Katherine Heiny

My guest this week is Katherine Heiny, who I’m happy to report is as funny in person and she is on the page. When I first approached Katherine for this podcast she told me that she had 9 million insecurities but rejection wasn’t one of them, and I thought, ok, maybe she’s not right for Write-Off. But then she kept writing back over the next couple of days adding caveats and comments and it became clear that in fact she did have things to say about rejection but perhaps not things that we all usually think of.

In a way that makes a lot of sense. Katherine had her first published short story - How To Give the Wrong Impression, about a woman secretly in love with her flatmate, published in The New Yorker when she was 25 and had recently finished a writing masters at Columbia. She’s since written a short story collection that is one my favourites ever, Single Carefree Mellow, and two novels, Standard Deviation, a tender, hilarious book about marriage and parenting that Kate Atkinson called "a marvel", and her latest recently released novel, Early Morning Riser, which is also so incredibly funny, wise and warm. Katherine is very good at finding the comedy in everyday life.

But there were two decades between that precocious New Yorker success and the publication of Single Carefree Mellow - Katherine was in her forties with she became a debut author under her own name - and they were not always easy years. Katherine and I talked about how she writes jokes, writing YA under a pseudonym in her twenties, what it felt like to take years off from writing to raise her children and the meanest knock backs she’s ever had.

Just a reminder that you can find and buy books by all my guests here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

You can find me on Twitter here: @francescasteele

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