Author of the week: Kate Christensen

last updated 8 January 2015

Men have a champion in Kate Christensen, said the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. It’s common for writers to complain about the difficulties of composing authentic characters of the opposite sex, but Christensen has done it enthusiastically in such novels as The Great Man and The Epicure’s Lament. “I have an inner guy, though I am straight and to all appearances female,” says the author, 48. The narrator of her sixth novel, The Astral, is also a man: Harry is a 57-year-old failed poet who’s just been given the boot by his wife. “Harry is an alter ego to me,” she says. “Women are much more subterranean. They mask their manipulations and blows with smiles. I like the way men have that surface competitiveness.”

Christensen admits that the women she created this time around also aren’t her kind, said Edan Lepucki in TheMillions.com. “One of the themes I’m exploring is the ways in which certain women try to control other people—their husbands first and foremost,” she says. “I’ve had my share of encounters with controlling women. There’s a mechanism at work in them that is deeply foreign to me and which I sought to expose.” Creating Harry’s voice also allowed Christensen to accept the failure of her own marriage, which was ending as she wrote the book, and to confront the realities of getting older. “Harry can’t lie to himself anymore,” she says. “When you are 22, you say and think what you are going to do. What you are at 57 is what you are.”