Survival, Shame, And Saying What No One Else Will: A Conversation With Kat Rosenfield

The novelist, cultural critic, and Feminine Chaos podcast co-host has spent the better part of a decade saying the things most writers in her orbit won’t. It got her pushed out of YA publishing in 2017. It also made her one of the sharpest voices in cultural commentary today. Her sixth novel, How to Survive in the Woods , releases March 10. It’s a psychological thriller set on the Hundred Mile Wilderness stretch of the Appalachian Trail—three people, a controlling marriage, and a plan that unravels in the backcountry. It’s been compared to Gone Girl and Wild , and early reviews call it her best work yet. We sat down with Kat to talk about writing morally complex women, why feminists need to reckon with the fact that most women are straight, what survival really means, and why she thinks the woke era didn’t so much end as shatter into a thousand pieces. Q: What drew you to setting a thriller in the wilderness? Was there something specific about that environment that felt right for this story? A: There is one extremely pragmatic reason to set a book like this in the wilderness, which is that it precludes the possibility of one of your characters pulling out an iPhone and ruining the story. (If you write thrillers or mysteries, this is an ever-present and incredibly annoying problem.) But apart from that, I loved the idea of taking these three characters—all of whom are hiding something—and dropping them into a setting where it’s very hard to keep secrets. Your strengths, and your weaknesses, your desires: the wilderness has a way of revealing these things, no matter what they are, and no matter how hard you’ve tried to hide them (including from yourself.) Q: Emma’s father is a Silicon Valley doomsday prepper. What drew you to that specific combination? A: What I discovered while researching this book is that there’s a pretty substantial overlap in real life between these two communities. It makes sense if you think about it: the person who designs the systems that make our modern lives possible knows better than anyone just how precarious those systems are, how they might fall apart. One guy I interviewed said something like, “When you spend enough time in tech you eventually start to understand that the whole world is held together by tin cans and string,” and I could absolutely see how, to someone like that, prepping was only logical—and also how, in the context of this story, it might end up warping a person’s approach to parenting in intriguing ways. Q: The title is How to Survive in the Woods , but it’s really about psychological survival too. Were you always interested in both, or did one lead to the other? A: That double entendre is very much central to this story: survival is an act, but a survivor is a person—or, sometimes, an identity. I wanted to explore the interplay between the two. Q: The book deals with guilt, self-destruction, and what happens when someone wants to disappear from their own life. Where did that psychological territory come from for you? A: It’s a particular hazard of writing fiction in the current era that people will always wonder how much of the narrative comes from the author’s own personal lived experience, so I should just say upfront: this book is not autobiographical. I was raised by normal, loving parents and I’m married to a great guy who I have never, even once, thought about murdering in the woods. (Please don’t put it in the newspaper that I want to murder my husband in the woods!) But emotionally—let’s just say there’s another name for the type of guilt that leads us to do desperate and self-destructive things, and that’s shame. Which is extremely relatable, to me and I think to anyone, if they’re being honest with themselves. In the wake of a trauma or a tragedy, how do we live with each other? Shame is something every human being with a functioning conscience has experienced, and it’s so painful that we’ll do just about anything to escape it, and it’s fascinating to see all the different forms that takes. Some people just completely internalize it and tear themselves to pieces; some people make up a story about how the shameful thing wasn’t really their fault—and sometimes they find a villain to blame instead. So for me, the heart of this story isn’t any one character’s emotional journey, but a more fundamental question: in the wake of a trauma or a tragedy, how do we live with each other? Perhaps more importantly, how do we live with ourselves? Q: You worked at MTV News before becoming a novelist. How did covering pop culture and entertainment shape the way you think about storytelling? A: I started working at MTV in 2009, just in time to watch the entire country be consumed by Twilight mania—and while that was an extremely silly moment in the culture, it was also so illuminating. On the one hand you had all this intellectual sniffing (which I fully admit I engaged in myself) about how unexceptional those books were in terms of literary quality, but on the other hand, these