Kate Wisel Talks About Writing Driving in Cars with Homeless Men

Photo: Paulius Mausteikis

Perched comfortable on a sunken sofa in a Chicago café not far from her teaching job at Columbia College, Kate Wisel looks every inch the badass. Bits and pieces of her characters from darker pages of her prize-winning novel Driving in Cars with Homeless Men shine through in her outfit, a black hoodie and black jeans. 

Her debut book is a love letter to women moving through violence. Four linked stories navigate through the old homes, tiny apartments and landscapes of working-class Boston. The idea began when Wisel talked late into the night with a friend in college. Her friend told a story from high school, about a boy who overdosed on heroin. The night of his funeral, the boy’s grieving girlfriend and Wisel’s friend slept in his bed. 

“I was so moved by that vision and imagining that situation, and I had so many questions about it that she couldn’t really answer,” Wisel said. “I was so fascinated by it that I didn’t forget it. Those questions and that fascination led me to the page. I started writing a story about a character named Rafa whose boyfriend overdoses and she sort of goes to live at his house.”

After finishing a story about Rafa, Wisel still found herself attached to the character. She had been writing stories with characters she felt were connected to Rafa when she realized the characters’ worlds were colliding. “I could either eliminate the problem, or lean into the problem,” Wisel said. “It took time to let their voices rise to the surface.” 

Pam Houston, who Wisel described as “this fancy writer and amazing teacher,” led Wisel to a realization: The women’s stories in the collection didn’t have to be equal. There could be a leading character, and characters who took up less space. Wisel realized certain arcs could be more fully portrayed and others could be smaller and more brief. The structure itself had the power to say something about a character’s life. 

“Instead of giving each character an equal amount of time in the book, I wanted it to be naturally what it was—sort of like a chorus, where certain voices are louder than others,” Wisel said. 

For the most part, the characters are derived from Wisel’s own experiences, and from her own observations of domestic situations, but that doesn’t mean they’re always real.

“I use real details, as well as fictional details. It’s sort of an interspersal, a way in which I feel like I can keep something alive by portraying something that’s true and fictionalizing it,” Wisel said. “I think the push and pull of that is what gives a story momentum.”  

Enlivening characters is an abstract thing to try to talk about. “But I think it’s supposed to be abstract because there’s a sort of mysterious thing that happens when you start uttering something on the page,” Wisel said. “It’s not the same as reality. It’s always a representation, which is totally different than reality; a point of view.”

Wisel described the exploration process and the questions she runs through. How do I best portray the situation in a way that feels most true, instead of it being most true? A factual truth and an emotional truth are very similar but also different—they’re tied to each other, yet they’re accomplishing different things. 

A lot of the work is about measuring. “It’s almost like being a musician of emotion if that makes sense,” Wisel said. “Measuring what makes sense in what tempo, where to place a detail, what rings true and what will make a reader feel something.”

The book has been published, but Wisel still sees herself doing more with the characters that came to life in her pages. “The way the book is set up, it structurally doesn’t end and it doesn’t begin. The stories are fused moments that are at the juncture of many different stories,” Wisel said. “It’s like looking at a diamond and seeing all the different angles and points of light that can be refracted. I’m still interested in the endlessness of their stories.” 

The stories are very dark, but Wisel expressed her desire for readers to feel welcomed into them. Ideally, she wanted to engage them in the stories in a way which left them wondering how a character could get from point A to point B and understand why a character could be in an abusive situation, either willingly or unwillingly. Often, those lines are blurry.

“What feels like love can be abuse or that abuse feels like it’s necessary,” Wisel said. “The abuse begets abuse and it becomes difficult to transcend.” 

Wisel wraps up her book tour next month. Catch her at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall on February 10.

Find Kate Wisel online at www.katewisel.com.

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