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ThrillerJan 26, 2023

Q&A with Thriller Writer Kat Rosenfield

Kat Rosenfield spoke to fellow writer Catherine McKenzie about her new novel 'You Must Remember This.'

By Emily Calkins

Cover of 'You Must Remember This' by Kat Rosenfield.
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Kat Rosenfield’s new novel, You Must Remember This, begins on a cold night, when 85-year-old Miriam falls through the ice on the surface of the river near her family’s home. Her granddaughter suspects that her grandmother’s death isn’t merely a tragic accident and sets out to understand what truly happened that night.

In a live event on the Likewise app, Kat spoke to author Catherine McKenzie (Please Join Us) about the relationship that inspired the book, collaborating with Stan Lee, and the process of adapting a book for the screen.

Event Transcript

Catherine McKenzie: We are talking to Kat Rosenfield, who is a culture writer and author of five novels, including the Edgar-nominated No One Will Miss Her in 2018. She partnered with the late, great Stan Lee on A Trick of Light, a new superhero story set in the digital age. Her journalism and criticism has appeared in Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times. When not writing about murder, the internet, or murders on the internet, she works as a yoga instructor and enjoys recreational Zillow-ing. Definitely with you there. Today is the release of something called Spare. No, I'm kidding. It's called You Must Remember This—that is what we're here to talk about tonight. Welcome, Kat.

Kat Rosenfield: Thanks for having me. We could talk about Spare if you really want to.

Catherine: Well, you've got family discord in your book, so maybe he'd have something to add to it. I don't know.

Kat: Yeah, how different is it really?

Catherine: All families are the same at their core. Well, first of all, congratulations, your book is out today. How's the day been so far?

Kat: It's been like most book release days—a little bit wild in terms of a lot of people are starting to post pictures of the book showing up, and that's very exciting, but also a little anticlimactic because the book has been done for years or a year at this point. I've been done with it. I've just been waiting for it to come into the world, so it's very exciting.

Catherine: One of my fellow author friends calls publication day “Thud Day” because the book lands with a thud. Often the anticipation leading up to it is more than the actual day. It seems weird.

Kat: Yeah, very much. For me, as the author, the most exciting day is when the book is announced, when the deal is announced, I think. And pub day is second to that, and it's a sort of distant second. I guess it goes with the territory.

Catherine: There's so much stuff online before the book comes out, with advanced reader copies available. You start seeing reviews trickle in and things on Instagram and Twitter, et cetera. And so it's not like what I imagine it used to be like where nobody had the book until it came out, and then it came out, right?

Kat: Yeah, it's true. I used to work as a book publicist pre-book blogging. The only one that really existed at that time was Book Slut, and it was unusual and a very big deal and the whole nature of day was just a very different beast back then, in the 1800s.

Catherine: So, You Must Remember This is a Knives Out-style whodunit with a twist of Taylor Jenkins Reid. It’s an immersive gothic mystery with a long ago love affair, icy death, and a rich family gone bad. What's your elevator pitch?

Kat: A fractured family has gathered at Christmas time on the wintry coast of Maine in this ramshackle mansion where their matriarch, Miriam Caravasios is on her way out. It's going to be her last Christmas, or at least everyone thinks so because she has dementia and she's fading fast. On Christmas Eve, in the middle of the night, Miriam slips out of the house, walks onto the frozen beach and falls to the ice and dies. And it's a terrible accident. Or was it?

Catherine: That chapter's so evocative, I could feel how cold it was and her confusion. It really drags you into the story. It's hard to talk about too much more of the details because then you start giving away twists, and I don't want this to be a spoiler-y event, but where did you get the idea for this novel?