stories captivated people! To the point where there wasn’t a person alive in America who didn’t at least know what Twilight was, and you could find Team Edward and Team Jacob merchandise in, like, Walgreens. To be clear, I didn’t look at all this and decide I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing about sexy vampires, prose quality be damned. But it reinforced for me that not all good stories are necessarily great literature—and vice versa. And seeing that interplay between literature and pop culture—and how authors like John Green and Gillian Flynn successfully inhabited the place in the Venn diagram where “good story” and “good writing” overlap—really brought home for me that I wanted to entertain people, and make them feel something, rather than write something that was technically impressive but emotionally hollow and plotless. Q: In 2017, you were pushed out of YA publishing. What did that experience teach you about surviving as a writer? A: In fairness, I’m not sure it was a pushing-out so much as a “you can’t fire me, I quit” sort of thing; I doubt I would have been targeted the way I was if I’d kept my head down and my mouth shut. But the world of YA publishing was becoming censorious and conformist and ideologically orthodox at that time in a way that I found both incredibly troubling and impossible not to talk about, so I spoke up, and the result was what it was. It’s about using my voice to express the truth as I understand it. It was a pretty dark moment, to be honest—I’d been completely unpersoned within that world and I thought my career as a novelist really might be over—which is to say, a tempest in a teapot doesn’t seem so laughable if you live inside the teapot. But I was also still a working journalist, and so I did what all journalists do when they accidentally end up with an inside view of some kind of crazy meltdown in a little-known corner of the internet: I wrote about it . And while I didn’t know at the time if I was going to write another book, I think that was where I began to understand that being a writer, for me, will never be about helping a political cause or being part of a certain clique. It’s about using my voice to express the truth as I understand it. Q: Who are the writers or thinkers who most influenced how you approach both fiction and cultural criticism? A: As a novelist, I’m very inspired by authors who are brilliant prose stylists and keen cultural observers, but who happily and unapologetically inhabit the world of genre fiction: Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Liz Moore. People who clearly love language, who understand its power as a storytelling tool, but aren’t pretentious or preachy about it. The cultural critics I admire are like this, too; many of them are also novelists. Joan Didion, Renata Adler, George Orwell. Didion’s explanation of why she writes—“to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means”—is the purest expression I’ve ever seen of my own feelings about what the purpose of a culture writer is. I’m not a fan of the emerging consensus among writers that we should be activists trying to change the world, because the nature of activism is that the cause has to matter more than the truth, and journalism is supposed to be a truth-seeking enterprise. Q: The book explores control in many different contexts: in relationships, the wilderness, even one’s own mind. Does the subject of control connect to your cultural writing? A: Very much! I see fiction and journalism as two different ways of approaching the same questions, and so my work is almost always in conversation with itself in that way. This book, I wrote at a moment when I was also writing a lot about sex and trust and relationships in the wake of MeToo—which was of course a moment when many women suddenly came to see bad or disappointing sexual encounters as not just something they’d experienced, but something they had survived. Q: You’ve written critically about cultural pressures on women to prioritize career and complete independence. Where do you think that pressure comes from, and why is it a problem? A: Originally? This goes back to the invention of a pill that decoupled sex from pregnancy: once it became possible to delay childbearing, it was only a matter of time before the possible became the desirable, which became, eventually, the necessary. In 2026, you don’t have to pressure an 18 year-old woman to pursue education and career before marriage; she will pursue these things by default because there’s no alternative cultural script for her to follow. But as for why and how the cultural script changed, there are hundreds of causes: go back a few decades, and you find Simone de Beauvoir writing about how women are wasted in the domestic realm, you have the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Working Girl offering early girlboss aspirational narratives, you have fifty percent of marriages ending in divorce—and you have women asking, rightly, what kind of idiot makes herself dependent on a man for financial stability under those