Chris Kraus is the author of several novels and books on cultural criticism including Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor and I Love Dick--an epistolary novel which was adapted for television.
She was born in The Bronx, and has lived in New Zealand, London, New York and Los Angeles and has spent summers in northern Minnesota, which plays a prominent role in her new book.
The Four Spent the Day Together is a novel in three parts. The first tells the story of Catt Greene, a girl very in tune with the constraints of social class growing up in Milford, Connecticut. In the second part, a middle-aged Catt has just bought an idyllic summer home in Balsam Township in Minnesota with her husband but struggles with his alcohol addiction. The third part is a fictionalized retelling of the 2019 kidnapping and murder of a man in Hibbing, Minnesota, referred to as “Harding, Minnesota” in the book.
Kraus has been known to draw from her own life in her writing and this is reflected in her character Catt Greene--from her childhood and adolescence to her career as a writer and living alongside an addict.
Yet, she doesn’t consider her work autobiographical or autofiction. In a recent What We’re Reading interview Kraus explained, “My life is there, but it's not exactly the point of the book. I'm not writing the book for the purposes of revealing or excavating or investigating my own life. I'm investigating other things. I'm investigating things in the world ... other people, people close to me, lovers, friends, family, but also political and cultural larger questions that I encounter in the world.”
But how did Balsam, a small township in northern Minnesota, become a focus of The Four Spent the Day Together? Again, Kraus drew from events unfolding in her life for this story. She and her husband purchased a summer house in Balsam and at the end of the summer in 2019 she read about a kidnapping and murder in the local paper.
Kraus explained, “I was immediately really interested in it because it involved teenagers and because my partner…was working with kids like these. He had a job in the town that's called Great Woods in the book, working basically at a juvenile detention center. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, did these kids pass through his office?’ Because most of them had been involved in child protective services, foster care and juvenile detention in the past.”
“The four of them spent the day together” was a phrase in the newspaper article that stuck with Kraus and became the title of the book. She said, “It was the durational nature of the crime that really caught my interest. It wasn't just a killing on the spur of the moment. It was a kidnapping that culminated in a killing. And that made me very curious about what went on during the almost 24 hours where they kidnapped the victim.”
This true crime turn in the third part of the book includes Kraus's investigation and interviews with the perpetrators and really highlights issues of social class, poverty and meth addiction in the Iron Range.
And this is also where we see the connections between young Catt and middle-aged Catt. Kraus explained, “Catt and Brittany, in a sense, could have been the same person, separated by 40 or 50 years.”
Kraus also noted how satisfying it has been to connect through this book with people who live alongside addiction, noting a shortage of memoirs by those affected by someone else’s addiction. She said, “Addiction itself is very well documented. There's a gazillion addiction and rehab recovery memoirs, but very little representation of the experience of the family members and friends of the addict.”
Learn more about Chris Kraus’s book The Four Spent the Day Together here.
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