Kat: A couple of things happened. This is my pandemic novel, which is to say that it was inspired by things that happened during the pandemic. The pandemic is not in this book; it takes place in 2014, which I did for reasons that had more to do with how old I needed everybody to be at a given time relative to this actual fire that consumed most of the state of Maine back in 1947. This book has a historical element. There's a timeline that takes place in the late twenties through the early sixties that follows Miriam as a younger woman. So I needed to frame the book around that and around this fire that's very pivotal to her long ago love affair with the man who became her husband. But that said, it was a relief to not have to talk about masking or vaccines or whatever.

Kat (cont'd): But during the pandemic, this is a little bit sad, but just a couple months into lockdown, my grandmother passed away and she was 105. It wasn't entirely a surprise but it was a very strange time to lose somebody because you couldn't do any of the things that you would do to mark a death. I inherited this painting from her, and I hung it in my home where I could see it from the couch that I sit to work on all day. I kept having this very surreal experience where I would see this painting and I would think to myself, "oh, I need to send a Grammy, a thank you note for giving me this painting." And then I would remember why I had the painting and be like, "oh, nope, nope." There is no sending thank you notes to the afterlife. Just put it out to the ether that I'm grateful instead.

Kat (cont'd): She had dementia, my grandmother did, and she and I were not particularly close, but because of the of state of her mind and her memory in the last years of her life that almost didn't matter. She did not remember anything or anyone from the past 30 years. And the interesting thing about that is that in order to have any kind of a relationship with somebody who's in that kind of mental state, you just have to meet them where they are. In my grandmother's case, it wasn't just where she was, but when—she really was kind of an internal time traveler. She had very, very vivid memories of things that had happened to her in her youth. Things she'd experienced long before my mother, her daughter, was born. What was incredible was getting to sit with her and hear stories about that time in her life because she remembered things so vividly. In maybe 1932, she had applied to be a coat check girl at the Roseland Ballroom in Chicago, and she was told that she could not have the job because she wasn't pretty enough. They said this right to her face. It was a different time. Oh my God. She was as salty about this as if it had happened last month. It was amazing

Kat (cont'd): So obviously the central relationship in this book and the mystery in this book, which is as much about Miriam's life as it is about her death, was very much inspired by my grandmother and my relationship with her, and not just what it was, but what I kind of wished that it had been. And that's really the biggest part of this novel.

Catherine: That's cool. So it is a thank you letter to the afterlife a little.

Kat: Oh, I love thinking of it that way.

Catherine: It's interesting. My grandmother lived to be 103.5. I felt like after a hundred, we should start counting in half years again like you do with babies. And she died in 2019, and my sister and I were like, thank God this didn't happen during the pandemic for exactly the reasons you talk about. And my other grandmother, who did die of Alzheimer's, the same thing happened. She was at her husband's bedside as he was dying, and she turned to my mother and said, I can help him. I'm a nurse. She had been a nurse in the Second World War. She didn't know who my mother was or even who her husband was anymore. But she remembered that sort of essential detail about her identity, something that she hadn't done for 50 or 60 years. It's so interesting, what sticks around. I always thought that the worst thing about that disease is that the person you knew is gone, even though their body's still there. There's another person in their place. That's a lot of cognitive dissonance, trying to deal with the person and the way you expect that person to behave. There's this completely new person who doesn't know that person and doesn't understand why you keep trying to make them act like that person, almost like you should give 'em a new name or something because they really are just a completely different person.

Kat: Yeah, absolutely. I felt like, for my grandmother, I was seeing glimpses of the woman that she used to be and I was lucky that that was actually a pretty fun person among other things. She was an incredible flirt, and that was very fun to be adjacent to and to witness when it happened in front of me.

Catherine: Yeah. My grandmother, who died over a hundred, her husband lived to be 97, and after he died, suddenly I heard my grandmother swear for the first time. And I was like, “Grandma, ooh, you're suddenly swearing at 99 years old.” And she said, “well, your grandfather didn't like it when I swore,” like she had repressed that they were together for 70 years. She had repressed it. Now she was going to say whatever she damn well pleased.

