Karen Odden's interest in the Victorian era goes back to her New York University doctoral dissertation, which explored how the medical, parliamentary, and literary representations of nineteenth-century railway disasters helped to create a discourse out of which Freud and others fashioned their ideas of “trauma.”Her first book, A Lady in the Smoke, was a USA Today Bestseller and won the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona award for eBook Fiction.
Odden's new novel is A Dangerous Duet.
From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: You've noted that your father was a pianist. How did you end up creating your character Nell, a pianist in 19th-century London?Visit Karen Odden's website.
A: There’s not a tidy answer to that one, honestly. I’d say the impulse came from a few different strands of thought and memory.
First, my father was a fine pianist, and so piano was always part of my life as a child. After he died in 2012, it sharpened my memories of him playing piano in our living room.
We had a goldenrod carpet (it was the ‘70s) and sometimes I would lie underneath the piano, listening to the disembodied notes coming through the air, and watching my father’s feet in their Hush Puppies as they moved among the three pedals.
I wasn’t ever close to my father, who was rather a loner, engaged in collecting model cars and trains, reading his books, and photographing the sights he saw on trips he took alone.
But after his death, which stemmed from his Type 1 diabetes, I realized that his diabetes in many ways shaped and defined his childhood; while his older brothers could play football and baseball, my father couldn’t, and so piano became his companion, and music a significant way of communicating.
This suggested to me some ways that my heroine Nell’s interactions with...[read on]
Coffee with a Canine: Karen Odden and Rosy.
The Page 69 Test: A Lady in the Smoke.
My Book, The Movie: A Lady in the Smoke.
My Book, The Movie: A Dangerous Duet.
The Page 69 Test: A Dangerous Duet.
Writers Read: Karen Odden (March 2019).
--Marshal Zeringue