.Trouble’s A-Brewin’

Kate Christensen assesses BFFs.

Sex is lots of things to lots of people, and sometimes
— just sometimes — it leads to trouble. In Kate
Christensen
‘s new novel, fortysomething married-with-child
Manhattan psychotherapist Josie realizes while flirting casually with a
man at a party that she aches to unhitch from her husband. Meanwhile
the media is savaging her best college pal, indie rock-star Raquel, for
sleeping with a much-younger man whose partner is pregnant. And that’s
why its title is Trouble.

Inspiration for the book came to Brooklyn-based Christensen during a
2006 visit to Mexico City: “Walking around the city, hanging out in
cantinas, hearing music, going to art openings, I was struck by the
idea of two longtime middle-aged female friends, both in a lot of
trouble in their lives, meeting in Mexico City to offer each other
moral support, escape, and a return to their lost, younger selves,”
says the author, who will be at Diesel (5433 College Ave.,
Oakland) on Thursday, July 2.

That sprawling sea of cars, curio shops, and cathedrals seemed the
perfect setting for such a story because in both looks and spirit it’s
light years away from slick Manhattan and also from Los Angeles, which
Christensen describes as a realm of “eternal youth, celebrity culture,
and life in the public eye.” By contrast, “Mexico City is a Catholic,
colonial, vast city built on Aztec ruins; it is a place of both
elemental ever-present death and wild, untrammeled life. Things happen
in Mexico City; both life and death are constant and powerful there.
It’s a very good place to go to shake something loose, to overcome
psychic stasis or paralysis.”

With crucifixes everywhere you look, Mexico City brings up memories
— and sexual guilt — for Catholic-school alumna Josie
and half-Latina Raquel. Assessing their present and past and the
shifting meanings of intimacy in their lives, the pair cannot help but
revisit the fits and starts of their own long bond. Writing about
female friendship appealed to Christensen, whose previous novel The
Great Man
won a 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award, “because of a very painful
misunderstanding I had had with my own best friend: a rift that, once
healed, brought to my consciousness the fact that there are no formal
codified structures for female friendship, no commitment or breakup
ceremonies, no structures in place for intervention during times of
crisis, such as friendship therapy.” (Now there’s a worthy
career choice for psych majors.) “Close female friendship is a
relationship that often goes as deep as, or deeper than, marriage or
family, but which has no rights or rules. I wanted to write about this
in a direct, visceral, emotional way.”

Each of Christensen’s novels, she says, “has begun as the idea of a
character, developed into a distinct narrative voice, and unfolded from
there; I hear them talking, and then I allow them to start narrating
their story through me. Not channeling exactly — more like
taking on a persona.” 7 p.m., free. Diesel.Booksense.com

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