Kat Rosenfield spends a lot of time thinking about murder. And lucky for us, the essayist and novelist writes about it, too. 

Rosenfield’s latest thriller, “How to Survive in the Woods,” set in Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness, releases March 10. (Not to spoil anything, but it’s really good.) She’s the author of other books, including “No One Will Miss Her” and New York Times-best-selling “A Trick of Light,” coauthored with Stan Lee. 

If you’re wondering why I’m writing about this, it’s because Rosenfield is also a culture writer at The Free Press, the publication cofounded by Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News. And Rosenfield cohosts the "Feminine Chaos" podcast.

I first started paying close attention to Rosenfield’s work in 2022, when I read a piece she wrote for National Review, titled “Why I Keep Getting Mistaken for a Conservative,” in which she talks about the tribalism that has seeped into politics, unmooring the principles that once made terms like “liberal” and “conservative” meaningful. 

“The work I love best is about analysis, not prescription; it’s about trying to understand what is and why, not what ought to be,” Rosenfield, who describes herself as a “free-speech, pro-choice liberal,” wrote in National Review.

This sums up her work well. Rosenfield’s writing is eloquent and stylish, and she’s adept at breaking through the noise of our cultural moment and distilling what’s going on. 

I recently spoke with Rosenfield about her new novel, why she loves writing about murder, and how her fiction and nonfiction influence each other. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is it about the murder mystery genre that attracts you? 

I think about murder all the time, and it’s not weird, it’s totally fine. This is the type of story I like to tell. It’s often the type of story I like to read, although I am somewhat picky. I don’t really love genre thrillers that are formulaic, and that’s not to shade on those books. I think there's a place for them, but I've always been into stories that have some kind of mystery element to them.

And I think more of it as a mode of approaching a story than of what section of the bookstore you would find yourself in. But I also love puzzles. I think that in another life, I would have probably been a great detective.

So you are both a culture writer and novelist. Is there one role you identify with more? Does your culture writing influence your novels? Or vice versa? 

I really see the fiction writing and the culture commentary as approaching the same questions from different angles. And it’s actually been very interesting to me to see how much whatever it is that I’m writing about will dovetail in each part of my life as a writer. Whatever I’ve chosen to work on fiction-wise, I will find myself enriching that story by writing and investigating cultural essays or reported pieces.

And I’m very interested overall in how we treat each other, how we conceive of questions like, what do we owe to each other and who are we to each other? And how do we conceive of things like fairness? How do we conceive of beauty? How do we conceive of friendship and love and loyalty? These are all cultural questions, and I think that they’re very central to a lot of the stories I tell where I have full control. 

What's it like working for Bari Weiss? 

I feel incredibly lucky to be involved and to have gotten in at The Free Press. I started writing for The Free Press before it was The Free Press and then became a columnist there after it became The Free Press.

Bari is not somebody who I have any day-to-day contact with. I’ve always been a freelancer. I am always in my home, just sitting on the couch, tapping away. And so she’s not my primary contact. But I’ve met her in person. I consider her a friend. I think she’s lovely. Apart from that, she has an instinct for what is missing in the media landscape right now that makes it very exciting to be a part of whatever it is that she’s building.

In your 2022 piece for National Review, you wrote: 'If words such as 'liberal' and 'conservative' and 'left' and 'right' are increasingly meaningless tribal signifiers rather than statements of policy or principle, if all they convey is who you're against rather than what you stand for, then maybe it's in our best interest not to keep clinging to them.' Is that still true today? 

I think it’s more true now than it was then. It’s been strange because I think like a lot of people I had a certain amount of tribal identity wrapped up in the idea of calling myself a liberal.

I would say I probably have less than the average person. I am not really a joiner. I’ve always been a little bit skeptical. I've always been inclined if a whole bunch of people are freaking out and running in one direction, screaming at the top of their lungs, I am going to start moving in the other direction just to see what it is that’s actually going on. I think that I have contrarian impulses to a certain extent, but I also think it's important to be skeptical. It's the only way that you can have something close to a sense of shared truth, shared reality. 

One of the things that I found really disturbing was whatever was happening to prevent people from knowing what was happening with Joe Biden, and to prevent people from talking about it or even asking questions about it. I was so disturbed and discouraged by the amount of contempt that conveyed for the truth and for the American people.

It left me feeling like it really does not matter anymore how I identify politically. To see how many people who I had previously respected just come out and say it doesn’t even matter if the president’s brain is like a half-mashed potato at this point, because the most important thing is that we have a Democrat in the White House or that we don’t have Donald Trump in the White House. I just found that so mercenary and terrible. 

How will you be promoting your book? I heard you're doing a book tour.

I am. This is very exciting for me because my very first job in publishing was as a publicist, and it was my job to in part help plan these tours for other authors. And at the time I was 23, and I thought this was the most glamorous thing I’d ever seen in my life. And now the glamour is mine.

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques

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