Hoboken resident Kate Rockland, 28, lived the typical life of a hopeful music writer after college. She resided in four separate apartments in the East Village over two years, landed a job at Rolling Stone Books after an unpaid internship at the magazine, and wrote freelance pieces for major publishing outlets including the New York Times. Eventually, she bought a condo in Hoboken, married a man she met on a plane, and was laid off – spurring her to spend the time writing her first novel.
“Why live in a borough? You pay all that money and it’s not even clean.” – Kate Rockland
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Jersey girl
Rockland was born in Princeton and grew up in Morristown. Her parents are both writers – her father is Michael Aaron Rockland, who teaches at Rutgers and writes nonfiction. Her mother, Patricia Ard, wrote a book with him called “The Jews of New Jersey,” even though Ard is Irish.
Kate Rockland obtained a B.A. in English at Rutgers and wrote a column for the Daily Targum called “Sex and the Campus” about relationships, although she steered clear of chronicling her own. “I thought I was Carrie Bradshaw,” she said in an interview last month. “I’d write about relationships and stuff. I’d write about the boys at the gym grunting, and how it sounds like having sex. I’d take polls about dating at Rutgers.”
Rockland applied each year for an internship at Rolling Stone until they finally gave in. Although the character in her novel, Harper Rostov, is quite knowledgeable about punk rock, Rockland says she likes all types of music. Given the choice, she’d rather listen to Springsteen or Paul Simon.
When Rockland worked full-time at the magazine’s books division, she also hustled to get freelance gigs, penning some “A Night Out With” columns for the New York Times, including one in which she shadowed rocker Courtney Love.
Rolling Stone Books folded after two years, and Rockland got tired of pitching freelance stories, which she said was “exhausting.” At some point, she also got tired of living in vermin-swarmed apartments in New York. She had a cousin she visited in Hoboken, and she couldn’t believe the value.
“I fell in love with it,” she said. “Why live in a borough? You pay all that money and it’s not even clean. [But] people in New York think it’s like four hours away.”
She and her parents bought a condo downtown, which she has lived in ever since.
Pitching the book
Rockland went on unemployment after Rolling Stone Books folded, and that’s when she wrote her first novel. She had found her agent through contacts made at work. Interestingly, she didn’t ask her parents for help in getting published, despite their status as successful writers.
When her agent sent the book out, she got the usual raft of rejections from big publishing houses.
“They’d explain why, and some of them were complimentary,” she said. “Others said, ‘We feel the character is not realistic.’ Some were like, ‘We’ll probably be eating our words…’ “
Rockland’s agent told her that an editor at St. Martin’s liked the book but felt it should be a lot longer. Since this was her best chance, Rockland asked if the editor could meet her for a drink and discuss ideas.
Ultimately, Rockland added more to the book, and even though the work was grueling, she was pleased with the end result.
She wound up with a two-book deal and now is slated to deliver her second novel, “150 Pounds,” about two girls with competing weight blogs, this fall.
The novel
“Falling Is Like This” follows a week in the life of Harper Rostov after she dumps her live-in boyfriend. The relationship has stagnated, he doesn’t support her writing, they haven’t had sex in six months, and she knows it’s time to go. But how, and where? She’s not sure it’s worth giving up the security of a committed relationship.
She visits her parents’ house in New Jersey, deals with her younger, clinically depressed sister, and makes trips back to Manhattan. At a coffee shop, she immediately recognizes Nick Cavallero, the heartthrob of a punk band called Hitchhiker’s Revenge. She and Nick begin falling in love, although of course there are complications: He’s unreliable, not good with commitment, has an on-and-off girlfriend, is still heartbroken from a love of many years ago, and takes drugs. As a typical twentysomething, Harper tries to impress him with her music knowledge and her sarcasm about everyone who isn’t “punk’ enough. Will Harper go back to the comfort of her live-in boyfriend, pursue Nick, or start over? This is the hook that keeps the reader in suspense.
What makes the novel transcend fluff is Rockland’s writing. “It smelled like her Bronx apartment: mothballs and matzo ball soup,” she writes about Harper’s grandmother’s rug. And later: “I passed a dead deer on the side of the road…one hoof was poised in midair; the white gleam of a rib bone gleamed in the midday sun.”
“I think of it as a love letter to New Jersey,” Rockland said last month. “I’ve lived here my whole life. I think it’s fun to have a character in the book who lives where you live. It’s a one-week glimpse into her life. It’s about how a major change can occur in a short time when you’re young. Every job you take, every relationship you have, you’ll remember forever.”
Is it me for a moment?
It is easy to assume, as with most first-person novels, that Rockland’s character is based on her. While she does have an encyclopedic knowledge of punk bands, she says she’s matured a lot since her early twenties.
“It’s like a warped version of myself,” she said. “If it’s me at all, it’s me when I was young and confused. Maybe forty-five percent of it is real. There’s a general sense that anything can come next when you’re 23. It’s okay if you don’t know what you’re going to do with your life. It’s okay if you don’t know who your life partner will be. It’s a very exciting time.”
Rockland apparently has followed writerly advice to include her obsessions and loves in her work. “The book has all things I’m interested in,” she said. “Boys, music, New Jersey. I think the book is very ‘me’; but it’s not about me.”
Hoboken life
Rockland currently works as a pre-school teacher at Brandt, a public school in Hoboken, and plans to help out at fashion camp this summer at M. Avery Design in town.
A year ago, Rockland married a banker she had met on a plane trip. She had been traveling from Boston back to New York after interviewing the rock band Weezer. She’s afraid to fly, and as is her custom, asked the person in the next seat to hold her hand. She says he had a shamrock tattoo, and she told him how she is half-Irish. They went for drinks after the plane trip.
Now they live in her Hoboken condo, and Rockland says she never plans to leave. She loves many things about Hoboken: Empire Coffee (where she does a lot of her writing), Grimaldi’s pizza, Toots and Tallie’s dresses, Yes, I Do Stationers, Amanda’s for a meal when her parents visit, and jogging on the piers. She’s involved as a volunteer in a project to fix up Church Square Park.
She also loves William Howard Home, and is selling photos she took at Martha’s Vineyard. How’s that for creative?
As a future project, Rockland says she wants to have four kids. She only has one extra bedroom in her condo, though.
“I’m going to put four kids in two bunkbeds,” she said.
For more information, see www.katerockland.com.