---
title: How Kathy Taylor Turned Two Stays in Marburg Into an Autobiographical Novel
description: How Kathy Taylor wrote The Birthing House, an autobiographical novel about grief, language and self-reinvention set in Marburg, Germany.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-06-09T13:49:23.615Z
updated: 2026-06-09T14:24:57.372Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/the-birthing-house-kathy-taylor
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-picturesque-view-of-a-cobblestone-street-in-marburg-s-old-to-22873836.jpg
categories: Literary Fiction
content_type: Spotlight
region: United States, Germany
publication: Rich Books
about:
  - type: Person
    name: Kathy Taylor
    description: Kathy Taylor is an American novelist, poet, and retired professor of Spanish literature, linguistics, and creative writing. She has lived in Mexico, Nicaragua, Ireland, Curacao, and Germany, and now lives in the Colorado mountains. Her books include the novel The Birthing House and the short story collection Trees and Other Witnesses, a 2022 Colorado Authors League award finalist. She also writes under the name Catalina Sastre.
    sameAs:
      - https://catalinawrites.com
---

There is a house in the German town of Marburg where women once went to have their babies. In The Birthing House, Kathy Taylor sends a woman back to Marburg to live in that house, twenty years after she first lived in the city, to grieve her father and to write, and lets the place go on doing the work it was built for. The novel is drawn from Kathy's own two stays in Marburg, in the early 1980s and again around 2001, and it follows its narrator, a professor named Clare Muller, through both. It cares less about plot than about the slow, unglamorous work of putting a life back together one sentence at a time.

### Book: The Birthing House
By Kathy Taylor

Set in the German town of Marburg, The Birthing House follows Clare Muller across two timelines twenty years apart: as a young mother in the early 1980s, and as a professor returning two decades later. A house that once served as a birthing place becomes the setting for a story about grief, language, memory, and the way writing returns a person to herself. Available in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook; the audiobook is narrated by Abigail Reno and Stephen Dalton.

[Author's Website](https://catalinawrites.com/book-store/)

Kathy is a retired professor of Spanish literature, linguistics, and creative writing who now lives off the grid in the Colorado mountains. Her website says that firsthand experience 'infuses the narrative with authenticity,' and the overlap with her narrator is plain: like Kathy, Clare is an academic and a writer who knows Marburg in both decades. The Birthing House is a novel rather than a memoir, though, and Clare is its protagonist, free to feel and do things the author need not have lived.

Early in the book, Clare unpacks a journal of blank pages bound in soft leather, a gift from her father, whose loss she is still carrying. He had called it 'a home for your writing,' and for a long time she cannot bring herself to mark the white pages. Her slow filling of that journal becomes the engine of the novel.

## An Autobiographical Novel Built Like a House

The book opens with a line Kathy attributes to her writing name, Catalina Sastre: 'We write to give birth to ourselves.' In Spanish the phrase for giving birth, dar a luz, means to give to the light, and that small piece of wordplay holds up the whole structure. The birthing house is a real place with a real history, and it is also the novel's governing metaphor. Clare is writing a book of her own about how fiction works, and she imagines it as a half-timbered German house, laying a foundation, mixing the clay of character, raising the walls that hold a story together. Taylor braids those building notes through the narrative, so the novel and the house are assembled in front of the reader at the same time.

Asked what sits at the center of the book, Kathy describes it plainly. 'In many ways the central theme here is writing as a way of understanding, of becoming,' she says. 'Clare is an academic who is trying to write a book about fiction and how it works, but she first has to write her way back to herself before she can get that project going.' Writing, she adds, 'is about moments and memory and language. And it is about paying attention.'

## Writing Through Grief, Twenty Years Apart

The Birthing House is one of those dual timeline novels that lets two versions of the same woman speak to each other. In 1980 a younger Clare arrives in Marburg grieving a miscarriage, with a small son and only modest German. In 2000 she returns as a professor, her children grown, her father newly lost, and stays in the house of a woman she has never met but comes to know by living in it. Taylor cuts between the two with dated entries, and the effect is to set a young mother learning to belong in a foreign town beside an older woman learning how to let her father go.

