"I don't think people are great at making themselves happy."
A conversation with Kate Riley about life in a Christian socialist community, integrity, and how to live a good life!
Hello readers,
I hope you are having a comfortable Sunday. Due to popular demand (people getting annoyed at me), I am going to try and start sending posts as emails instead of letting them accrete in silence here.
We will start with a breadthy and depthy conversation about: humiliation, power, failure, vetting your own motives in writing, being edited, situations of mutual pity, and taking a magazine quiz to discover what shape your face is.
[Insert shimmery flashback music here.]
The year was 2002. Ashanti was burning up the charts, 8 Mile1 would soon become the Millennial version of Purple Rain, and Iraq was but a gleam in Bush II’s rodentine eyeballs. That is when I first met Kate. I don’t remember what we discussed during our first hangout session—definitely not the run-up to Iraq war, but quite possibly Eminem. I know we spent a lot of time walking and subwaying and attempting to decode the world, which would become an intermittent pattern over the next decades.
Cut to 2025 and we found ourselves in a backroom at the bookstore McNally Jackson, preparing to have a public conversation about Kate’s first novel Ruth. I was lucky enough to meddle in the background of the book; the nature of the meddling is covered below.
In the backstage area of the bookstore stood a table with a single Reese’s peanut butter cup on it. The cup lingered temptingly; the thought of stealing and grasping its flirty foil crenellations provided a distraction from the fear that always attends occasions when I must speak to (or at) >2 people.
I imagined that a clever McNally employee had placed the Reese’s cup on the table intentionally—and did same before every bookstore event—as a way of inflicting the Stanford marshmallow test on visiting authors. Whether Kate passed or failed will be revealed only upon her death.
My opinion of Ruth ("a freakin masterpiece”) is as biased as an opinion can possibly get. Here are some reviews if you’re curious to know what nonMollys think.
I thought Kate’s end of the bookstore discussion was wise and funny enough to merit transcription, preservation, dissemination—and so it is below.
¡Hope you enjoy!
Molly: Let’s start by talking about the world in which Ruth takes place, which is within a devout Christian socialist community. It is based on an experience you had when you were younger. Tell us about that period.
Kate: I had a great childhood. A childhood full of beautiful things, where I thought the world worked very simply and beautifully. Everything that followed was confusing because it wasn’t as lovely as my childhood had been. A lot of the life choices I made were based on trying to figure out why I couldn't just be a good enough kid to restore the way the world had once worked.
So, I studied philosophy in college, got frustrated with that, and quit school. I got involved with the Catholic Worker, got frustrated with that, stopped. Eventually I got a job writing internet copy for a supermodel in London who ran a nonprofit. And I became very very mad about the fact that it was down to supermodels to solve world problems.
That’s when I met some young people from a community that sounded, to my mind, like a utopia. To meet morally upright and convicted and hardworking people—people my own age, especially— was remarkable.
I started visiting their communities, and it was incredibly stressful. I would come home and wake up from dreams crying because it had been so stressful to spend a weekend there. What was stressful about it? The expectation that a person would be alert to— and responsive to, and honest with— other people at all times. Similar to the kind of mindfulness and “presence” that Buddhism and yoga are meant to induce. Always, with every person, you must be open.
Which means making yourself open to the most intense forms of conversation at all times. When you are there, a person you barely know might approach and say, I've noticed you're not cleaning the dishes well as you should be. What in your spiritual life has led you to not care enough about the people around you that you're gonna do a shit job of dishwashing? Things like that.
There was an expectation that if you were going to do a thing, you had to do it really well. Because everything is consecrated. Every single act you do is your demonstration that you love the people around you—and if you're failing in even the smallest things, you should probably reexamine how much you love the people around you.
And I'm somebody who spent probably 4-5 hours a day looking at cool images on Tumblr up until that point. I was not ready to be great all the time with other people! But it seemed that to know about this place—and then to go back to a life of posting on Twitter— would be hypocritical. I had to at least try to live there. So I went because I knew how much I’d regret it if I didn't try.
I assume my friends thought I was crazy. One of the questions I got from an interviewer about Ruth recently was, “Do you remember specific reactions from your friends and family when you told them you decided to join this community?” And— I don't! Which doesn't mean I didn’t receive reactions; it just means that the reactions failed to penetrate.
I'm sure people said What are you doing? But at the time, joining did not seem like a choice. I had to do it or I would've been too mad at myself.
Molly: Were these communities open to all visitors? What was the protocol—did you simply show up at the gates and announce yourself?
Kate: Lots of outsiders visited for an afternoon and were impressed and enjoyed the food. But there weren’t many serious visitors coming in from outside.
The particular community I was in had gone through peaks and troughs of attracting outsiders. When I visited, they happened to be in a long trough, so any new person who seemed excited was really interesting to them.
