school), but I still thinking that exposure is what fostered my love of language. I remember reading The Catcher in the Rye at a very young age and not understanding it at all, but one scene stuck with me, where Holden kisses Jane all over her face–but not on her lips. And the tension and melancholy and mystery of that scene just wormed its way into my brain. I still think it’s a great detail. I used to teach, and whenever I saw parents getting really anxious about what their kids read, I just thought: you’re really doing too much. Worry about TV (I guess…), but don’t worry about books. The way we read makes it hard to get out over your skis.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a novelist, whose debut RABBIT HOLE is out now from Soho Press. I have always been passionate about books and writing, but it wasn’t until my last year of college that I started to consider the possibility that I might write as a career. I fell hard and fast in love with creative writing workshop, and that led me to pursue an MFA, which led to more professional ambitions, and then bing bang boom ten years later, I have a published book. (I’m kidding, because writing and publishing is VERY slow.) In my writing, I am often thinking about family, mental illness, art, and mortality. With RABBIT HOLE, I wanted to use the thriller genre as a container to talk about these issues, so the book follows a young woman who is at the center of a cold case disappearance and who becomes obsessed with Reddit conspiracies around her long-missing sister.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

It’s very, very hard to make a living writing books. The advances are often too small to survive on, and they are doled out over many years, with no insurance. I think if we, as a country, would like to have a thriving literary culture, we need to invest more heavily in the arts. Ireland is a great model for how to improve on this front. Public funding for the arts in schools, grants for working writers, cultural emphasis placed on the value of the written word. Again, as a teacher, I’m always surprised when parents tell me they really want their kids to be big readers, but they themselves don’t read at home… that’s the situation we have right now as a country. You can’t just like the idea of reading. You have to actually pull yourself away from your phone and read.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I wrote a book in grad school that I tried to find an agent for. I called it NEVER BE ALONE, and the feedback I got was largely very nice, but uniform in the sense that everyone said they didn’t know how to sell it. So rather than find some way to force it into the world unagented, I heard the notes and started over. With RABBIT HOLE, I set out to write about the same big ideas, but in a way that would be more palatable. That’s what drew me to the thriller concept. It’s hard to start new when you have a project you like, but sometimes it’s better to cut your losses than sink another five years into a project that isn’t going to work.

Contact Info:

• Website: katebrodyauthor.com
• Instagram: @katebrodyauthor
• Twitter: @katebrodyauthor