(gentle music) (typewriter dings) - [Christine] I'm Christine Coulson, and this is One Woman Show.

(gentle music continues) So I've written a novel almost entirely in museum wall labels, which are those little descriptions you see next to a work of art in a museum.

And I've used that to create a kind of retrospective exhibition of a life.

And the subject is a woman called Kitty, who is not always likable, but she is treated much like a work of art in that she is evaluated, critiqued, prized, and collected from when she's a child, throughout her whole life.

(gentle music continues) - How did you even come up with this idea?

- [Christine] You know, it's one of those-- - What was that nugget that was like, ooh?

- Yeah, so it's one of those unusual times where I know exactly where I was, where I was standing, what was happening.

The process of writing those labels involved a lot of back and forth.

And after one kind of contentious meeting, we were all breaking up, and I looked at my colleague, and I thought, I'd love to write a label about him.

At the same time, I thought, that's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna use this language and I'm gonna write about people as exquisite works of art.

(gentle music continues) - [J.T.]

Tell us a little more about Kitty.

- Kitty arrived in a very haphazard way.

I did not sit down and intend to write like, oh, this will be the vehicle.

I will write about this woman, and I'll use labels to do it.

It was very much the reverse.

I wanted to write labels about people, and I had to just give it a try.

And so I wrote about this patrician woman, I called her Kitty.

I had no particular investment in her as a character, but there she was, and she kind of took over the book.

I thought, well, now I'm gonna challenge myself to write 20 labels about Kitty.

And now I'm gonna write 40.

And I just kind of let her reveal herself to me.

- This is an amazing book and I can't wait for everyone to read it.

Congratulations, it's just a masterpiece.

Thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you.

- And thank you for watching A Word on Words.

I'm J.T.

Ellison.

Keep reading.

(typewriter dings) - [Christine] In museums we call flaws, condition issues.

What better term for human beings and their flaws?

We all have condition issues.

(gentle music continues)