Abandoning a sociable San Francisco of ‘LSD on rooftops’, the young writer moved to New York, where she discovered loneliness and literary success. Marta Bausells joins her on a tour of this new world
As precocious writers go, Kathleen Alcott is an extreme case. In her early 20s, she waved goodbye to a wild life in San Francisco and headed east to New York, hoping it would be a corrective move – with fewer recreational drugs, and more paying rent. In San Francisco, she faced a choice: pursue the writing or go back to school? She went for the former: in New York she took a vow of celibacy and knuckled down on the writing – and it worked.At the age of 22 her first novel sold to New York publisher Other Press.
These days, Alcott is very much a New York author. Following her 2012 debut, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, her second novel, Infinite Home, is set in a decaying Brooklyn apartment block. The tenants are all struggle socially and economically in different ways. Among them is Paulie, a young man with Williams syndrome, a developmental condition that gives him the soft sweetness of a child; Adeleine, a young woman with agoraphobia; and frustrated comedian Edward, surviving thanks to the goodwill of their elderly landlady Edith. Gentrification looms, but Edith can’t be bothered to make a profit from chai latte-slurping yuppies.
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