The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism
(Drawing on interviews with a diverse range of mothers and...)
Drawing on interviews with a diverse range of mothers and daughters who experienced the era of Women's Liberation, a timely cultural study describes the stresses and rewards of being and having a feminist mother.
(Angela can feel the clock ticking. She is single in New Y...)
Angela can feel the clock ticking. She is single in New York City, stuck in a job she doesn’t want and a life that seems to have, somehow, just happened. She inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, but she never seems to have the time for it - these days, her oven holds only sweaters. Tacked to her office bulletin board is a photo from a magazine of a tidy cottage on the coast of Maine - a charming reminder of a life that could be hers, if she could only muster the courage to go after it. On a hope and a chance, Angela decides to pack it all up and move to Maine, finding the nudge she needs in the dating profile of a handsome sailor who loves dogs and Italian food. But her new home isn’t quite matching up with the fantasy. Far from everything familiar, Angela begins to rebuild her life from the ground up. Working at a local coffeehouse, she begins to discover the pleasures and secrets of her new small-town community and, in the process, realizes there’s really no such thing as the way life should be.
(Christina Baker Kline’s #1 New York Times bestselling nov...)
Christina Baker Kline’s #1 New York Times bestselling novel - the captivating story of a 91-year-old woman with a hidden past as an orphan-train rider and the teenage girl whose own troubled adolescence leads her to seek answers to long-buried questions…now with an extended scene that addresses the number one question readers ask, and an excerpt from Kline’s upcoming novel A Piece of the World.
(As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, ...)
As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists. Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.
(Adapted and condensed for a young audience, Orphan Train ...)
Adapted and condensed for a young audience, Orphan Train Girl includes an author’s note and archival photos from the orphan train era. This book is especially perfect for mother/daughter reading groups.
Christina Baker Kline is a British educator and New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Orphan Train, A Piece of the World, and Tin Ticket (2020). She is published in 40 countries. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and the NYT Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, Poets & Writers, and Salon, among other places.
Background
Christina Baker Kline was born in 1964 in Cambridge, United Kingdom and was raised there as well as in the American South and Maine. Her parents were William J. Baker, a history professor, and Christina (Looper) Baker, an English professor and author.
Education
Christina Baker Kline received her Bachelor of Arts in English from Yale. She then gained her Master of Arts in Literature from Cambridge University, and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing.
Christina Baker Kline has taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women’s studies at Yale, New York University, and the University of Virginia. She also served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University for four years from 2007 to 2011, where she taught graduate and undergraduate creative writing and literature.
Additionally, being a resident of New York City and Southwest Harbor, Maine, Kline serves on the advisory boards of the Center for Fiction (New York City), the Jesup Library (Bar Harbor, Maine), the Montclair Literary Festival (New Jersey), the Kauai Writers Conference (Hawaii), and Roots & Wings (New Jersey), and on the gala committees of Poets & Writers and The Authors Guild (New York City) and Friends of Acadia (Maine). Moreover, she is an Artist-Mentor in the Studio Duke creative arts mentorship program at Duke University.
Besides, Christina Baker Kline has written eight novels, including Orphan Train, A Piece of the World, and Tin Ticket (2020). Her writing is published in 40 countries and has appeared in the New York Times and the NYT Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, Poets & Writers, and Salon, among other places.
In addition to her novels, Kline has commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow, and edited a book on grieving, Always Too Soon. She is co-editor, with Anne Burt, of a collection of personal essays called About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror, and a co-author, with her mother, Christina Looper Baker, of a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins.
As part of the #MeToo campaign, in late October 2017, Baker Kline penned an essay published by Slate magazine in which she accused former President George H. W. Bush of inappropriately touching her and telling an inappropriate joke while she posed for a photo with him during an April 2014 event benefiting the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. She further stated that the driver who chauffeured her (and had "introduced herself as a friend of the Bush family"), overheard her tell the story to her husband and requested that she remain "discreet" about the incident. Baker Kline stated in her essay that the driver's reaction made her suspicious that her case was not unique, thinking that "the people around President Bush were accustomed to doing damage control," and the #MeToo campaign confirmed her suspicions.
Connections
Christina Baker Kline is married to David Kline. Currently, they live near New York City and on the coast of Maine.