A Word from Kate

I am living in a very beautiful, very serene part of the country, where osprey dive for their dinner and herons stalk their prey against a setting sun that puts all agitation to rest. It is a quiet, idyllic place where I am able to write, and read, and think. To wit, I am working on my third book, which I am calling The Irish House, a novel loosely based on my experience of having lived in Galway on and off for four years. I think of it as a kind-of psychological thriller, but it is also the story of the price that must be paid when passion is misunderstood. The writing process is often interrupted by friends, who love good conversation, good wine, and good binoculars. I welcome these interruptions, as friendship to me is a kind-of extraordinary privilege, one I have enjoyed all my life.

Conversation can grow heated, as it did last week when Roe was overturned. My closest friends are Democrats, and when their fundamental rights as citizens are threatened the craic can suddenly veer into dangerous waters – “boisterous” waters, as my friend John Delancie would say. The talk grows in volume and intensity, the evening attenuates, there is nothing left but darkness and candles and wine…and passionate whispers about who we should be at this point in the history of time, who we yearn to be, the primitive ideologies that thwart and delay and, ultimately, destroy.

After which, I retreat to my room and study the stack of books I bought last week while in London doing press for the UK roll-out of Paramount+. Drunk with jetlag, I staggered into Hatchard’s on Piccadilly and within 30 minutes had acquired enough loot to hold me for the summer: two by the inimitable Kinglsey Amis: The Old Devils and One Fat Englishman, What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forche, Good Morning, Midnight by the superb and tragic Jean Rhys, Alien Hearts by Guy De Maupassant, The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich and, lastly, (glowering at me from its perch in my study) Ulysses, by that incomparable Irishman, James Joyce. I recognize that this last is ambitious for a summer read, but then – why not? A young Harvard senior, ablaze with intelligence and guileslessness, said to me over a particularly good spaghetti Bolognese, “Oh, you haven’t lived until you’ve read Ulysses!”

So, there is writing and reading and cooking and friends and late night watching of television which, depending on my mood, can vacillate between Borgen and The Offer on Netflix, to Yellowstone and 1883 on Paramount+ and, of course, my own contributions: Star Trek: Prodigy and The Man Who Fell To Earth on Paramount+. I am thoroughly enjoying voicing Janeway and her many incarnations on Prodigy and loved playing Drew Finch on The Man Who Fell To Earth, created and helmed by Alex Kurtzman, who knows how to tell an epic story.

I am thinking that tonight I will make Greek meatballs and maybe some Israeli couscous tossed with black olives and feta, and I will set the table outside under that Impressionist sky, and a few of us will gather and lift our glasses to each other and…to the beauty of what we cannot know.