We chat with author Courtney Preiss about Welcome Home, Caroline Kline, which is a debut novel sparkling with wit and insight about a young woman whose reluctant return to her Jersey Shore hometown gives her the second chance she didn’t know she needed.
In your own words, tell us what Welcome Home, Caroline Kline is about!
Welcome Home, Caroline Kline is about a woman whose life in New York City is falling apart in every way. Her relationship, her job, and her living situation all take a sudden turn and she’s left without the things she’s relied on defining her. A troubling call from her ailing father brings her back to her Jersey Shore hometown where she discovers he isn’t looking for a caretaker, but rather a replacement on the local men’s softball team where he’s been a star for decades and is on the verge of a championship. Coming home feels mortifying but necessary, and Caroline’s embarrassment doesn’t just stop at having to sleep in her childhood bedroom. A hostile team environment, run-ins with old friends-turned-rivals, and cringeworthy dates all have her questioning her decision to return to New Jersey. It takes a night gone wrong to put her in the path of her first love and make Caroline hopeful about the possibility of a comeback.
More broadly, Welcome Home, Caroline Kline is about letting go of the life you thought you wanted in favor of greater possibilities for what it might become. It’s about recontextualizing the concepts of victory and recovery and recognizing what they mean within our lives. It’s about the potent, nuanced relationships that shape us: the ones we have with our parents, our siblings, our friends, our first loves. It’s about baseball—the bonds it creates and the way it serves as a metaphor for life; how there is always a chance to turn it all around before the last out.
The thing that doesn’t get mentioned at all in the novel but very much serves as a narrative overlay: Caroline is going through her Saturn Return—an astrological phenomenon that allegedly creates unmooring shifts every 29.4 years in a person’s life, corresponding with the placement of the planet Saturn. Saturn Returns have this mythical reputation for majorly shaking up everything you thought you knew, be it your career, your relationships, where you live. We meet Caroline on the precipice of 30 and going through the wringer, which is a very Saturn Return storyline.
What inspired you to write this novel?
This novel was very much inspired by my own Saturn Return! My entire life changed the year I turned 29. I fell in love with one of my closest friends and we decided to move to Asbury Park, New Jersey for his work and to be closer to family. I grew up in New Jersey and had been living in Brooklyn for nearly a decade at that point. I felt that my identity was very tied to everything I’d spent my 20s building in the city: where I lived, what I did for work, who I spent my time with and what we did with all our non-working hours. I was grappling with a lot of fear around making such a huge change and altering those pieces of my life that I leaned on to define myself.
On my 30th birthday, about a month before I moved to New Jersey, I returned to my hometown to watch my father and my brother play a Sunday morning game in the local men’s softball league, where my father has been a fixture for decades. But my father was sidelined with an injury that day and I had the surreal experience of watching the game with him in the bleachers. I joked about taking his place—something that my sister and I threatened to do after my brothers came of age and were allowed to join the men’s only league—and that turned into the idea for Welcome Home, Caroline Kline. I started writing it in earnest shortly after my move during my long commutes on the New Jersey Transit.
Baseball, of course, plays a huge role in the book. Can you talk about your own love for the sport, and what your process was like writing the game scenes?
I was raised in the church of baseball. I grew up in a house where nothing came before the Yankees, the game was always on the radio and the television simultaneously, and my siblings and I learned how to hit a ball as soon as we were old enough to pick up a bat. My grandparents’ first date was at Yankee Stadium in 1948. My parents were both at the Reggie game in 1977. I came of age during the Yankees Dynasty Era of the late 90s-early 2000s, and felt like the luckiest kid alive that I got to be a part of that fandom and bear witness to all the excitement and celebration. I spent my 10th and 20th birthdays in Cooperstown at the Baseball Hall of Fame because I couldn’t imagine anywhere more precious to mark a milestone. Derek Jeter was the number one boy of my youth, and the year he announced his retirement I went to spring training, every home stand, and his last game at Fenway Park. Yankee baseball is my longest, greatest obsession. It’s my tie to my family and my tie to the city where I was born.
Writing the game scenes took the longest. I knew what I wanted the outcome of each game to be and the interactions that needed to happen on the field to move the story forward, but if I spent too much plotting the mechanics, it would eat up my allotted writing time and threaten my daily word count. In many instances, I bulleted out the key points for each game and at the end of the draft I returned to each of them to flesh out the logistics.
Despite it being time consuming, writing gameplay came naturally to me because I spent so many years of my life playing baseball and being an observer—not only to my beloved Yankees, but to my father’s adult men’s team and to each of my siblings’ games. The greater challenge was writing gameplay in a way that would appeal to baseball fans like me but also make sense to a reader who wasn’t as familiar with the game.
