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The novelist and art criticKatie Kitamura suggested we meet at David Zwirner gallery on 19th Street.
Wylie was anointed an art star late in life, decades after shed had children.
I love that shes unfazed, Kitamura said.
The same thing could be said about Kitamura.
She writes about inertia, insecurity, equivocation, and alienationtopics not known to send novels flying off shelves.
By night, she wonders whether her boyfriend is ghosting her and why her friend is acting weird.
Although she now lives in Brooklyn, her last two novels have been set in Europe.
(He was acquitted.
Fictionalized versions of both the court and Gbagbo feature in the text.)
you might sit in on almost everything, Kitamura said.
The interpreters her primary point of interest were located above the courtroom in glass booths.
Before I got there, I had an image of the interpreter as a self-effacing presence, Kitamura said.
Instead, they were confident, garrulous people who operated well under pressure.
They were, in other words, performers.
A professional mourner only works if you believe its real, Kitamura said.
But you know its fake because youre paying them to do it.
That suspension of disbelief is interesting to me.
Even in a relationship, she said, youre performing a version of yourself.
Kitamuras husband is thenovelist Hari Kunzru, and the couple live in Brooklyn with their two children.
Every time I read one of his books, Im like, Youre so smart!
Its not as though Id forgotten.
We wandered up to the High Line, where we sat on a bench.
Neither of us had been there in nearly a decade and couldnt believe the altered landscape.
Had it always been surrounded by luxury residence versions ofStar Trekspacecraft?
We watched a teenager glued to an iPhone zombie-walk behind her parents.
For Kitamura, it came down to the first-person voice.
I resisted first person for a long time because I dislike the authority of it.
The trick, she found, was to fashion her narrators into deconstruction machines.
No cliffhangers, but plenty of steep hills to climb down.
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