I was living in London at the time , so I wrote a letter to one of the British communities. The letter said, I'm really interested in coming long term. And they replied, Great, here's your family. Here are your mom and dad now. Here's your sister. Let us know when you'll be here.
I went expecting to be there forever.
Molly: For outsiders who visit seriously, as you did— do they tend to stick around forever, or no?
Kate: No. Unless you come as an entire family—or you visit and marry in while you’re there—it's really hard to assimilate. And neither of those were my situation.
Molly: One aspect of the community that Ruth chafes against is the preponderance of rules. There are rules about what a person wears, what she eats, how she speaks to people, whom she marries, what she does for a job. These strictures are a source of both comedy and sadness in the novel.
Of course—outside the community, in our world, we are also smothered by rules—only in our case, the rules tend to be tacit, unevenly applied and ambiguous, if often no less punitive.
Kate: I had a teenage sister in my community family, and she had so many qualities that I recognized as “universal teenage girl behavior.” She started a trend of wearing her plaid skirt extra long and baggy, and then got in trouble because all the other girls started doing it. It doesn’t matter what the specifics are; there is just something in a teenage girl that wants to either conform or defy conformity. The same instincts replicate themselves everywhere, only it’s much easier to notice in a bracketed environment.
But then, I cared about all that shit when I was a teenager! How many magazine quizzes did I take to find out about my face shape and body shape and what I was allowed to wear? We’re all just trying to understand the patterns.
So yes, there were lots of rules in the community. But often, people were reluctant to be explicit about why certain things happened or didn't happen, or why a behavior was good or bad.
In the case of big questions—like “Why does one person get married and have a kid when another person doesn’t get to have those things?”— those were no more answerable within the community than they are outside it. Only, when you're in a smaller system, it feels as though you should be able to know all the rules of the game, whereas in a bigger one, you can pretend that nobody knows.
Molly: Do you remember having violated a rule? What happened?
Kate: I was admonished twice for sumptuary violations. Once I was called in and asked if the unkemptness of my hair was an act of defiance. I was like “No! I'm so sorry— I didn't realize—I wasn't trying to make a statement—I’m just bad at haircare.”
And then I was admonished during an evening of circle dancing. Some elder's wife had seen a small amount of my stomach when we were dancing around. It wasn’t considered intrinsically offensive, but they did want to know whether I had shown stomach on purpose. Like…was I being slutty.
Neither of those really stung because they were truly unintentional. But if someone admonishes you for trying to show off, and you really were trying to show off—that’s when it would be mortifying.
Molly: For all the rules that might be broken and transgressions that might be committed, there is—within the community—a capacious sense of mercy, and always a path toward forgiveness.
Kate: One of the coolest things about that community was how seriously they took the concept of authority. The responsibility of being in charge— the relentless self-awareness, the refusal to abuse that power—was something they took more seriously than anything. Whereas regular life (outside the community) prepares you for a narrative where whomever has power is going to abuse it.
There were so many situations where I was expecting to be punished or humiliated—but instead the person in authority apologized or said, “What have we done wrong that has resulted in you not thriving?” Which is a good question for anyone in authority to ask when people are disappointing them.
Molly: Transgression often comes in the form of Ruth being mischievous. The book is incredibly funny, and Ruth is a comedic genius in her way. What is she doing when she is using humor? What is she attempting, what is she reaching for?
Kate: As a not-very-domestically-intelligent and lazy person, humor was the only thing I could contribute to the community. Humor made me feel specific and useful. I had role models; there were lots of people who were really funny and silly. My host mom was basically a professional elf. She left funny poems in people's rooms and stuff, and she was given the time and support to make mischief.
I mean, there were certainly limits to mischief. I tried to start a satirical newspaper and was told “No, you can't. We're in a season of mourning right now. We're not interested in jokes.”
Molly: The novel spans a large chunk of Ruth's life. It begins when she's a child and ends when she's in her fifties. When writing, was it harder to pitch yourself back in time to a child’s perspective or forward in time to an older-than-you-are perspective?
Kate: I felt I was treading treacherous ground mostly when trying to describe having children, or childbirth, or pregnancy—because I've only ever seen those things and have no claim to authority on them. Whereas I have very distinct memories of being a little kid.
Molly: When you were first organizing and editing your reflections into a textual form, why did you decide on fiction?
Kate: You were the one who did all that.
Molly: Haha, no. Well we can talk about that later maybe! But why did you write fiction instead of, say, a memoir?
Kate: When I left that community, it was because I didn't feel strong enough for it. At no point was I like, “These guys are wrong. I'm going back to real life where things make sense and are fair!”
I was just not strong enough to stay there. I missed it a lot after I left, and the only time I didn’t miss it was when I wrote about it.
