Kate Schatz, known for co-writing the New York Times bestselling author of Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book with W. Kamau Bell and the Rad Women book series, is back with her debut solo novel.
Where the Girls Were is about a promising 17-year-old in 1968 whose carefully planned future collapses when an unexpected pregnancy sends her to a home for unwed mothers. Inside the restrictive world of the maternity home, she confronts shame, limited choices, and societal judgment while finding solidarity and strength among the other girls forced into silence.
We asked Schatz to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
An impossible question! Too many to choose from! But if I have to choose I’ll go with my early core memories of the picture book A House is a House For Me by Mary Ann Hoberman. I memorized the lilting, funny rhyming narrative, and would pore over each of Betty Fraser’s intricate, whimsical, and definitely magical illustrations. Even though it was a picture book there was something about it that felt cool and grown-up and quirky in a way that I definitely aspired to be. My mom kept my copy and it was such a joy to read to my own children as well.
What book helped you through puberty?
There was really no reason for me to sneak my mom’s tattered first-edition copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves off her shelf and into my room, as I feel pretty sure she would’ve happily let me read it. But it felt illicit, which did add a certain charge to the experience of reading every single page, and closely examining each picture and diagram. I still remember reading about pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding. There were sections on relationships—it’s likely the first place I read about lesbians! And it was absolutely my introduction to abortion: what it was, why people might seek one, and what happened before they were legal. I still remember staring at the image of the naked woman who’d died from an illegal procedure. It horrified and haunted and also radicalized me, and it definitely influenced me as I was writing Where the Girls Were.
Honorable mention to my mom’s copy of Anais Nin’s erotic classic Delta of Venus, which I also snuck off the shelf (and was helpful and fascinating in a very different kind of way!), as well as YA novels like Where Has Deedie Wooster Been All These Years (very obscure, from the 70s, I found a copy at a thrift store when I was probably 11 and I read it a million times) and every single one of Lois Lowry’s absolutely perfect Anastasia Krupnik books (those books literally introduced me to the following: feminism, Freud, iambic pentameter, Rachmaninoff, and Gertrude Stein. Pivotal!)
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
I thought about this for a while and it led to a nice realization: during my senior year of high school and my first year of college, when I was indeed 18 years old, I was exposed to a pretty stunning selection of foundational literature—via high school teachers and then college professors, cool older friends, and my own library explorations. The books I encountered during that time were quite literally transformative. In high school I remember reading The Monkeywrench Gang, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, On Civil Disobedience, The Things They Carried, East of Eden, The Joy Luck Club, and The Collected Stories of Raymond Carver. And then I got to UC Santa Cruz and it was GAME ON. In my first year alone I read books that 100% changed my brain and my life: Morrison’s Beloved and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. I read Angela Davis for the first time (Women, Race & Class). I read Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own). I read A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and I also read contemporary Chicana feminist texts like This Bridge Called My Back and Loving In the War Years. I read Adrienne RIch, I read Audre Lorde, I read bell hooks, I read Grace Paley. When I reflect on this and type it all out it’s pretty wild to realize the degree to which these texts, read during such a formative intellectual and social and emotional time, influenced me. They are absolutely why I am the writer and thinker that I am today. Good job, 18 year old me! And THANK YOU TEACHERS!
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
This answer is a bit of a cop-out because answering that feels really impossible and overwhelming but also it’s true: it would be an ever-changing syllabus, because I do believe that there is so much Damn Good Writing out there, and I think it’s important to constantly be finding and experiencing and learning about Damn Good Writing and the Damn Good Writers who are making it happen. It’s boring and stodgy to have the same old examples of Good Writing when there’s such a vast world of it out there. But ok fine one maybe the one recurring text will be Syllabus by Lynda Barry because it is the most brilliant and weird and perfect approach to accessing and freeing your creativity. That, and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. And Stein’s Tender Buttons. Wait, also Charlotte’s Web. Oh, and We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler…See, this is why I can’t be asked this question!
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The most important books have been the non-fiction ones that grounded the novel in the sociopolitical and historical context that I needed in order to fully imagine the world of the novel: The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler; When Abortion Was a Crime by Leslie J Reagan; and Wake Up, Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade by Rickie Solinger. I learned so much from each of these books, and am so appreciative of the critical, scholarly, and sociological work that these authors do.
What books are on your nightstand now?
My wife and I just moved our whole bedroom around, so our book situation is a bit of a mess. The giant pile of books that was on my nightstand before is now a stack on the floor next to the nightstand, but currently on the nightstand are the following: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (finally reading! Loving!); Aqua by Chiara Barzini (BRILLIANT! Also she’s my best friend 🙂 Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (haven’t read, a friend loaned it to me and says it’s weird and I’ll like it); Joyride by Susan Orlean (holiday gift from my mom, and a delight to read); Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (I love it so so much); The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavich (a perennial re-read); Sacrament by Susan Straight (stunning, riveting, beautiful); The White Hot by Quiara Alegria Hudes (can’t wait to read!); the first “Tales of the City” book by Armistead Maupin (a fun re-read for research purposes); The Essential CD Wright (I always like to have poetry next to my bed); and, of course, an arc of my own novel.