Kat: She needed to get it all out. That's a lot of pent up obscenity.

Catherine: It really was. So that's my letter to the afterlife. Grandma, thank you for making me laugh about your swearing. So funny. So, what is your writing process? Are you pants-er or a plotter? Do you know the end before you start? How do you go? You had this idea of this love letter to your grandmother or thank you letter to your grandmother, but what happens after that?

Kat: Where I end up getting started in a story can really be anything. My previous novel was very much inspired by this horror movie that came out in 2014. It's this very esoteric German film called Goodnight Mommy, which everybody should watch. It sounds terrifying and it absolutely is. And then there's this song by The Mountain Goats called “No Children,” which is about a horrible divorce. I was really obsessed with the lyrics of this song and the picture that it painted of a couple at odds with each other. Those two things really formed the backbone of No One Will Miss Her, which started with the twist. For You Must Remember This, there was my grandmother's death—I didn't actually get the idea for the book immediately after her death. But the first Christmas that we celebrated without her, it was Covid Christmas. It was a very, very strange holiday. I had gone back home to visit with my family and we were staying in this house that belongs to my parents, but not the house that I grew up in. I spent a lot of time walking around in this part of town that I was less familiar with and feeling I was the last person left on Earth. Nobody was out on the streets, every place felt kind of shuttered. All the businesses were closed. The house was on the Hudson River. This incredibly thick fog rolled in and stayed and sat there the entire time that we were there until I started feeling not just like I was the last person left on Earth, but the world itself didn't exist outside of whatever 20-foot radius I was currently standing in because it was just so soupy and misty. I started ruminating about the idea of the mist and memory and how we lose ourselves in the fog of our years.

Kat (cont'd): I got this idea, this image in my head, of an old woman walking out onto the frozen river in the fog and just disappearing. And that's it. Maybe you hear a splash, maybe you don't hear anything at all, but she's gone and you don't really know how or why. That image is obviously central to the very first chapter. This is where the book begins, and that's where the story spiraled out from. As is often the case, I had this thing that I then built a story around and had to discover who this was, her family, what happened to her and why. I stumbled upon the idea of having twin timelines after I had already begun the writing process. I was really struggling with this one. I was struggling with whether to make Delphine's part first or third person and struggling to get in touch with her. Tthe way that I found my way into that character was by realizing that her story lived so much in conversation with her grandmother. Delphine is the granddaughter of Miriam, who investigates her death—I don't think we talked about that yet. I ended up constructing these twin timelines. One is just the course of a couple of months when Delphine is dealing with the aftermath of her grandmother's death and starting to get suspicious that maybe it wasn't an accident. And the other is this 15-year span of Miriam's life from when she's a teenager summering in Bar Harbor to when she's an adult woman married and living in the house where her family used to spend their summers.

Kat (cont'd): I discovered that once I had those two timelines together, they knit together in this very organic way where I could end on a moment in the present and throw back to something in the past that had an echo there, an object or a family dynamic. There were all kinds of things that would recall these moments from Miriam's life that were happening in the present. That was how I ended up constructing the book. As for whether I'm a pant-ser or a plotter, I use a plot and map a loose write-through. It's less formal than an outline. It's just a big jumble of everything that happens in a given chapter, what scenes I want. Sometimes there'll be a great line in there that I want someone to say. I'll talk about character development so that I have it marked where I want to go before I actually muddle my way through it.

Catherine: That sounds pretty plotty to me.

Kat: I think it's hard to write thrillers as a pants-er; I very much admire anybody who can do it. They're so intricate. You have to make sure that you're seeding stuff in. I like to figure that out ahead of time rather than trying to do it by the skin of my teeth.

Catherine: I definitely always need to know the end and the major twists. I don't write down a detailed outline, but I'm thinking of one. I've got one in my head for sure. I mean, Stephen King says he writes without an outline. If I ever meet him, I want to challenge him on this if I can work up the courage because his books are so intricate and complicated. It's hard to believe that he does that. Coming back to your bio for a second: Stan Lee. How did that happen?

