The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #119: Christine Kalafus
"My husband has read the entire thing—we are still married—but requested no changes. Which is good because I wouldn’t have made them."
Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 119th installment, featuring , author of Flood: a Memoir. - Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Previously a seamstress for the interior design industry, Christine’s sewing appeared in various publications including American Vogue and is on permanent display at The Mount, the Massachusetts home of 19th and 20th century writer and designer Edith Wharton. A synthesis of her work in a cross-discipline of aesthetics, Christine’s writing explores the complexities of home. Flood (Woodhall Press, June 1, 2025) is her first book. More information is available via Christine’s website and Substack: Notes from the Underworld.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I am 55 and I’ve been writing full time for eleven years.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
Flood: a Memoir was released June 1, 2025.
What number book is this for you?
Flood is my first book.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
Flood is a straight chronology of two years with alternating flashbacks. Expansion in the genre is a good development but I am drawn to the word memoir and its Latin origins—memoria—to remember.
I wrote a short scene of waiting in the oncologist’s office to find out whether I had metastasized cancer. When we put down our pens, the instructor said we could either share the piece we had brought or the thing we just wrote. I wanted to read the humorous essay I brought about cake. For some reason I still don’t understand, I read the oncologist piece. No one laughed and I went to the bathroom to hide. The instructor followed. From the stall next to mine, she told me I was a writer. It was like I had been anointed. I felt I’d been seen for the first time. I cried the whole two-hour drive home.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
“Christine is pregnant with twins and reeling from her husband’s affair when her right breast engages in a mutiny. Delivering identical boys and a tumor on the same day, she believes the worst is over. Until the natural spring under her house—what the neighborhood kids call The Witch House—begins to rise.’
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
I was born and lived in Connecticut’s lower Housatonic River Valley, a series of mill towns, until I was 13. Both sets of my grandparents, all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins lived in the Valley, too. My first memory of observance is riding in the back seat of my mother’s car at 4 or 5 years old, aching to see inside the grand Victorian houses lining the main streets of the Valley. The lives of people I didn’t know—and what objects they surrounded themselves with—fascinated me. They still do. The Valley, with its faded grandeur and labor-infused grit, is in my DNA.
Right after I closed my sewing business, my maternal grandmother died. The writing of her eulogy was purposeful and interesting the way sewing had been. So I signed up for a writing workshop.
At the first class, the instructor invited us to write for five minutes about something traumatic. I wrote a short scene of waiting in the oncologist’s office to find out whether I had metastasized cancer. When we put down our pens, the instructor said we could either share the piece we had brought or the thing we just wrote. I wanted to read the humorous essay I brought about cake. For some reason I still don’t understand, I read the oncologist piece. No one laughed and I went to the bathroom to hide. The instructor followed. From the stall next to mine, she told me I was a writer. It was like I had been anointed. I felt I’d been seen for the first time. I cried the whole two-hour drive home.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
It wasn’t hard to write what had happened, it was hard to relive what had happened. In the immediate aftermath of my husband’s affair, the twin pregnancy, the Triple-Negative breast cancer, medical gaslighting and circus of care that came next, I didn’t have time to process any of it. It was only twelve years later, through writing, that I was able to. But it was fraught. I went on weird restrictive diets. I went on punishing bike rides up steep hills. I cut my hair very short. I got angry. I nearly had an extra-marital affair. That was the first draft.
I wished I’d asked the agent who I worked with in 2017 for more information about the “lovely rejections” Flood received. Instead, I put the manuscript in a box and worked on other writing projects. In January 2023, I rewrote and re-titled the manuscript, the fastest I’d ever done with a piece of writing. It was liberating. Ultimately, Flood found its proper publisher, Woodhall, an indie Connecticut-based press, because I sent it to them myself.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
If we are writing about our lives, other people are going to show up. For my essay “Renovating a Family” that appeared in Longreads, I didn’t name the son who appears in it. I referred to him as “my son,” although I have three sons. This son was 20 years old and was having a hard enough time. By choosing anonymity, I believed I was adding a layer of protection. But I probably wasn’t.
For Flood, I changed the names of my physicians and those of early childhood friends. The latter was for their privacy. My physicians were assigned pseudonyms based on my experience with them. I never sought permission or ran the book by anyone for their approval. My husband has read the entire thing—we are still married—but requested no changes. Which is good because I wouldn’t have made them.
A thread in the book is Connecticut’s Flood of 1955, a natural disaster that my parents witnessed as children. By listening to their experiences of this event, the writing of the memoir became a lens to see my parents differently. which was worth the entire process and then some.
