It seems unrealistic that Colin would have so many girlfriends named Katherine. I wanted to try to write about a different kind of prodigy with a different set of anxieties. The Glass kids–Salinger’s original prodigies–are more than sixty years old now. I’m very conscious of the debt that I, like all YA writers, owe to Salinger, but I’m also very conscious of the size of his shadow. But then I started dating the woman who is now my wife very early in the process of writing the book, so I had to write this story of a bitter, angry guy railing against his exes while I myself was falling in love.Ī. I’d been interested in child prodigies ever since I read Salinger, so that was a big part of it, probably.

Also, at some point in your adolescence you become aware that you are not quite so special as you’ve been led to believe, and this is a pretty difficult thing to reconcile, and I wanted to write about a young man who was experiencing that in the most extreme way possible.Īlso, I wanted to write a book about getting dumped, because I’d just been dumped when I decided to write the book. (It says something the word “individual” did not take on its current meaning until the 18th century.) So that was part of it. What inspired you to write An Abundance of Katherines ?Ī. I’m really interested in why we are all so obsessed with mattering–why people in our historical moment are so fixated on fame and notoriety and leaving a legacy. Most of these questions where taken from

An abundance of katherines full book