Kat: That was a very exciting bit of kismet. I was at a pivot point in my career. I had been writing young adult fiction. I wanted to try something new, and I had an opportunity through my agent to audition for this gig. Stan was writing a novel. He had a story in development with a couple of guys, Luke Reman and Ryan Silver, who were longtime friends and collaborators. They were building this whole new universe that was going to take place first and foremost in the form of Audible exclusive audiobooks. But this, a long form book, was the one thing that Stan Lee had never written. They needed somebody who had experience in that space to co-write with him. I was up against, I think, four or five dudes. It was me and a bunch of men, all of whom had a background in either science fiction writing or comic book writing or action, Star Wars books, that kind of thing. And then there was me, the young adult mystery and thriller writer. As it turned out, they decided that they had enough geeks on this project, enough nerds, and also enough testosterone. So I was able to work my way in there. It was an amazing experience.

Catherine: That's so cool. And did it see a light of day?

Kat: A Trick of Light? Yeah, yeah. It was released in, I want to say, 2018, and the audiobook hit The New York Times bestseller list. It was super exciting. I got to go to Comic Con, very exciting. I partied with actors. It was super great.

Catherine: Did you get to wear a superhero costume? Do you have an action figure?

Kat: I do actually own the Captain Marvel spandex onesie. It's just so cool.

Catherine: That's a very cool experience. So not quite ghost writing, but—

Kat: Yeah, it was really a collaborative effort. And Stan had remarkable energy for a man who was in his mid-nineties at the time. He was really fascinated by getting to play with this story that took place in digital space, which was also kind of a new thing. He and I share a mutual fascination with the internet. It was just an exciting and productive collaboration.

Catherine: That's very cool. A memory to cherish. You Must Remember This is also described as a gothic mystery. I sometimes struggle a bit with what that means. Does it just mean set in a creepy house or do you think it's something deeper than that?

Kat: I think that the first person to call it gothic was not me. And I was like, that sounds good. Let's go with that. I do like to think about what qualifies as a gothic story and why. And I think the big thing is that yes, it's set in a creepy house, but that the house is in itself a character. The big thing with gothic story— I'm thinking of things like Rebecca or The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle—they have a great sense of place.

Catherine: Definitely. And a sense of foreboding from the sense of place, too. The sense of place itself is what contributes to that sense of foreboding and that something else is going on.

Kat: Yes, absolutely. There's a sense that after the story ends, whatever is going on with the characters, whatever happened to them, whatever will happen to them, stuff is still going on in that house, whatever house it is.

Catherine: You mentioned before that part of the book takes place in the forties, I believe. Did that require a lot of research on your part? Personally, I write contemporary fiction, so I keep my research to a minimum. How did you find dealing with that weaving in the past?

Kat: It was damned difficult. I stumbled backwards into this historical plot line. It was not something I had done before. The thing about that is not just that, yes, it requires a lot of research, but gosh, you can really fall down just the most ridiculous internet rabbit holes. I spent I don't even want to admit how many hours of my life just trying to figure out what kind of bathing suit Miriam would've worn in 1946 when she was 17 years old. I spent a lot of time looking at vintage bathing suits online. Might’ve bought one for myself, I will neither confirm nor deny, but it was really cool to stick a toe into this world of the past that obviously I can't write from experience. It's as much about trying to imagine what it would've been like as it was to research other people's accounts of what it was like. That was a really fun challenge. If nothing else, I definitely did take liberties with some of the history. I include this in the acknowledgements alongside my thank you to the Bar Harbor Historical Society, to say that there are definitely things in here that are not real. And that's because I also, in addition to capturing certain elements of history, made a bunch of stuff up.