Who was your favorite character to write, and why?
I love a friendship story, so I loved writing Winnie. It’s special for Caroline to have a friend who knew her in every era of her life, so I knew Winnie had to be a special character. She’s borrowed from some of my best friends throughout different eras of my life and, like all my characters, she’s borrowed a bit from me. She has some of the funniest lines and scenes in the novel and I had so much fun writing her.
I’d also get excited whenever Serene Jackson showed up. Like Caroline, I spent my teenage years going to the Stone Pony to see shows, and there’s a local magic to that environment and the people who are a part of it. I was compelled by Caroline getting to interact with a character whose work has been such a big presence in her life. Serene Jackson’s songs have soundtracked Caroline’s youth, and now they’re just casually out by the stage door smoking a cigarette together before a show. There’s also a part of me that has always lamented not having any “talent show talents” (I can’t act, can’t sing, can barely dance), so I loved assuming Serene’s stage presence and bravado for a moment and getting to write from that place.
The Jersey Shore almost functions like its own characters in the book. Tell us a bit about your experience writing a book set in your hometown. Did you pull a lot of details from real-life?
I wanted Glen Brook to be a fictional amalgam of the Monmouth County town where I grew up and the towns that neighbor it. My parents moved from Brooklyn to Marlboro, New Jersey when I was four years old, and I lived there until I went to college so its small-town culture is deeply ingrained in me. I used a lot of the personalities I grew up surrounded by as inspiration for the characters on the team and around town. Much like the people in Marlboro I grew up with in the 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of Glen Brook residents moved out to the suburbs from Brooklyn or Staten Island “to start a family,” and they have New York City-informed attitudes and sensibilities about them.
My father, like Leo, has played in Marlboro’s Men’s Softball League since 1993, and both of my brothers played in the league with him once they came of age. Like the teams in Glen Brook, there are a lot of strong personalities and memorable stories and funny team dynamics on my hometown teams. There is a big local devotion to baseball—everyone is either a rabid Yankees or (ugh) Mets fan, and we have a robust Little League where I played Girls’ Softball in its inaugural year. And while there is no Ringer’s Bialys in Marlboro, there is a Bagel Talk on Route 79 and I will still drive out of my way for a fresh dozen there on a Sunday morning.
The house I grew up in bordered Freehold, where Bruce Springsteen is from, so the hometown pride surrounding him was potent. I tried to go against the grain when I was younger and say I wasn’t into Springsteen. Then as soon as I left for college, I found myself telling people I shared a place of origin with him and started listening to his albums and feeling wistful and nostalgic for my very recent past.
Caroline and her family are Jewish. What role does faith play in the story, and did you draw on your own family’s culture and traditions for inspiration?
When Leo convinces Caroline to move back to her hometown, he tells her coming home is a mitzvah (a good deed) and part of her Tikkun Olam (a Jewish person’s mission to heal the world), knowing he’s invoking Jewish concepts that compel her. Faith plays a large role in the novel in that way. Caroline, on some level, is buying into the fact that she’s doing a real mitzvah by returning home for her father—making it the impetus behind her homecoming.
From a cultural perspective, I borrowed from my own experience growing up in a suburb that seemed like an even split between Jewish and Catholic people. Like Winnie and Caroline, my best friend and I frequented Catholic school dances and got in trouble for requesting raunchy songs. We also belonged to our local B’nai B’rith Youth Organization chapter and were very involved throughout high school. (And yes, we participated in loud, over-the-top “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” singalongs at the BBYO dances.)
In the book, Caroline is pushed onto a path that includes her exploring sobriety, a very different lifestyle from the one she had prior. How does this trajectory change Caroline throughout the book?
I think it’s natural for people to reach a point where they examine their relationship to alcohol and the role it plays in their lives. Some people come to this investigation on their own, and some are forced to reckon with it. Caroline falls into the latter camp: there isn’t much introspection going on until she gets a DUI and needs to attend a court-mandated program to consider her actions. At first, there’s more of an exterior motivation to pursue sobriety because participating in the alcohol programs allows her more time with Crispin, her love interest. But what motivates her sobriety evolves over the course of the story. Caroline witnesses how the lifestyle change positively impacts not only all the areas of Crispin’s life, but also in her own. When Caroline slips in her sobriety, she’s able to see more clearly what’s at stake for her and recommits to abstaining from drinking..
Caroline and her father, Leo, bond through their love of baseball. Can you talk a little bit more about their relationship, and how it changes throughout the novel?
