An Interview by Benjamin Woodard, edited by Emma Parzybok
AN INTERVIEW WITH KRISTEN VAN NEST, AUTHOR OF WHERE TO NEST
Kristen Van Nest’s debut memoir, Where to Nest: A Global Search for Love, Cheap Wine and a Place to Belong (Rising Action Publishing), follows the author as she embarks on an around the world adventure, living in Europe after college on a Fulbright Scholarship before settling in Shanghai to work for a wine importer. Van Nest has traveled to over 40 countries, and in the memoir, she makes pitstops in Nairobi, Bangkok, and on a yacht on the Mediterranean as she navigates life as an expat far from her childhood home in Connecticut. Along the way, Van Nest falls in and out of romantic relationships, pursues multiple career paths, adopts a cat, and ultimately finds a calling in stand-up comedy.
Shortly after Where to Nest’s launch, I was able to chat with Van Nest over Zoom to discuss her journey as a writer.
Benjamin Woodard: What initially drew you to the idea of writing a memoir?
Kristen Van Nest: As a child, I didn’t want to be a writer. I guess I technically wanted to study lions. I’m a cat lady, so that kind of makes sense. My mom was a painter and I saw how difficult it was to go on a creative path. So I was like, “I’m going to do business and fully put myself into that kind of role.” And then I loved traveling, and so I thought, “Okay, I’m going to do international business.” I just kept going on that journey, and when I moved to LA, I felt like I was in more of a settling phase of my life.
When I first arrived in LA, I was totally focused on comedy; I was writing, acting, and directing. My mentor, Joanna Johnson—she’s the showrunner for Good Trouble and was on The Bold and Beautiful—advised me, “If you enjoy all of these creative venues, you can do them all, but you need to focus on one thing and be really good at it first.” Then COVID hit. I couldn’t do any performing or any type of acting because everything was shut down.
I took a class at Upright Citizens Brigade with Margot Leitman about writing memoir, and I had all these essays that I had written throughout my life that were kind of abandoned or thrown to the side because other things had come up. I realized, “Oh, I have these specific stories I want to tell.” I felt very strongly about that, and the message of the memoir is really that you can do whatever you want in life. When we’re growing up, older people who love us always give us advice: You shouldn’t do that. You must take this path. It’s coming from a place of projection. They are afraid for you, and they love you. We’re told we need to be full-time at work and we need to be loyal. I did the exact opposite and I turned out okay. That was a message that I wanted to share with others: you don’t have to sacrifice your happiness to be successful and have a beautiful life.
BW: You were living in Shanghai when you first started working in comedy. Was this a thread from your life that had been nagging at you? What made you decide to try stand-up in particular?
KVN: I had a life coach who said I connected with people through humor, and I was like, “I do?” Charna Halpern, one of the founders of iO Improv, came to Shanghai to do a class there. People flew from all over Asia to do this class. I didn’t tell anyone. I just signed up for the class and my first time performing was in front of her, this queen of comedy.
It was such an adrenaline rush being on stage. I’m a very analytical person on one side, and for me comedy is like a puzzle that you play with to figure out which words actually make a joke. Also, how you drive someone to where you want them to go. I found it like a mind puzzle, and I was not very fulfilled at my day job. It was like a nice outlet. I started performing.
I visited LA, which I talk about in the book. I took a class at Upright Citizens Brigade. I realized I enjoyed comedy, and I didn’t really have a job at that point in Shanghai. I was renting out Airbnbs and hated it and had nothing keeping me in Shanghai. I thought, “I guess this is the next city that I’m moving to.” So, comedy really came out of being bored, and the finding of fulfillment in it led me to follow that excitement.
BW: You mention the idea of finding the right words to make a joke land. Has comedy informed your ways of writing? Of course, you were writing before starting stand-up, but once you got into comedy, did you find that this method of thinking influenced the way that you would sit down and tell a story?
KVN: Definitely. It’s very hard to have a career in improv, but improv is very good for dialogue and thinking about how to structurally set up a joke. Stand-up is very good for wording and figuring out where to find rhythm in a joke.
The world is dark right now. It’s a very hard time to be alive, and I believe in the “spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” kind of mentality. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that I don’t have the emotional capacity to read really dark stuff right now. I still think it’s important, especially as a member of a democracy, to be educated on what’s going on in the world. But at the same time, on an individual level, I like taking care of my mental health. So when I write about dark things, I try to write them in a way that takes that “spoonful of sugar” mentality, where people can read about the pain, but it’s not going to hurt them. The beauty of comedy is that you can help people empathize with situations in a way that’s enjoyable. Lessons can be learned but in a safer space.
BW: Since a good chunk of the book takes place years ago, was it hard to reconnect with those earlier versions of you as you wrote? You clearly change as a person as the book goes along. To use comedy terms, you begin the memoir as the straight woman who reacts to the crazy events happening around you. And then, eventually, there’s an evolution of character.
KVN: Yes. I hate the person that I was in those earlier chapters, and I think that’s just part of maturity, right? You don’t want to go back to your early 20s and who you were in your early 20s. As I wrote those chapters, I had to put myself in the shoes of thinking about what was important to me then, especially when it came to romantic relationships and love. Back then, if I felt the tiniest morsel of love I would obsess. And so, I had to picture myself back in that.