Catherine: I studied history in undergrad and it always struck me that, you might read something from 200, 300 years ago and it would sound way more contemporary in a lot of ways than you'd think it might. And other times you'd stumble across something where you're like, what are they talking about? Sometimes translating that contemporary stuff is hard because we expect it to be different. It's sort of that difference between book real and real, so that people will still buy that it happened even if people did curse in the same way that we did. We don't think about it that way because movies set in that time period don't have curse words in them or somebody says them differently. Have you had somebody write to you to tell you that's not how that would have been, that’s not how somebody would've talked or that's not how they would've said X, Y, or Z?

Kat: Not yet. Hopefully that won't happen. I did take pains to make sure that I was using the proper lingo. Another one of the rabbit holes that I went down was trying to figure out exactly when the expression “having your head up your own ass” was coined. Turns out that it's pretty ancient. So I was okay there. But yeah, if I got it wrong, I'll be interested to hear from folks, but hopefully I didn't.

Catherine: Well, if you're obsessed with the internet, you know that whether you're wrong or not, and whether they're right or not has nothing to do with what people's opinions might be and how they might express them on the internet.

Kat: That is also true.

Catherine: Yes. The actual facts and being on the right side is not required. Thinking about “gothic” and atmosphere, can you talk about how you create a sense of place and mood?

Kat: Yeah, this is one of my favorite things. So for me, and I think it's probably different for everybody, but for me, the big thing is when you're talking about a setting, when you're trying to make it real on the page, you talk about how things look, you talk about sounds, you have to talk about how things smell. It's very important to talk about how things smell. That’s my one weird trick for creating a sense of place.

Catherine: It's the magic of books. We take one sense—our eyes, or, if we're listening, our ears—and we turn it into five. The alchemy of writing is making all the senses appear. Filmmakers and songwriters have different tools than we have. I'm waiting for the audiobook that cues up the music track that goes with that particular chapter. When's that coming, right?

Kat: Oh yeah. I feel like there has been, in recent years, maybe because people have started listening more to audiobooks and to podcasts, I have a sense that the old timey radio drama is maybe making its way back. Not entirely, not exactly. But there are elements of that coming back in and it's such a fun medium to play in.

Catherine: My first book came out in 2010 and there's tons of music in it and I had a playlist, but of course there wasn't a way. I had a YouTube and iTunes playlist that people could download if they wanted, but you want that button right there. It needs to be like this meta experience. Maybe it's coming.

Kat: Oh, I'm so mad. I didn't make a playlist for this book. I made a mood board like a noob.

Catherine: Oh, that's fun. It's not too late to make a playlist.

Kat: It's true. Maybe I'll do that tonight

Catherine: Another excuse to be on the internet. What are you working on now?

Kat: I am at work on my next novel, which I can say is a sort of an erotic thriller set on the Appalachian Trail.

Catherine: Nice. I need more details.

Kat: I'm not sure that I can offer more. I think I'm just going to leave it right there. That's tantalizing, right?

Catherine: Yeah, definitely. It's funny, my next book is set in Yosemite, in the search and rescue world and the Pacific Coast Trail goes through Yosemite. So the other trail.

Kat: The research for that is a lot of fun. I assume that you're spending a lot of time Googling about deaths in the woods.

Catherine: Yes, I did. My sister and brother-in-law were search and rescue in Yosemite for five years, so I was just like, "please tell me all your insane stories about all the insane things that people do in national parks."

Kat: Oh, that's amazing.

Catherine: Have you walked any of the Appalachian Trail?

Kat: Yeah, yeah. Every summer I go to Maine and I hike a little bit of it. Usually the same portion of it. I'm obsessed with the part of it called the Hundred Mile Wilderness, which backs up to the place where I stay with my family, which is right near Borestone Mountain, if anybody is familiar with that. I grew up going to Maine. Both my sets of grandparents had homes there and my father's parents lived there towards the end of their lives, so I spent a lot of time in the state. I have fond feelings about it. I've done small town Maine, I've done the coast, and now I want to do the woods. I'm just going to make my way over the entire geography of the state eventually.

