A warm welcome to author Anna Veriani who is joining us today to talk about new release “The Winter Quarters”.
How Keeping up with the Kardashians Inspired My Book
Back in 2016, the seed that would become The Winter Quarters was planted into my head: I watched my first—and for years, my only—episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians. I didn’t know anything about the Kardashians, and the only one I could name was Kim. The experience was surreal: A parade of beautiful women crying crocodile tears for the camera, nibbling on croissants by pool sides, languishing in luxury. I’ve never been good with faces and they all looked too similar to tell apart—but one of them was not like the others. Deep in the dark recesses of Kim’s private movie theater was a man who seemed to wish the cameras would just leave him alone. I never caught his name, but Kim and Kim’s mom kept confiding into the camera, “He’s doing a lot better than before,” and “I really think he’s going to be okay. He just needed to rest.”
I didn’t know who he was. His scenes were odd precisely because they felt real: an acknowledgement of mental health issues on the fakest show I’d ever seen. It never dawned on me he might be related to the rest of the cast. I concluded he was a crew intern the Kardashians had sort of informally adopted for PR reasons.
Even weeks later, I couldn’t stop thinking about the random man who lives in Kim Kardashian’s house. I wanted to figure out his story, and finally someone told me I must have seen Rob Kardashian, the introverted brother trapped in America’s most extroverted family.
He became, weirdly, the inspiration for Kai Ledging, my book’s hero. I kept imagining: What would it be like to live in a fame empire, inheriting an enormous about of money and privilege, when you were simply ill-suited for it? What if you wanted to get out but had no choice to stay, because the TV show you despised was also your family’s job?
I still don’t know much about Rob, but I googled his name just now, and the first headline says, “Rob Kardashian hasn’t been seen in public for more than 800 days—where is he?”
That headline could just as easily be about Kai. Desperate to get away from his family’s fame, Kai travels halfway around the world to his childhood best friend’s family inn. As a new hashtag—#whereiskai—trends online, he’s deep in a rural Japanese winter, figuring out where he really belongs. <3
Anna Veriani was born with a deep love of queer lit and .99¢ New York pizza slices. After graduating from NYU with a degree in East Asian Studies, she set sail for Ishikawa, Japan. Now she spends her days writing by the river and dreaming of opening an expat pizzeria.
Author website: https://www.annaveriani.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/annaveriani
Author newsletter: eepurl.com/gnHGGn