Katie Kitamura
speaker
35 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Katie Kitamura’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
you know, that is a canon that you're writing against, but it's also a canon that kind of can bore you along as well. I'm thinking about even a film like Rosemary's Baby. There's so many great horror films that have been set in New York. That sense of alienation, that sense of slight remove and otherness, the sense of something bubbling under the surface, that's very much a New York story.
And so when I was thinking about this novel, I found myself thinking about horror as a genre the most probably.
I mean, horror is an interesting genre in that the moments that are frightening are often not when the monster appears, but all of the moments leading up to it when you don't really know what you're waiting for. You know, I think once you see the monster, you say, ah, there's a monster or whatever it is that you've been building. But the true tension of horror is always in the waiting.
And I think this is a kind of novel where there is a lot of that waiting, maybe more than in any of the previous books. The other thing I would say is that, of course, the kind of key moment in the novel is when the central character suddenly has this realization that she herself might be the problem. She might be the monster, so to speak, within the family.
And so when I think about horror, when I think about, you know, who is the kind of monster that's out there, it's not a kind of moment of violence. It's not a moment of kind of violence. some discovery of something horrible. It's actually the moment is finding that she herself is a problem in this story.
Yeah, I love workplace novels. Yeah. And the workplaces are really interesting. Interesting space. I mean, okay, less now, I think, because so much is remote. But it's a physical space that has so many very particular rules and cultures and subcultures and subcultures below the subcultures. And navigating a workplace, it seems to me, just full of fascinating interpersonal experiences.
tensions and dynamics. But of course, I'm mostly interested in workplace novels because I think one of the things that novels excel at is depicting the relationship between the individual and a larger social structure. And that is what makes novels special. That is what makes novels different to essays, for example.
And I think workplace is a place where you very naturally see the relationship between the individual and the institution. Because whatever the workplace is, it is representative of an institution of some kind. It will tell you about some kind of structural reality about the society that the characters are living in.
And it allows you the opportunity to do it through really granular detail, through very, very small things that seem insignificant, whether it is... The quality of the coffee in the break room or whether or not people feel they're surveyed when they're working or what the sight lines are from somebody's desk to another desk or how the office space is organized.
There are so many ways in which hierarchies of power are built into a workspace. And as a novelist, you then don't have to say hierarchies of power and you don't have to say social structures or institutions. You can just have a character who's at their desk working and is aware that their boss can see their screen. for example.
You know, Audition was written... Broadly speaking, during the Biden administration and during the pandemic, you know, this is clearly not a pandemic novel. And yet it is a novel in which people are sequestered in rooms together with their family and they slowly go a bit crazy. So there's no, you know, there's no there's not a single mask. There's no reference to the pandemic, but it's written.
It draws from the atmosphere in which it was written. Yeah. It was finished well before the election. The power of fantasy is something that is relevant, politically speaking. As I said, I teach, and I remember the day after the election, my students came in and they said, you know, what is the point of a novel right now? You know, we should have all trained to be lawyers.
And I mean, I don't disagree. I think it would be great if we all had legal skills. That seems like a useful skill set to have right now. But I actually think. that novels and writing in general feels incredibly important because it is already clear in the new administration that language is going to be a terrain where a substantial part of this battle is going to be fought.
And I mean that absolutely, literally, in terms of what language people are allowed to use, in terms of how language is manipulated or denuded of meaning. And I think what writers do or can try to do is to use language with precision and care and use language in a way so that it does retain its meaning.
I think when words stop meaning what they're meant to mean, then in a lot of ways we're in trouble. Katie, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Showing 21–35 of 35 · page 2 of 2
← Previous