circumstances. Men die! Or gamble away your savings! Or run off to Daytona with their 25-year-old secretaries, leaving you destitute and with a giant unhireable blank space on your resume! Once it became possible to delay childbearing, it was only a matter of time before the possible became the desirable, which became, eventually, the necessary. I don’t know if I’d call this a problem so much as a state of affairs; I do think it’s important to understand that the current cultural script arose first from economic and scientific realities beyond our control, and second from a well-intentioned desire to protect women from the danger and indignity of being unable to fend for themselves. But if that script has become hegemonic and is having unintended second-order effects—on the fertility rate, for instance—that’s something we should seek to understand. Q: You co-host the Feminine Chaos podcast. What’s one thing about young women’s lives today (dating, careers, social media) that some feminists miss? A: Not to put too fine a point on it, I think feminists have talked themselves into a weird sort of denialism about the fact that most women, including young women, are straight. As in, they like men, they want to be with men; men are the category of person to whom they are innately attracted. I hope this has been a passing phase and that it’ll be over soon, because a brand of feminism that demonizes men, and by extension treats the sexual orientation of 90% of women like it’s something to be apologized for and embarrassed about, is never gonna make it. Q: How do you approach writing about morally complex women when there’s so much pressure for “positive representation”? A: Like the quote says, I subscribe to the radical notion that women are people—for better and for worse—and that’s how I represent them. I will say that nobody has ever pressured me to do otherwise, maybe because people care less about that these days, or maybe just because they know what my answer would be if someone asked me to make one of my morally complex female characters into a role model (rhymes with “go pluck yourself”.) Q: On trans issues, you’ve tried to hold two truths at once: People with gender dysphoria face real challenges and that biological sex matters. How do you engage with these debates productively? A: I don’t see debate on this issue as productive, nor necessary, to be honest. The truth is easily knowable and provides a very clear path forward. The challenge has been getting to a place where people can accurately describe the contours of this issue and the truths that undergird it—which is easy for me to do as a quote-unquote heterodox writer, and a lot harder for people who are entrenched socially and professionally in places where the term “biological sex” is considered hate speech. But I think the tide is starting to turn. Q: Some people are saying the Woke movement is ending, that the cultural pendulum is swinging back. Do you buy that? And what do you think replaces it? A: It depends on where you look. Donald Trump is not woke, obviously, and I do think the fact that he won in 2024 was at least partly driven by people being fed up with the more insufferable manifestations of that ideology. But we’re still intensely polarized, and many of our centers of cultural creation—in media, academia, the arts, publishing, Hollywood, etc—made themselves over at the institutional level to align with the demands of that movement, and many of the people in those institutions are still true believers, or their social and professional well-being depends on pretending they are. That matters insofar as those people are still in charge of deciding what movies get made, what books get published, what goes on the walls at the local museum, what your children learn in school, etc—but these institutions have also lost so much trust that I think this maybe matters less than it used to. I sometimes think the cultural pendulum hasn’t swung back so much as fallen off and shattered into a thousand micro-cultures, each with its own discrete ecosystem of media and social mores. Whether that will be good or bad, I couldn’t say, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens. Q: What would you tell a woman who agrees with many of your views but is afraid to say so publicly? A: Well, for starters, I completely understand. I get paid to articulate my views; most people don’t, and I’m not out to judge anyone who decides it’s not worth ruining the vibe at the tailgate just to register her opinion on the thing du jour. At the same time, though, I feel strongly that having respectful, even spirited disagreements should not be the kind of thing that ruins the vibe at the tailgate, and if you agree, then there’s no time like the present to be the change you want to see in the world. And if there is no tailgate, and the only fear is of being dragged on Twitter by a bunch of crazy people? Just say what you think. They can’t hurt you. Kat Rosenfield’s How to Survive in the Woods is available March 10, 2026. Order it now on Amazon or wherever you buy books.