Catherine: I'm just guessing, and I'm not trying to make you talk about something you shouldn't, but have you forayed into other media, writing for TV or adapting novels or writing screenplays?

Kat: I think I can talk about this a little bit. No One Will Miss Her is currently in Hollywood being looked at. The pilot that was written by me and hopefully there will be good news to share at some point on that front.

Catherine: And was that your first time adapting your own work?

Kat: I had written a screenplay once before but this was the first time adapting something from a book to another medium. It was so fun and such a fun challenge. I definitely want to do more of that.

Catherine: It’s interesting with TV. When you're adapting a book for a movie, you need to cut away, right? Because there's too much in the book to put in the movie. But if you're writing a TV series based on a book, then you need to expand and you need to go more into some of the characters who are side characters and go down some of the rabbit holes that you left unexplored.

Kat: You let the book go, but there's always more that you wanted to do with it. And if you're writing a TV series based on it, then you get to do that more. You get to be like, yeah, I'm going to wrestle with all this stuff that I wish that I could have dealt with more. All these characters get to be built out more. We're going to hang out with them more, spend more time in that world. It’s so great.

Catherine: Personally, I've let go of my book. I know I'm done with the book because I've stopped thinking about it and I've let it go. But when I've come back to things years later to think about adapting some of my own stuff, that's when I feel like I can find the fresh stuff that I left behind. It's like, "oh yeah, how come I never thought about this?" It's almost like you're reading somebody else at that point, right?

Kat: Yeah, exactly. I think it's very important to have that distance and to approach it still from that distance once you start to dive back in to try to understand what makes it interesting to somebody who's not you.

Catherine: I've been lucky enough to have a couple of my books bid on by different people, and it's so interesting to me when they pitch to you what they like about the book and how they see it. Sometimes it's like you have four meetings and everyone says the exact same thing, but sometimes it's completely different takes and completely different comps, as they call 'em, other shows that they think it could be. And it's like, "oh, that's so interesting." That was not in my head at all.

Kat: Yeah, everybody who's talked to me about the potential adaptation of No One Will Miss Her has said something slightly different about what part of the book it is that speaks to them or where they think the meat of it is. And it's just really, really interesting to get into somebody else's head that way.

Catherine: I find that in book clubs too, or just in Q&A sometimes and people will bring up themes and things that they think about the book where I'm like, that sounds awesome. I had no idea. That was not what I was thinking about. But maybe subconsciously.

Kat: Yes.

Catherine: Question: how is writing adapting for the screen different from writing a novel?

Kat: You have to spend more time thinking about how people move around a room. What are you seeing when they're not talking? There's all of this stuff that you can put on the page and expect the reader to fill in the blanks. They'll add their own inflection. When you have actors who are going to be speaking a line, interacting with each other in a visual medium, there's just a lot more you have to think about. On the other hand, there's also a lot that is on the page that just has to be conveyed with a glance or a camera move. You have to try to manipulate the audience in a very, very different way. And that's fun. But it can be complicated if you are used to thinking of things in one way. I think that I'm lucky in that I tend to think very visually about my books, even when I'm writing them in the first place. So it's not completely unfamiliar ground for me, but there's definitely that difference.

Catherine: I think personally, another difference is that scenes in TV shows and movies are so much shorter than book scenes. They really have to be reduced down to their essence. Every word of dialogue is there for a reason. And when we talk about writing, even in novels, I always tell people, people don't need to say, "hi, how are you?" The normal niceties of conversation, you can cut past that, but even more so in scripts, it's just cut, cut, cut, cut. Did I need to say that and this or is just this enough? I think it's faster to write a script than an entire novel. I'll fight people about that.

