July 31, 2026
Good Company, by Kate Christensen
Kate Christensen’s new novel is a reckoning, and also a memoir disguised as a novel about a memoir. And as a novel Good Company is terrifically odd, but still most compelling, taking place over a weekend in which Julia Heimdahl, a midcareer writer in her 50s (whose biography resembles the author’s), attends a writers’ festival at her alma mater in the Pacific Northwest. She’s just published a memoir, which compiles her life’s most complicated relationships—with her difficult mother, her father who she witnessed beating her mother, old friends, boyfriends, her ex-husband, her new partner who’s a musician 20 years her junior. And she’s placed on a panel with a noted biographer who has recently published a memoir of his own, the vibes between them just a little off, which might have something to do with the allegations of historical sexual abuse that are on the verge of breaking.
The novel moves between encounters throughout the festival weekend—which end up resembling scenes from “This is Your Life,” past figures from Julia’s life most conveniently stepping into the story to have conversations that are conspicuously relevant to the novel’s central themes and ideas (it’s weird, but it works!) about gender, power, narrative, truth—and excerpts from Julia’s memoir. The latter underlines the ways in which Julia has made a point of being a cool girl throughout her life, someone who keeps up with the guys, who can write like a man (and also drink like one). And by the time Julia is telling her story now, she’s had enough therapy and reflection to understand how her difficult childhood helped to make her this way, but she’s not far enough along to know she can change.
Over the weekend, however, Julia begins to question her own complicity and complacency when it comes to terrible and/or predatory men, to acknowledge her own vulnerability, and confront the mixed messages she’s been receiving throughout her life about strength and power and femininity. Some of the literary figures in this novel are thinly disguised, which makes Good Company an especially juicy read, but it’s also powerful, moving, and incredibly profound.
PS I’ve been reading Christensen for a long time now, originally inspired by Maud Newton’s enthusiasm for her work. All these years later, it’s sometimes easy to forget how foundational Maud Newton’s blog was to me as an aspiring writer/literary person, a window into a world then that seemed so far away from mine.
