November 15, 2019

S2 Ep 19: A Conversation with Author and Straight Spouse Kristin Levine on her YA Novel, The Jigsaw Jungle, About a Tween Girl Who Discovers Her Father is Gay

51 minutes

In today’s episode, Kristin Levine shares her own story of becoming a straight spouse, and how that experience inspired the events in her YA novel, The Jigsaw Jungle, in which a twelve year old girl named Claudia is left clues by her father in a series of jigsaw puzzles as to why he abruptly left the family. Claudia slowly discovers that her father is gay in an intriguing and sometimes maddening process that mirrors the puzzle mixed orientation families solve when they piece together that a loved one is LGBT.

When Kristin’s own marriage ran into trouble, she determined to solve the problem between them by diving into marital relationship courses and insisting on individual therapy. “We need to go to a therapist because something is really wrong and I don’t know what it is,” she told her husband. “I thought maybe this will solve our problems, because I was like ‘there’s no problem I can’t solve if we just worked really, really hard’. I remember walking into the therapist’s office and telling her, ‘I’m really obsessed with this idea that I need to divorce my husband but I’m not exactly sure why’.” Her therapist dismissed her as having mid-marriage doldrums, but as it turned out, her husband was gay, and her mysterious foreboding was accurate after all.

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