Second Acts: A conversation with Kristin Koval ’88
A conversation with debut novelist and former lawyer Kristin Koval ’88
Kristin Koval ’88 always wanted to be a writer but instead pursued a career in law. She attended Georgetown University and, after a year of travel, Columbia Law School. Traveling, Koval says, was “one of the best things I’ve ever done. … Travel reminds you that there are eight billion different worlds on this planet.”
A few years ago, she decided to focus on her writing. The result, Penitence, is an assured, accomplished debut novel, a compelling tale of tragedy and forgiveness in a small Colorado ski town. In the opening pages, 13-year-old Nora is arrested after fatally shooting her 14-year-old brother. Ultimately, the effects of the shooting encompass not just their parents, but also the lawyers — formerly close friends of the family — who take on Nora’s defense.
We caught up with Koval to hear more about her new book and transition to the writing life.
I love how your characters have messiness in their lives; each one is such a complete, humane person. How did you manage that?
It was really important to me to write the novel from different perspectives. I thought that readers needed to walk in each character’s shoes in order to develop empathy for them. You need empathy in order to have mercy, and you need mercy to land on forgiveness, and forgiveness is where I want readers to land at the end of the novel.
Why is forgiveness so important?
I have had really impactful experiences with forgiveness, with being forgiven and forgiving other people. There was one instance where I forgave a couple of people that I’d been trying and failing to forgive for a really long time. One day, it happened in an instant, and I felt this sense of calm and peace. It was such a great feeling; it changed my life for the better, so I knew I wanted to write about it.
How did this particular plotline come to you as a way to write about forgiveness?
I came across news accounts of juvenile fratricide and decided this would be the way to write about forgiveness: by opening the novel with that situation, you are putting the parents in both the very easiest possible position to forgive — because if they don’t forgive the second child, they will lose that child — and the hardest possible position to forgive, because that second child killed their first child. It enabled me to explore how messy and complicated and hard forgiveness can be, and yet how beneficial it is.
You captured small-town dynamics impeccably. Your characters are thoroughly entangled, yet there are aspects of estrangement too.
Well, I grew up in a very small town in central Pennsylvania. I also lived in New York City, which can have small communities within it, for eight years. Even schools can be small towns. I thought that placing the novel in a small town was a great way to show how judgmental and unforgiving people can be. I was also writing during COVID, and when I looked around at that time, it seemed like our world was very unforgiving. A small-town setting was one way to communicate the unforgiving nature of our world.
You were a lawyer. How did you make the transition to author?
I tried to write books several times before this one! The first time, I was on maternity leave with my first son, and I thought, “I have three whole months. Why don’t I just write a book?” As you can imagine, that didn’t happen. I was an overwhelmed first-time mother. Ten years later, with both kids in grade school, I tried again. But I did not have the energy to be a full-time lawyer, a full-time mother and a writer. I know that there are lots of people who can make that work, but I was not one of them. Then one day, when the kids were in high school, I happened into a free writing class, just a two-hour class in this little garden, and I came out of it totally rejuvenated. I realized that the reason I had been trying and failing for so many years was partly because I had never taken a creative writing class and didn’t have a writing community. So, while I was still a lawyer, I set about fixing that. I started taking evening classes, took the idea of a novel off the table, and focused on short stories. I realized that I could sit down on a Saturday and do my writing homework, focus for 12 hours, and be perfectly content. But if you took a picture of me in my office while I was lawyering, I was clock-watching all day.
A sign, perhaps?
I was at a point in my life where I needed to not be a lawyer anymore. I needed to do something different. I didn’t want to wake up when I was 80 and say, “Gosh, I wish I would have tried to write that book.” I wrote this novel pretty quickly: Start to finish, including my research, took about 11 months. I was ready. I had everything in my head, and writing was what I did that year.
Were there particular experiences at Exeter that shaped you?
So many! I recently came across a journal that I kept during a prep-year English class. (I did not save my chemistry and math notebooks, but I saved all my English notebooks.) In this journal, I had to write about something that was important to me, and I wrote about my grandparents’ basement, and I remember trying to be creative as I wrote. All my Exeter English teachers shaped my writing, my analysis of texts and my willingness to think creatively; that has been a huge help for my writing and my communication skills. And Exeter made me a very independent person. It shaped me into someone willing to take risks. You have to do that at Exeter: you’re on your own to some extent as a young person, and you have to make decisions, try new things. I pursued activities totally new to me, like water polo and weightlifting. Exeter was about making choices to always do something new.
Did your background in law inform your writing?
I was a trust-and-estates lawyer, not a criminal defense lawyer, so I had to do quite a bit of research to write the novel. That included perusing the websites of various juvenile detention centers and reading the handbooks they give to the juveniles they house. I connected with two criminal defense attorneys who represent juveniles — they answered question after question — and I watched the trial of a juvenile for assault. Also, my own legal work was complicated, so clarity was important — clarity and efficiency with words. I became known as the person who could cut more words than anybody else. I love words, effective words — that’s definitely been incorporated into my novel.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing my next novel, and I’ve started a Substack about second acts because I’ve had so many people come up to me and say, “How did you have the courage to do something different?” I didn’t need courage; it was more that I would have been afraid to not do this new thing. I encourage people all the time to not be afraid of doing something in the second — or third, or fourth — act of their life. You can be 25 and decide, “I think I want to go down a different career path.” You can make that decision when you’re 38 or 47 or 55. Having that freedom to really grow and change and evolve — that freedom is a good thing.
Daneet Steffens ’82 is a books-focused journalist. She has contributed to The Exeter Bulletin since 2013.
This article was originally published in the summer 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin.