Catherine Newman is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, the kids’ craft book Stitch Camp (co-authored with Nicole Blum), the best-selling how-to books for kids How to Be a Person and What Can I Say? and the novels We All Want Impossible Things, Sandwich, and Wreck (forthcoming October 2025). She writes the Substack newsletter Crone Sandwich and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, Real Simple, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Tell us about Wreck. What made you want to return to the family you explored in Sandwich? And do you have more planned for Rocky and her family?

The truth is that I started working on Wreck without knowing for certain that it would be Rocky’s family—but then it became clear that it was. There is so much overlap between Rocky’s family and my own, and it just made sense to keep these characters rather than try to create new ones who were similar. I am not officially writing another novel at this point, although I am taking a lot of notes about caring for people. (How’s that for cryptic ha ha!)

Your books tackle grief and love and friendship, but always with levity and humor. What is your methodology for bringing that lightness into your writing?

My husband and I once saw a couple’s therapist who identified the constant joking and teasing and laughter in our relationship as “a crutch” and that made us laugh even harder. Sometimes I feel like it’s the only way through—being able to laugh, even when things are desperately hard or sad or your heart is breaking.

You’ve written across genres and mediums. Is there a through line in all of your work or do you choose mediums based on your varying interests?

Ah, that’s such an interesting question. I think that there’s something in most of what I write that encompasses the inherent bittersweetness of life’s unfolding. We love everyone so desperately even though we have everything to lose. Preemptive grief is what that’s called, I guess, but flavored with gratitude.

Do you have a favorite type of writing? Which writing challenges you the most?

The thing I’ve written the very most in my career is essays, and I love that form—the tightness of it, like a poem. But within fiction my favorite thing to write is dialogue: I can almost literally hear my characters talking.

Rather than the familiar question of how to balance motherhood, family life, and writing, your work seems to intertwine the two—drawing from your personal life and weaving those themes into your books. Do you find that this integration creates its own kind of balance, where one naturally feeds the other?

Wow, I wouldn’t have thought to describe it this way, but yes. I really do. In fact—and this is the opposite of how a lot of people feel—having kids actually unlocked me as a writer. First I was one kind of person, who was working on an academic dissertation, and then I became a mother and the emotional experience of being a person in the world just became incredibly and comically urgent to me. Writing was the only way I could get at this constant, crushing swell of love and dread. And because I was always writing about them or about my experience of raising them, I think I paid a lot of attention to the kids when they were growing up. Just curious attention–not so much to shape them, but just to understand who they were.

Book you love to gift?

A very favorite book I love to gift is Maira Kalman’s illustrated The Principles of Uncertainty. It’s moving witty and charming and heartbreaking. I love it so much. It’s also the book I love to leave next to the bed in our guest room.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

A book that flew under the radar but deserves more attention?

Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows. I feel like folks ended up reading other stuff by her? Women Talking, which became a movie. But All My Puny Sorrows is the novel I identify as my very favorite funny-sad novel, and I often meet people who haven’t read it.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

The scariest thing about being a writer?

Ah, yes. I mean, you just kind of hold your heart out in the palm of your hand, and people look at it, and some people understand that it has to be cherished—It’s your heart, after all!—and other people are like, “Eh. I don’t like it. I’m going to write a 100-paragraph-long book report on Goodreads about how awful it is, your heart.” Mostly, though, people rise to the occasion of your vulnerability. They really do.

Wreck by Catherine Newman

If you fell head over heels for Rocky and her family on their vacation to Cape Cod in Sandwich, get ready to join the clan at home. Rocky’s daughter is home from college, her son took a job in New York and her father just moved in. With the same anxious and hilarious approach on life, Rocky becomes obsessed with a local accident while trying to keep a medical condition under wraps in an equally delightful follow up to her bestseller.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble