Pay attention! Your Next Novel Can Come From Anywhere

Katie Crouch

“Embassy Wife” author

Pay attention. Your next novel can come from anywhere. 

I wrote Embassy Wife mainly because baboons broke into my house. 

Let’s back up. My husband, Peter, won a Fulbright to Namibia in 2015 to teach at the University of Namibia. At the time we were living in San Francisco. We are both writers, but I had taken some years off, because we had two kids and I just couldn’t do it all. 

Anyway, Peter came home one day and said, “Hey, I got the fellowship for next year!” I’d always vaguely wanted to live in Sub-Saharan Africa, so I thought, why not? 

At this time, we unexpectedly got pregnant with our second child.  I’ve always been an adventurous traveler, so I had this big idea of arriving with a newborn strapped to my chest and driving a Land Rover to see the elephants. Needless to say, things did not happen this way. 

I think if I hadn’t just had a baby, I would have been more mentally prepared to adjust to this new life, but I sort of decompensated as soon as I arrived. It was 104 degrees, our house was once grand, but now had no furniture and was swarming with mosquitos because of a dilapidated pool. Almost everything was closed: we learned Namibia shuts down for most of January. I was sweaty and leaking milk, and I was seriously ready to kill everyone.

So there I was, feeling seriously sorry for myself, and we decided to get out of the house and go see some animals. In many countries in Africa you can go on something called a “game drive”, meaning you can go to a reserve and buy a seat on a jeep, and a ranger will drive around and look for oryx, rhinos, hornbills…anything. This immediately became my favorite thing to do, ever. My baby‘s seat was tied into the Land River with a rope, and we were bouncing all around, chasing elephants. And at the end you get a Gin & Tonic. It’s the bee’s knees.

I was trying to breastfeed, because if you don’t, as everyone knows, your child will grow up to be a serial killer. But I also was secretly supplementing with fancy formula from Whole Foods, so I had brought all these cans with us from the States, and I thought of them as pure gold and irreplaceable. (They do have formula in Namibia, by the way. I was just being a spoiled idiot.)

When we got back from the drive, the house was wrecked. Ransacked. Cabinets opened, food everywhere. We thought we’d been robbed, but no money or electronics were taken. Only…the formula. Baboons had broken in, taken the cans, and carried them off onto the veld for an organic powdered milk feast. 

I had two options. I could either go mad or start writing all of this down. So I noted all of the things that I was being “American” about, the things that really made me cringe when I heard myself say them. And boom, I had this absurd character who tries to create a little United States wherever she goes.  Persephone. She’s not the protagonist, but she is the main character, and she really drove the book. 

Many humorists⎯myself included, have a history of depression⎯so finding the absurd is a manner of survival. I was not in a great place when I started Embassy Wife, but by the end of the project I had a true love of Namibia and I had fallen in love with my cast of characters. I think that’s really important when you’re writing a long book, even if they’re jerks. It’s like family, isn’t it? You’re going to be with these people for a while, so find something that makes you laugh. 

I teach writing, so I’ve seen things that work, and things that don’t in terms of starting novels. I had a lot of students come into my office and say, “OK, I’m gonna write a novel, it’s about this guy, I don’t know where he’s from.  But he’s in a (band/cult/gang) and he has this idea that he wants to (blow up the world/steal a billion dollars) and I’ve got every bit plotted! Un, no, I don’t know how he is. It’s not important.”  

They have a ton of energy and plot love and they go for it but they give up because they don’t care about the character. I really think character is everything. Know who’s telling the story, so when you get stuck, you can ask them what’s next. 

I realize, now that I’m reading all of this, that it sounds like I spend most of my time talking to imaginary people in my head. Well, I do. That’s the job, pretty much. Try it! The louder they’re talking, the better off you are.

—

Katie Crouch is the New York Times bestselling author of Girls in Trucks. Her other novels include Men and Dogs, two young adult novels, and Abroad, a literary thriller set in Italy. Julia Glass wrote of Abroad: With uncanny psychological precision and a dark, dead-on wit, Katie Crouch explores how the casual follies of youth all too quickly turn tragic”

Katie covered the Amanda Knox appeal for Slate magazine, and has also written for The Guardian, the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Salon, and she has a regular column on The Rumpus called “Missed.” A MacDowell fellow, Crouch teaches at San Francisco State University and lives in Bolinas, California with Peter Orner and their daughter Phoebe.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/KatieACrouch

EMBASSY WIFE

A wickedly irresistible novel.”―Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar

In Katie Crouch’s thrilling novel Embassy Wife, two women abroad search for the truth about their husbands―and their country.

Meet Persephone Wilder, a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia. Persephone takes her job as a representative of her country seriously, coming up with an intricate set of rules to survive the problems she encounters: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not to look drunk at embassy functions, and how to eat roasted oryx with grace. She also suspects her husband is not actually the ambassador’s legal counsel but a secret agent in the CIA. The consummate embassy wife, she takes the newest trailing spouse, Amanda Evans, under her wing.

Amanda arrives in Namibia mere weeks after giving up her Silicon Valley job so her husband, Mark, can have his family close by as he works on his Fulbright project. But once they’re settled in the sub-Saharan desert, Amanda sees clearly that Mark, who lived in Namibia two decades earlier, has other reasons for returning. Back in the safety of home, the marriage had seemed solid; in the glaring heat of the Kalahari, it feels tenuous. And the situation grows even more fraught when their daughter becomes involved in an international conflict and their own government won’t stand up for her.

How far will Amanda go to keep her family intact? How much corruption can Persephone ignore? And what, exactly, does it mean to be an American abroad when you’re not sure you understand your country anymore?

Propulsive and provocative, Embassy Wife asks what it means to be a human in this world, even as it helps us laugh in the face of our own absurd, seemingly impossible states of affairs.

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