Bestselling author Katherine Center is practically Houston royalty. Her mother’s maiden name, Detering, graces a street in the Rice Military neighborhood; her younger sister, Lizzie Fletcher, is a U.S. Representative for southwestern Houston and Harris County; and her uncle Herman owned and operated Detering Book Gallery for 30 years.
Center knew from a young age the literary life was for her. She wrote her first novel in the sixth grade at St. John’s School and went on to attend Vassar College in New York, where she won the College Fiction Prize. She returned to Houston to get her master’s in fiction at the University of Houston and stayed to raise a family. Center spent many years working on “serious” short stories, essays, and poems. But it wasn’t until she had her first child and her older sister, Shelley, challenged her to write a novel about being a new mom that the author found her distinct voice: a blend of heartwarming, funny, and uplifting that she calls “half personal growth, half love story.”
Her debut novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, came out in 2007. Her sixth book, 2018’s How to Walk Away, hit the coveted New York Times Bestseller List—along with four more after that. Now on book 12—The Love Haters comes out May 20—Center has had two of her novels adapted into Netflix movies and was anointed the “Reigning Queen of Comfort Reads” by BookPage magazine. She’s also one of the literary community’s biggest proponents of the cultural value of love stories. “When I was younger, I thought that love stories were for movies and serious fiction was for books,” she says. “But love stories are my favorite kind of read—they’re my favorite kind of anything. For a long time, I wasn’t sure that counted, so it’s been a process of letting all that go.”
Enjoying this article?Texas Highways: Tell me about your family’s roots in Houston.
Katherine Center: I’m a fifth-generation Houstonian. My mom’s family came to Houston from Germany in the 1860s, so we’ve been here a long time. I was born in Washington, D.C., because my dad had a job there working for John Connally, who wound up later being the governor of Texas. We moved back to Houston when I was 1, so it’s all very Texas connected.
TH: When did you first want to be a writer?
KC: I wrote my first novel when I was in the sixth grade at St. John’s School. I was very dorky and miserable in sixth grade—this was the mid-’80s—and my two best friends and I decided to basically write fan fiction about Duran Duran. We wrote these novels about meeting the band members, and we cast ourselves as the main characters. We wrote happily ever afters for ourselves to cut the misery of middle school.
TH: Was moving to New York for college a big adjustment?
KC: Texas and New York are very similar. They’ve both got a ruggedness about them. That was surprising to me. Vassar is a very liberal, artsy place, and they had no math requirement, which is one of the reasons I wanted to go there. Also, Meryl Streep went there. So those were my two reasons. But there were tons of English majors, and I felt like every kid I met was writing a novel. So, suddenly, writing wasn’t the thing that made me special anymore.
TH: What brought you back to your hometown?
KC: I grew up my whole life hearing about the University of Houston’s creative writing program, which is currently ranked No. 1 in the nation. So, I came back and got a master’s in creative writing from U of H. My uncle had a bookstore in Houston that was famous during that time called Detering Book Gallery. I worked there when I was in grad school and had to ring up Larry McMurtry.
TH: Oh, wow. What was that like?
KC: I was totally panicking. We didn’t even have a cash register! We just had an old adding machine with a tape. He had a bookstore in Archer City, so he had a dealer discount and was buying a gazillion books. I am not a math person, so I was desperately trying to not mess it up. I spent the whole time trying to work up the guts to ask him for his autograph, and I completely chickened out. But there was a moment when I had done the totaling, but he changed his mind and added some more books, and he wanted to write me a new check for the new total. He ripped up the old check and dropped it in a waste basket. After he left, I fished it out and taped it back together. I brought it home to my husband because Lonesome Dove is his favorite book. We still have it.
TH: What did you do after graduate school?
KC: I spent a long time sending short stories to the New Yorker and getting rejected. I mean, many, many years. I didn’t love the rejection. I would lick my wounds for a long time before trying again.
TH: What changed?
KC: My husband and I thought it would be fun to have a baby, so we did that. I had never really been around kids, so I had a very steep learning curve. There was one day when I was talking to my big sister, who’s always full of advice for me, and I was complaining that I hadn’t done any writing since the baby, not even a grocery list. And my sister was like, “Why don’t you just write something fun?” The very next morning I woke up with the idea for what turned into my first novel.
TH: What was the hardest thing about writing your first novel?
KC: The length of it. I had only done short stories my whole life, so I made a Word document and chose Courier—the largest of all the fonts—because I thought it would help me rack up pages quickly. But I found as soon as I started writing I got hooked on the story in the way that you get hooked on a great novel that you’re reading. It was a crazy epiphany when I realized this was what I should have been doing all along.
TH: And now two of your novels, The Lost Husband and Happiness for Beginners, have been made into Netflix films. What was that like?
KC: It’s fun because it’s glamorous, and I got to meet the stars of the movies. Josh Duhamel [who starred in The Lost Husband] was so handsome I forgot how to talk. But it’s also so good for the books. These books wound up getting turned into movies close to a decade after they originally came out and before I ever hit the New York Times list, so most people had not heard of me.
TH: Most people would look at you now and assume you were an overnight success.
KC: My first book came out in 2007, and I really, solidly for the first 10 years thought I was going to have to quit. But not having an easy path forced me to become a better person, which is of course what happens to every single one of my characters. Nothing about those journeys that I’m writing is in any way false or manufactured. I fully believe that the hard things you go through make you better.
TH: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
KC: If you’re going to be a writer, the only compass you can follow is your own compass. You must be clear—not just in your head but in your own heart—about what it is that you love to read and what story you think should exist in the world. Not what your English teacher from high school would want you to write—but the stories that you, yourself, love.
