Interviews

Unavoidable and Unsettling Intimacy: A Conversation with Katie Kitamura, BOMB

“Maybe I also wanted to write about the grief that comes with not feeling at home in your body, about how your body can dictate the shape of your home.”

The Impossible Desire, Guernica

“A colleague once asked Montei what could possibly tie the subjects of motherhood and rape culture together. She answered: ‘Our bodies.’”

Adoption, motherhood, and female desire since overturning Roe v. Wade, Lucy Writers

“What Immediate Family is critical of is not adoption itself, but the narratives of white saviorism that have formed around it, in literature and in public discourse. We’re seeing this narrative rise again now with the religious right around abortion bans and the suggestion that adoption is a plausible solution to forced pregnancy.”

Immediate Family Book Club, goop

“Immediate Family is a novel that’s wary of redemptive tales, so I will be, too. I didn’t write the book to improve or save our relationship or our story. I wrote it to tell what I hope can feel like a more universal story about the many ways we make a family.”

Diverging from the Adoption Narrative, ZYZZYVA

“I think the book is scratching at all the parts of motherhood that never seem to fit into a neat category. The waiting for a child, the yearning for a child, all the work done to get there—I think is part of motherhood, too.”

Essays

Reclaiming the Infertile Body, Slate

“I thought about the term forced pregnancy, except in my case I was the enforcer, my body separate from the decision, without agency.”

What Will the Literature of Motherhood Look Like After COVID? Lit Hub

“I’m wondering if COVID will turn the motherhood literature into something else, something less about art and ambivalence and more on the loneliness born of this time. I’m wondering how it might change the shape of the American family.”

7 Books About Women in Purgatory, Electric Literature

“Maybe it’s no surprise then that I’m drawn to fiction that operates in some kind of middle space, with hope functioning as a central tension, a prayer whispering through the page that the character might pass through to someplace better by the end.”

Immediate Family Playlist, Largehearted Boy

“Then in 2019, music found its way into my writing life. I sold my first book and had my first baby within the same six-week period.”

Of Course By Now You Know This Story, Catapult magazine

“I felt I didn’t own the resulting anger entirely, and instead put it away, shoved down those deep pockets of near misses.”

On Fear, Fourteen Hills

“Fiction is the secure warehouse where it’s acceptable to put a lethal plan into action and see what happens when you set it all loose.”

Fiction

Auntie, ZYZZYVA

2017 Notable Mention, Best American Nonrequired Reading

"That summer my mother changed the sheets, buttered a fresh duvet on the bed, and said my room belonged to Auntie now. The new duvet was a morose gray-blue, and with my pink one removed the space was no longer a girl's room, but appeared as our summer sky did in the evenings, when the fog came to collect at dusk, shooing away the heat and sunshine and pleasures, making all the children on the street trudge home for dinner and sweatshirts."

Terrorphobia, Fourteen Hills

Winner of the Bambi Holmes Award

"It is a good question, probing how far one's sympathy should stretch. Where, if rubber-banded overseas, would the American psyche snap? At which point does it simply extend too far?"

We Sex, The Atlas Review 

"Why were we in such a hurry to know about our bodies, the scents and sounds and squish of strangers? We thought: strength in numbers. We thought: we would protect each other. We think sex is stranger now that we know what it is."