But I didn't want to write about it as an outsider. I was already embarrassed to be resuming life as an outsider. Having the main character be a person who was born into the community and basically capable of living that way— with struggles, of course, but basically someone who could hang—that was the person I wanted to write. Not as a tourist.
Molly: Is life better inside the community or outside the community?
Kate: I think about this all the time. There are very obvious superficial criticisms of that existence—one where you've got homosocial groups and are required to wear a uniform and plenty of other things a person could point to as examples of regressiveness or unfairness to certain people, genders, life circumstances.
But I don't think we're exactly knocking it out of the park in real life, either. I don't think people are great at making themselves happy. I don't think we’re great at organizing. I don’t think we’re great at protecting our families, relationships, children. If we were doing a better job of it here, I'd feel safer criticizing the community. But I think it's really hard anywhere.
Situations of mutual pity are interesting. A lot of people visiting the community might feel sorry for everybody that is “stuck” there. But then members of the community will hear about online dating, or about what people pay for childcare…
You can have 11 kids in the community and be certain that every one of those children will be cared for. You don't need to worry about healthcare, childcare, or who will do the laundry. None of those worries are operative. There are lots of things that, from their perspective, look insane about normal urban life. And vice versa.
Molly: Do you have writing advice? You've always been one of the best writers I've known, though you’re not someone who has ever identified as a writer.
Kate: I think this will embarrass you, but I wouldn't have written anything if I didn't have somebody worth writing to. You are one of the few people for whom it was worth being as smart and funny as I could possibly be. What I would say to anybody who wants to write—that’s a much more propulsive force than career ambition.
I didn't want to be a writer. It seems a really punitive and vulnerable lifestyle. But I wanted to communicate something to Molly.
Molly: Well, I am going to cry. While I collect myself, perhaps we could have an audience question. Who will be brave and start us off?
Audience member: There's a lovely passage at the end of the book where Ruth is talking to her oldest son, who has left the community. He tells Ruth that she looks happy—and she accepts it. I’m wondering how Ruth might define happiness at that point in her life, when she's in middle age and has come to a form of acceptance.
Kate: One of the best backwards definitions of happiness is from Walker Percy in The Moviegoer. He says, basically, that despair is when you feel like you are not *onto* something. I think happiness is when— even if only occasionally— you feel like you're *onto* something—you're pursuing something in life, or in your thoughts.
Even if it's as simple as a poem you were planning to deliver to a community dinner or a little joke that you wanna tell somebody—being *onto* something would maybe be as close to a definition of happiness as someone like Ruth could have.
Audience member: I was curious about why you chose, in particular, the setting to be in a town in Michigan. I'm from Michigan!
Kate: I wish I had a great answer for you. The first version of the book hewed way too closely to the truth. For the revised version, I didn't want anybody to get in legal trouble, so I had to choose all new places. And Michigan was a place where they didn't have any communities. So… (laughing) that was why I chose it.
Same audience member: The funny thing is, the small town where my mom is from was originally settled by Germans from Bavaria. It just resonated with me because of the Bavaria thing and being in Michigan. That's why I asked!
Kate: I'm so glad for that! But I can't take any credit for it. It was all legal defensiveness.
Audience member: I know that you also make sculptures and crafts. What's the difference or similarity between making a discrete object vs. writing a novel?
Kate: I am better at crafts.
Audience member: Did you make crafts when you were in the community?
Kate: Yes, I was allowed to make stuff, though the provisions were limited—it wasn't like you could go to a craft store and buy whatever you wanted.
Both the writing and the projects I make are a version of occupational therapy, a way to work out some energy in my brain. It would probably be more productive if I could make fewer beaded keys and more novels…but I can't stop making beaded keys now.
Audience member: Can you talk about the technical aspects of writing to Molly? Did those emails consist of personal nonfiction accounts, or did you start writing fiction to Molly— and then, how did the emails turn into a book?
Kate: The first things I wrote were entries without a narrator. Entries like, “Here is what happens when a baby is born and introduced to the community” or “Here is what the hierarchy of desserts is.”
When I needed to have a narrator, that's when I started writing scenes in the third person.
I did a really dumb thing where everything was written out of order. It was written in terms of whenever I happened to remember a specific thing; there was no biographical narrative. And so Molly, on the receiving end, just got hundreds of unrelated paragraphs.
Molly: I liked it!
Kate: It took much longer to get the pieces in order than it did to actually write the meat of them. And she did most of that work.
Molly: I will say, I do recommend that everyone try the non-chronological form of writing, even if it causes a lot of headaches in the post-production phase. For some people it can be helpful to write about what they’re most interested in at one particular moment, and then to figure out the chronology later.