I like to go through old photo albums on Facebook that I have. I click through those to remember that point in my life and to help get me back there. With those early chapters, I didn’t initially have as much written down, because it was just so long ago. So I used old photo albums, and then I thought about how I felt in those times and how I feel now and just sat in the moments that I remember more vividly. Like, you know, being told I don’t look good in skirts. It’s a little throwaway comment that someone said, but it was mean, and it sat with me, and I still think about it in my 30s. Things like that have emotional heat attached to them. Why do they still feel so triggering and emotional? I used that to guide me.
BW: It’s amazing, the stuff that we hold on to, that we will remember for our entire lives. Meanwhile, the person who said the insult will never remember that they ever said it to us.
KVN: Oh yeah, they’re not thinking about us at all.
BW: Almost exactly halfway in the book, there’s a line, “Sometimes travel is about running away from your problems.” And the book’s throughline revolves around you trying to figure out what makes you happy. Can you comment on how you navigated this part of your life and the emotions that came with it when putting the book together?
KVN: I would say that it really came down to outlining. I put together chapters that I thought contained themes that I liked and were relevant to finding belonging. Some chapters were removed because of that. I visited North Korea, but that chapter didn’t really fit with the theme of “me;” it felt like the theme of learning about the world.
It started with outlining and then looking back and asking about the actual things that made me happy. Why did those chapters mean that to me? If I’m deciding the top three things that make me happy, maybe it’s my loved ones, my pet, something I do in my free time. You don’t think health care, but not getting proper health care and going through health scares won’t make you happy. I have a chapter on finding out I had HPV while in Shanghai, and it made me realize that having access to doctors and healthcare that I could trust did impact my happiness. So when we look for a place where we feel we “belong” and can settle down, some important components of what makes us happy in that place are not things you usually think of. Happiness is not only about wants but also practical needs. That’s the process I went through.
BW: I keep thinking of the title of the book. I read it two ways: where to nest, as in where am I going to end up? But I also read it as where to next, as in where am I going? How did you land on this title?
KVN: Where to Nest is a play on my last name, Van Nest, right? So partially that, and then I wanted the subheading—A Global Search for Love, Cheap Wine and a Place to Belong—to describe what the book is about and its tone. How do I say that? How do I show that it’s funny? A global search for love is a theme in the book. Cheap wine is there because I worked in the wine industry, and a place to belong is the overarching theme of finding belonging. As you said, “where to next” was me hopping around these traveling experiences to test out all these things.
BW: One last question. Since travel plays a big role in your memoir, I wonder if you can give us an ideal pairing: What is a perfect book that matches to a specific location out in the world?
KVN: Problematic as he is, I do enjoy Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises while reading in Spain. In that book, he goes to San Sebastian. Kind of like a day trip. That is my favorite. I was only in San Sebastian for a day trip, too, but that is currently my favorite beach town. It is on the Atlantic Ocean, and it has very strong waves, but then it is this tiny city with very spindly streets. So, I would say that book captures a lot of the magic of Spain.
Since we’re on Hemingway, there’s the book The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. It’s about his first wife, Hadley, from her perspective when they lived in 1920s France. That is an interesting book on Paris because you’re getting an insider view of the “Lost Generation,” but it’s from Hadley’s perspective as a Midwestern woman whose husband is kind of becoming a god among men. She’s thrown into this amazing period of literature, but she’s also just a human trying to live and raise a child. That’s a beautiful book to read in Paris.
For China, I would say The Three-Body Problem, which just came out as a TV series on Netflix. Liu Cixin is one of the best-selling Chinese authors of modern history. The book has some scenes that take place during Mao Zedong’s era, and it was one of the only books not banned in China that contains such content. In order for his book to not get censored and not blocked in China, he had to move those scenes to the middle, so that when someone was reviewing it for approval for censorship, these scenes weren’t the first thing they saw. This is a cool book to read about that time because it is allowed in China and yet it covers some very topical issues that are usually censored.
And if I picked a chapter in my book that best fits a location, I think it would be the chapter when I wander around Athens during Grexit. I wrote the initial version of that chapter while sitting in a café in Athens, crying. This is in the final cut of that chapter. I was sitting and crying and writing sections of that. So, with that essay, I was literally recording the streets, and the city was watching all their banks shut down. I was there while the people were going through a mass bizarre experience. If one chapter exemplifies a place, it’s that one.
Kristen Van Nest is an American comedian and business owner based in Los Angeles, CA. Having traveled to over 40 countries and lived and worked for most of her twenties in Europe and Asia, she’s found herself through travel. Her personal essays and satirical writing can be found on The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, SlackJaw, and more. When not traveling, you can find her curled up on the sofa drinking wine with her cat. Kristen is represented by Mariah Nichols at D4EO. Where to Nest is her debut memoir.
Benjamin Woodard’s fiction has appeared in journals like Joyland, F(r)iction, HAD, and SmokeLong Quarterly, as well as in the 2019 and 2021 editions of Best Microfiction. He is editor-in-chief at Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine and can be found at benjaminjwoodard.com.
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