Kat: It certainly was for me. I don't know if that's just because I was familiar with the material already. I think if I had been trying to write it from scratch, maybe it would've taken more time. But I mean, a book could take years, and a pilot, which is 60 pages and the lines are spaced very far apart—

Catherine: —and the margins are tiny. Yes. I think typically in a script there are 10,000 words and a novel is 90 to a hundred (thousand). So just that right there.

Kat: Different beast. The screenplay that I wrote a few years ago, which has never seen the light of day, was for a feature length film, and I still did that in, I don't know, four weeks or something like that. It is a faster paced medium.

Catherine: I agree. For me, way faster. I think there are some stories that fit that medium and some that fit a novel. There's just some things, particularly screenplays where, for me anyway, the idea is more condensed sometimes and I'm like, "oh yeah, that's a script." And then no, this is meatier in a different way and it needs the space of a novel. Is that something you want to get into more?

Kat: I do so much culture writing, and I love that. It's a completely different part of my brain, but one that I think is very useful to my work as a novel writer. I find that some of the stuff that I tackle when I write about culture inevitably sticks and then makes its way into my books in a way that is fun for me. I would like to clone myself so that I could do all of the things. If it comes down to one or the other, I would stick with keeping a foot in the world of journalism and social criticism instead.

Catherine: It gives you your more direct access to the internet.

Kat: That is also true. Yeah. I'm just an internet junkie. That's basically all this is.

Catherine: I mean, we all are at this point. I don't know about that screen time feature on Apple, which I still have not managed to disable, but I do not look every time it sends it to me. It's terrifying.

Kat: They tell you your screen time went up every week. At some point you're going to max out.

Catherine: Exactly. I always like to ask people what they're reading. So what are you reading right now?

Kat: Actually, I'm really, really looking forward to cracking open something that I bought and have been holding for a time when I have a lot of spare time to just dive into something. It's called Long Bright River. I don't remember who wrote it anymore. It's a book that's a few years old, but it's a thriller. It's a police procedural with a female detective, which I always like.

Catherine: Liz Moore.

Kat: Yeah.

Catherine: Great cover.

Kat: I read a lot of non-fiction for work because I'm asked to review books. So I just finished this book, Butts by Heather Radke. It's a cultural history of the butt. Awesome. Incredibly fun. I had certain objections to the book, which I wrote about in my review. But overall very compelling. If you want to know about butts, definitely check out Butts.

Catherine: Is it a Mary Roach kind of approach to things?

Kat: No, it really centers on analyzing butts ultimately through a racial lens. There's quite a lot there, but I think that in doing so, the book ultimately missed the opportunity to be more well-rounded, so to speak.

Catherine: Did you get to keep all your puns in your original text?

Kat: There were a lot of puns in there. I'm happy to say that the final product still had a lot of puns in it. Some of them left on the cutting room floor, but that's the nature of the beast.

Catherine: Nice. We live for puns obviously. Are you going out on tour? Can people find you in other events if they want to hear more from you the next couple days or weeks?

Kat: Yeah, I'm doing some podcasting. I'm not going anywhere because it's Connecticut and it's January and the idea of trying to fit a book tour in at this moment just seemed a little daunting. I will, however, be doing an event called The Reason Speakeasy hanging out with Nick Gillespie in New York City talking about my novel writing, my culture writing. I think he wants to talk about Butts. Everyone wants to talk about Butts. That's on February 6th. It's a Monday. I don't remember the exact location but it's in midtown Manhattan and I've posted a link to it on my Twitter feed. I'm on Twitter, @katrosenfield, just my name. And if you are interested in attending that there will be beer and wine, books, and Butts discussion. Would love to see some folks.

Catherine: Yeah, please join the event. Thank you for being here. Thank you also to Likewise for hosting this event.

Kat: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Catherine: All right, thanks everyone. Have a good night.

If you liked this, make sure to give our past Likewise Q&A event transcripts with authors Kate Clayborn and Alice Hoffman.

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