Katharine Weber grew up in New York City and has lived in rural Connecticut since 1976, when she married the cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber. (They have two daughters and a grandson.) She also spends parts of the year in West Cork, Ireland, and in London. She is the author of five previous novels and a memoir.Weber's new novel is Still Life With Monkey.
From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: You write that part of the inspiration for your new novel was a friend of yours who was injured in an accident. How did you come up with the characters of Duncan and Laura?Visit Katharine Weber's website.
A: In writing about the profound effects a spinal cord injury can have on a life, thinking about the before and after of such a traumatic event, I recognized early in the process of planning the narrative that an accident and its aftermath inevitably have a huge impact on the people in that person’s life, especially partners and siblings.
For the novel to have emotional resonance, there had to be conflict between Duncan’s ambivalence about living this new life and at least one other person, someone who desperately wants him to choose to keep living. There is no emotional velocity if a character wants something and there’s nobody else in the story to share or oppose the want.
Virginia Woolf once wrote in her diary, “I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.” Life is other people, other characters.
I have always been drawn to fiction that portrays the complexity and nuance of marriages of long duration, and I count...[read on]
The Page 99 Test: Triangle.
The Page 69 Test: True Confections.
The Page 99 Test: The Memory of All That.
Writers Read: Katharine Weber.
My Book, The Movie: Still Life With Monkey.
--Marshal Zeringue