It wasn’t hard to write what had happened, it was hard to relive what had happened. In the immediate aftermath of my husband’s affair, the twin pregnancy, the Triple-Negative breast cancer, medical gaslighting and circus of care that came next, I didn’t have time to process any of it. It was only twelve years later, through writing, that I was able to. But it was fraught. I went on weird restrictive diets. I went on punishing bike rides up steep hills. I cut my hair very short. I got angry. I nearly had an extra-marital affair. That was the first draft.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
I read the first volume of Virginia Woolf’s diaries while I wrote the first draft of Flood. I loved how curious and gossipy—how human—she was. I loved how a memory would infiltrate a scene she was describing and also her concise descriptions of landscape. Later, in a more final draft, I read Woolf’s The Waves and was floored. The objectivity of that novel allowed me to see my own story as if from above.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
Find your support system and hold it close. My support system is yoga, hikes with my dog, sparkly nail polish, and punk rock. It’s a combo that never fails—now. But I was especially vulnerable the first five years. Experiencing rejection after rejection or worse—silence—I became envious of friends whose work was getting acclaim. I kept it to myself and celebrated their book launches, attended their movie screenings, public readings, and took their classes. I loved what they’d done and was proud and happy for them but wondering if it would ever be me was counter-productive.
About four years ago I decided that to make the kind of work I wanted to make, other people’s opinions couldn’t be more important than my own. If I liked what I was doing, it would have to be enough, because I wasn’t going to stop. What I could stop was torturing myself with imagined judgement. Capitalism eats everything. Everywhere there is a contest or an award. It took winning a couple for me to realize acclaim and rejection are illusions. There is no best. There is only preference.
What do you love about writing?
I don’t! At least not the way I think of love: as mutual adoration. Ours is more of a passive-aggressive relationship. The last thing I want to do is glue myself to a chair, but the words only cling to the page if I do.
What frustrates you about writing?
My constant inability to recognize that a project will take twice as long as I think it will. Reshaping a sentence requires reshaping a paragraph. Skills I developed as a seamstress are useful as a writer; the work is finished when the last thread is knotted.
What about writing surprises you?
The magic. Every single time. When the writing is effective it feels like I’ve performed sleight of hand and I don’t know how I did it. Each project is an attempt to perform a stage trick, like Houdini freeing himself from padlocks and chains in a box underwater.
About four years ago I decided that to make the kind of work I wanted to make, other people’s opinions couldn’t be more important than my own. If I liked what I was doing, it would have to be enough, because I wasn’t going to stop. What I could stop was torturing myself with imagined judgement. Capitalism eats everything. Everywhere there is a contest or an award. It took winning a couple for me to realize acclaim and rejection are illusions. There is no best. There is only preference.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
I’ve learned that a piece is the most successful if I bring the laptop into the bathroom or kitchen counter and work out the essential shape of the thing—a blob—while I brush my teeth or boil water. Then I let the piece rest, like bread rising.
When I return to it, properly sitting at my desk, hours or days later, paragraphs that have been built in my subconscious spill out and abracadabra—the amorphous blob has become a structure with walls and a ceiling. Sometimes windows and doors. This pleases me to no end. Then I live in my magic house until it is done.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
I once had a writing adviser who said “Do less, Christine, do less.” I laughed–wondering how less could be possible with three high school age children I was actively parenting, while also tending to my marriage, the house, dog, and volunteer projects.
But his suggestion stuck. I reconsidered my commitments, eventually feeling at home in the land of less, where everything feeds the writing. It was easier than I imagined handing volunteer programs over to others and very satisfying to realize that I enjoy watching the successful way they are managed from afar.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
Surprising no one more than me, Ovum, a chapbook of free-verse and prose poems will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2026. There She Is, my recently completed YA novel, is out on submission. I was inspired by the historic wreck of the Orissa off Cape Cod, dark truths within the American Dream, the mask of celebrity, parental deception, and unwelcome inheritances.
There She Is is fiction, however, Orissa Linnell, named for the ship that wrecked in her backyard, was my great-great-great aunt. I grew up being told by my grandmother, if Orissa hadn’t given the shipwreck money to the Christian Scientists, we would be wealthy today.
My current project is a second memoir. Sewing the Ghost focuses on the messy metamorphosis of what culture calls healing. Here, healing manifests as a specter, shapeshifting between the warp and weft—an architectural biosphere—where conversations occur within a fabric of tissue, muscle, and bone. There is only thread, needles, and scissors to make the unconscious conscious.
The story frightens me. Which is why I must write it.
Paused and re-read her lines that "acclaim and rejection are illusions. There is no best. There is only preference." Great advice to help writers persevere through all those inevitable rejections among the achievements. Either way, just keep writing and good things tend to happen, eventually.
this interview / questionnaire has hit me strongly on so many levels. Thank you, Christine. And thank you, Sari.