Caroline is obviously very devoted to her father and feels in part that the life she has built living in New York City is an attempt to strike out on her own and prove herself to him in some way. She describes it early on as wanting Leo to see her as her own tree instead of just a branch on his. She mentions how he at times feels impossible to impress, and that keeps her in this state of frustration. I think a real turning point is when she accompanies him to a specialist after he takes a second fall. She realizes that she can serve an essential need in his life by being herself and distracting him from his medical issues—which he is desperate to be distracted from. Leo’s change throughout the novel is palpable, too: at the beginning he is consumed with going to the world series and hyper focused on winning. As circumstances shift throughout the novel, it turns more into him seeing Caroline’s return and what they’ve been able to build together as the real victory.
How would you describe your writing process?
When I’m drafting, I like to write first thing in the morning before work or the world has a chance to zap my energy. I aim for at least 1000 words a day (a habit ingrained in me from Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer writing challenge), and I keep track of my daily progress on a spreadsheet titled “MAZEL TOV! YOU’RE WRITING A NOVEL!” Ideally, I repeat this every day—no skips, including weekends—without going back to edit until the draft is complete. I try not to be too precious about my surroundings, but my preference is to write with a candle lit, sitting on my big white armchair, curled into a position that will likely have detrimental long-term effects and make my posture resemble a croissant. Before I sit down to write, I say, “Time to make the donuts.” I’m fortunate to have married an early riser whose love language is acts of service, so my husband makes the coffee. I always credit him with my ability to actually finish what I start, because the truth is I’d be nowhere without that coffee.
Tell us about some of your favorite authors, and books. Did you turn to any books, movies, or television shows for inspiration while writing Welcome Home, Caroline Kline?
My favorite authors are the ones who can devastate me and make me double over laughing from one line to the next: Lorrie Moore, David Sedaris, and Jo Ann Beard come to mind first. I love when troubling, true-to-life circumstances are mined for humor. I very much subscribe to Carrie Fisher’s age-old: “If my life weren’t funny, it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.”
My favorite novels of the last few years are razor sharp and darkly funny. Raven Leilani, Melissa Broder, Liv Stratman, Marcy Dermansky, Jen Beagin, Rachel Khong, and Kevin Wilson have all come to occupy sacred shelf space in my home.
Reading Rachel Khong’s debut Goodbye, Vitamin when it released in 2017 definitely planted some seeds for Welcome Home, Caroline Kline. I was blown away by how that novel examined parental illness, heartbreak, and a fraught father-daughter relationship with such beauty and humor—and she somehow did it in just 200 pages! I read Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes after finishing a draft of Caroline in summer 2020. Seeing how deftly she blended the love story with the self-discovery narrative and watching her successfully reach a wide audience with a baseball-infused book was so heartening and gave me confidence as I continued to shape my own.
My favorite movie growing up was A League of Their Own. Penny Marshall has been my idol my entire life, and I can’t tell a “women in baseball” story without crediting that film and how it shaped me. Readers of Welcome Home, Caroline Kline will not be surprised at all to learn that Silver Linings Playbook was a massive inspiration to me. I did the inverse of my usual book-to-film consumption and saw the movie before I read Matthew Quick’s novel, but I love and aspire to both.
There’s a line in the season 3 episode of The Simpsons “Homer at Bat,” where Mr. Smithers is trying to lure Steve Sax away from the Yankees to play in Springfield’s local nuclear power plant’s league. He approaches the second baseman and says, “How would you like to be the ringer on a small-town company softball team?” That line is basically a 15-word summary of my novel.
What do you want readers to take away from your book?
My priority is to entertain and connect. I want to make readers laugh and I want them to make them feel less alone if they relate to any aspect of the story.
If a reader finds themselves in a similar headspace to Caroline, I’d love for them to challenge their own old, maybe outdated, visions of their life they’ve been clinging to and consider the beauty of what it could be if they let go of that. It’s difficult, but essential, to be honest with ourselves about what isn’t serving us anymore, or if our decisions are based on upholding other peoples’ perceptions of us or what might make us truly content and fulfilled.
What’s next for you?
A second novel! I’m so grateful that Caroline sold to Putnam in a two-book deal and I’ve been hard at work on my next book. It’s unrelated to Caroline’s story, but it shares a set of hallmarks that I believe will come to tie all my work together: a complicated female protagonist trying to find her place in the world, a family story braided with a love story, and lots of voice-y humor. My greatest dream has always been to write. I have a deep well of ideas for more novels, and my sincerest hope is to have the privilege to continue doing this.