Audience member: I wanted to ask about turning Miriam [ed note: Miriam was the title of an earlier version of the novel] into Ruth and what that process was like—where you found opportunities, challenges, et cetera.
Kate: When I started writing the book, the idea that anybody but Molly would read it was not on my mind. So I wasn't careful about names. I just used the names that I thought would be funniest—which, in some cases, were real names 'cause they were funnier than names I could come up with. When it became a book that would be published, I had to be careful about not accidentally implicating any person or any place.
Also, there were lots of gaps in the narrative that I hadn't thought to fill in because, again, I wasn't writing for anybody except one person who could pick up the phone and ask me directly what I meant when she was baffled. So, the revision was about trying to make it more legible to a broader audience without getting rid of anything I really loved.
I'm not a particularly gracious person to be edited. I mean—I wrote it the way I wrote it because I think it was better that way! (Laughing.) But I do think all the edits were improvements.
Still, that’s one of many reasons I didn't want to be a writer. I feel… tender.
Audience member: Do you expect to hear from anybody from the community about the book?
Kate: For a while I was terrified that they would be mad at me about it. And some people were mad about it. But, I've gone through the process of vetting my own motives in publishing a book. I do feel that I wrote it in good faith, and that I love the people I knew there, and I love my time there.
I wasn't writing it as an exposé. It's a real shit exposé, if that's what somebody is looking for.
So I doubted that I would hear from anybody in the community. But I’ve heard from a fair number of people who have left the community. One of them thought I had grown up there— which was the best review I ever could have gotten.
Audience member: I haven't read the book yet. But hearing about the time span it covers, and looking at the length of the book, I'm like, “Wow, that's a lot of time in quite a small amount of pages.”
How long you were in the community? What was your sense of time like while you were there? Did that translate into your plotting of the years that transpire in the novel?
Kate: I spent about two years with the community in total, including the earlier visits; I lived there solidly for a year and a bit, when I was 25 and 26 years old.
It felt as though I was there much longer because everything was new; everything demanded attention. I was alert the whole time, getting new information at every moment of every day.
Audience member: How long was it until you were able to write about your experiences? Were you writing to Molly while you were there?
Kate: No. The time immediately after I left the community was objectively the most depressed and unhealthy I've been in my life. I felt like a failure. I went from living in a bucolic utopia to flunking out and living in my parents' apartment on the Lower East Side. I was very sad and unhealthy. But I think it was pretty soon after I got back that I started writing to you?
Molly: Yes, it was.
Kate: That was the only productive thing I did over the next two years. Every other choice I made was death-driven.
Audience member: It seems as though the burden of integrity is dauntingly high in the community. But you also seem like a person of integrity, and– I don't know if I can articulate this, but I'm curious about the current distinction between how you live and how you want to live. Or, the selfish way of asking my question is: what is a life-changing hack that you brought back with you?
Kate: I don't know if this is a hack or something that actually makes life more complicated, but: always remember that it is possible to live a different kind of life. There are better ways to operate. And you can visit those places and see them.
When you’re in a situation where failure or human stupidity seems inevitable, remember that it is possible to do things differently. People do. It's not very visible, and you do need a certain number of people to pull it off. It's really hard to do when it's just you or just your family.
I remember how hard it was after I left the community but was still trying to obey community rules while living alone in Manhattan with no job and nobody to serve. I couldn't be the version of Good that I wanted to be when I was by myself.
I still feel that. The regular world is not set up for everybody to be childlike in their goodness and industry. There’s no way to do it. You really need a group of people for anything like that to work.
Audience member: Kate, you speak of your motive in writing this novel in a way that sounds very pure—that you wanted to communicate with a close friend of yours, that it was unrelated to career ambition. Do you think that affected the way the sentences came out? Do you think prosody reflects a certain integrity of spirit?
Kate: I don't. I attribute whatever formal weirdness there is in Ruth to the fact that I wrote all of it on an iPod Touch, where you can only see three sentences on the screen at any one time—which makes you real focused on those three sentences. And then it causes you to forget that you wrote them.
So, that was my writing hack: obsolete Apple products.
Thank you Kate! And thank you to McNally Jackson for hosting, and to Alice for transcription voodoo, and to you, Substack readers, for reading. Please go fetch a copy of Ruth at your local bookstore if you want to frolic longer in Kate’s mind.
Farewell,
Molly
P.S. It was wonderful to meet Akosua, Verity, Will, Diana, Kelsey, Julie, Enzo, Colleen and other new friends at the reading. And to see newish friends Emily and Matthew! And to hug old friends.
What Prince is to dressing-room brooding, Eminem is to backstage seething. Also, I’ve been saying this for years but how come there hasn’t been a Broadway musical version of 8 Mile? Instant smash hit.