That structure is the novel's quiet argument about grief. The past does not sit behind us, the book suggests, it runs alongside, close enough to touch. One of Clare's images for it stays with you: the moments of a life nesting inside one another through time, like a set of Russian dolls. For readers who come to fiction looking for the unspectacular turning points that a life is actually made of, becoming a mother, losing a parent, finding the words at last, this is a book about finding yourself in exactly those passages.

## Becoming a Different Person in Another Language

Because Kathy spent her career inside languages, language is where the novel does its sharpest work. Clare notices that she becomes a slightly different person in each tongue she speaks, more philosophical in German, more open and quick in Spanish. She turns over the way old words quietly decide what a woman is allowed to be, including a much-translated line from the book of Isaiah in which a 'young woman' became a 'virgin' on the way to the Christmas story. These are not asides. They are the book's case that reinvention often starts with the words we are handed, and with the courage to question them.

![The Marktplatz in Marburg, Germany, the setting of The Birthing House](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/marburg-marktplatz.webp)

## Listening to the People History Displaced

For all its inwardness, The Birthing House is generous toward other people. Clare is a listener, and the novel fills with the stories she gathers in Marburg. 'Clare also listens to the stories of others,' Kathy says, 'and they become part of her life.' Among them is Johann, an elderly violinist who was pulled into the German army during the war despite a Jewish grandmother, and who survived, he says, because 'music kept my soul alive.' Around him gather a Polish lawyer who gave up her legal career in Poland to follow her husband to Germany, a German family expelled from a homeland that kept changing its name, and a Somali poet who reads her own life aloud in three languages. Set among novels set in Germany, this one turns a single town into a small republic of people who have lost a place and built another, which makes it, underneath everything, a book about belonging.

## Where to Read The Birthing House

The Birthing House is sold in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook through Kathy Taylor's website at catalinawrites.com. The audiobook is narrated by Abigail Reno and Stephen Dalton. The site also carries her short story collection Trees and Other Witnesses, a 2022 Colorado Authors League award finalist, and her earlier work.

**About Kathy Taylor**

Kathy Taylor is an American novelist, poet, and retired professor of Spanish literature, linguistics, and creative writing. She has lived in Mexico, Nicaragua, Ireland, Curacao, and Germany, and now lives in the Colorado mountains. Her books include the novel The Birthing House and the short story collection Trees and Other Witnesses, a 2022 Colorado Authors League award finalist. She also writes under the name Catalina Sastre.

## Frequently Asked Questions

**Q: What is an autobiographical novel?**
An autobiographical novel is a work of fiction that draws closely on the author's own life, while keeping the freedom to invent, reshape, and compress. The events and characters may be based on real people and experiences, but the book is presented and read as a novel rather than as a factual memoir.

**Q: How can writing help with grief?**
Writing gives shape to feelings that are otherwise hard to hold. Putting a loss into words, whether in a private journal or in a more finished form, can slow the mind down, make sense of scattered memories, and create a record of the person who has gone. Many people find that the act of writing, rather than the finished page, is where the relief lies.

**Q: What is autofiction, and why is it popular now?**
Autofiction is fiction that openly blends the author's real life with invented material, often using a narrator who resembles the writer. It has grown popular partly because readers are drawn to writing that feels candid and first-hand, and partly because it lets authors examine memory and identity without claiming the strict accuracy that a memoir demands.

**Q: Do authors often write about their own lives?**
Many do. Drawing on personal experience gives fiction emotional weight and detail that is hard to invent from nothing. Writers usually change names, combine real people into single characters, and rearrange events, so that even a closely autobiographical novel remains a made thing rather than a transcript.