Weber, Katharine 1955-

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WEBER, Katharine 1955-

PERSONAL: Born November 12, 1955, in New York, NY; daughter of Sidney (a film producer) and Andrea (a photographer and bird watcher; maiden name, Warburg) Kaufman; married Nicholas Fox Weber, September 19, 1976; children: Lucy Swift, Charlotte Fox. Education: Attended New School for Social Research, 1972-76, and Yale University, 1982-84. Politics: "Quite left—a red diaper baby." Religion: "Cultural identity, mostly Jewish—religious beliefs, mostly absent."

ADDRESSES: Home—108 Beacon Rd., Bethany, CT 06524. Office—210 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06510. Agent—Watkins Loomis, Inc., 133 East 35th St., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Harper & Row, New York, NY, editorial assistant, 1975; Richard Meier and Partners Architects, New York, NY, in-house editor, 1975; American Institute of Graphic Arts, New York, NY, assistant to the director, 1976; Josef Albers Foundation, Orange, CT, archivist, 1976-81; Sunday New Haven Register, New Haven, CT, weekly columnist, 1985-87; Publishers Weekly, weekly fiction reviewer, 1988-92. Fairfield University, guest speaker, 1988-90; Mattatuck Community College, teacher at One Day Writer's Conference, 1992; Connecticut College, visiting writer in residence, 1996-97; Yale University, visiting lecturer, beginning 1997. Administrator of the estate of Kay Swift, 1990-94; Kay Swift Memorial Trust, trustee, beginning 1995; conducted archival research in Warburg family papers in conjunction with Ron Chernow's work for The Warburgs. Residents for Rural Roads, founding member, 1980-84.

MEMBER: National Book Critics Circle, Authors Guild, Authors League of America, PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: Named best columnist of the year, New England Women's Press Association, 1986; Discovery Award, New England Booksellers Association, 1995; included among Granta's best young American novelists, 1996.

WRITINGS:

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (novel), Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 1995.

The Music Lesson, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 1998.

The Little Women (novel), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of numerous articles, short stories, and reviews to periodicals, including New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Boston Sunday Globe, New Haven Register, Connecticut, Story, Redbook, Journal-Courier, and Architectural Digest.

SIDELIGHTS: Katharine Weber's first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, has been greeted enthusiastically by critics. "Tender and funny and sometimes remarkably jolting, this is a first novel of remarkable accomplishment," said a contributor to Publishers Weekly. Set in Geneva, Switzerland, the story traces the experiences and thoughts of Harriet Rose, a young American photographer, through a combination journal/letter she sends to her boyfriend, Benedict.

In the novel, events from both the past and present serve to expose the darkness underlying each character's life. Harriet observes Anne Gordon—the friend she is visiting—embark on a self-destructive affair with Victor, her father's friend and fellow Auschwitz survivor, and the relationship causes much concern for Harriet. While wandering the streets of Geneva so that Anne and Victor can continue their daily lunch-time trysts in privacy, Harriet ponders her friend's happiness and gradually succumbs to memories of her own past.

Written in a style that critics found both witty and humorous, as well as dramatic, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear reminds the reader that the past has a constant influence over the present. Truth can be interpreted on many levels, according to Weber. Harriet's letters and journals may record the events experienced inside a day and interpret her feelings; however, she can never precisely capture the day as it happened—written words can only be impressions and fragments of the complete truth, which is acted on by outside forces and events from the distant past. "Life is nothing but images transformed by reflection, and we rarely understand what we think we see," summarized Sally Eckhoff in the Voice Literary Supplement. Harriet's experiences reflect these limits of perception and fragmentation of memory. Elizabeth Benedict wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "As her title suggests, Katharine Weber is wise to these issues of artifice, distance and what seems like candor." Despite such weighty thoughts woven through the novel's plot, Weber's novel is never heavy-handed. As Eckhoff observed, Harriet's buoyant character keeps the darkness and danger from oppressing the reader. "Her jokey patter and enthusiastic innocence—that's the book's brightest idea."

Weber once told CA: "I have rarely done things in the usual order. I have no high school diploma, having left after eleventh grade to attend the New School when I was sixteen, and I have no college degree, though several years of part-time college at the New School and Yale. One way of thinking about this as an asset rather than a liability is to consider my education as being an ongoing activity rather than something that has been completed.

"Though I worked as a journalist and critic for several years, my fiction was never published anywhere until a story of mine was selected off the slush pile for publication in the New Yorker in January of 1993. That story was to form part of my first novel. I tell this story to encourage all unpublished fiction writers. It can happen."