Island Girl, Author Kaui Hart Hemmings

Kaui Hart Hemmings makes a splash with her debut novel.

At thirty-one, Kaui Hart Hemmings is the youngest writer at San Francisco’s premier writing collective, the Grotto. She’s also a married mom with a two-year-old daughter and now, with The Descendants in bookstores this month, a full-fledged novelist.

What she isn’t: your typical suffering artist. “It all seems so accidental at times,” says Hemmings (whose first name rhymes with “Maui”). “Writing wasn’t really a passion—it was more like, How can I get out of having a normal job?” She found out how when she enrolled in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence, followed that up with a Stegner Fellowship, authored short stories that made it into the Best New American Voices and Best Nonrequired Reading anthologies and, by age twenty-nine, published her first short-story collection (House of Thieves) to critical acclaim. That’s enviable momentum for someone who didn’t start with the writing bug, and who admits that she ignores the adage about “writing what you know.”

“Writing about someone who’s the opposite of you is freeing,” she says. “There’s something about not knowing what it’s like that lets you better imagine what it’s like. I swear there’s a middle-aged man inside me.”

And most likely, his name is Matthew King. That’s the protagonist of The Descendants, who, while his wife lies in a coma, takes his two troublesome daughters on a road trip through Hawaii in search of his wife’s lover. Having lived in both Hawaii and Breckenridge, CO, Hemmings gravitates toward stories about the mundane, painful (and painfully funny) struggles people encounter in Edenic settings. It makes perfect sense, then, that she’s currently working on a collection of essays and stories about motherhood in that other cultural “paradise”—San Francisco. “There’s this strange combination of affluence and insecurity here when it comes to raising kids,” she explains. “There are consultants for everything: sleeping, lactation, organizing. I just had to write about it.”

By Robin Rinaldi