National Librarians Day is coming up on April 16. This is a perfect time to highlight the working biography I wrote for “Benefits” character Karen Kling (since she is a librarian), who is main character Ben Schmidt’s best friend.

Working Biography Purpose

This is another in the series of working biographies I’ve posted for characters in my novel “Benefits“. She is not an original character for “Benefits”; she had a huge role in the predecessor book “Benediction.”

As with so many of the working biographies for fictional characters, I used this sketch to draw from but did not use all of it. Additionally, I invented other aspects of character not in the working biography at all. So it’s best thought of as resource and starting point.

Karen is very loosely based on someone in my real life, not a librarian but a (now retired) teacher. This is the working bio I concocted for her prior to writing “Benediction”:

Karen Kling Working Biography

Karen (Ben’s producer and confidante):

• She wants the movie Hell for the Holidays to be a success, and a springboard for her to go on to other projects, with or without Ben, She wants to assist Ben as he’s going through Cancerworld, She wants to find out if her husband (Dennis) is having an affair, and if so, who with.
• She has an off-again, on-again weight problem, yo-yo.
• She’s 46, blond, blue eyes. SHE’S 55 IN THE SEQUEL.
• She would shop at Macy’s, but not Nordstrom.
• Her day job is as a librarian for the SF Main Branch public library.
• Her desire is to become a movie producer. She caught the bug going to the Castro Theater for years.
• Married to Dennis Carstens, who is chasing the dot-com boom in SF, and has made some good money at it. Karen drives a new Mini-Cooper that was paid for by this.
• IN THE SEQUEL, KAREN HAS GOTTEN RID OF THE MINI AND HAS A TOP OF THE LINE PRIUS, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE RICH PEOPLE IN SF DRIVE. SINCE BEN AND JAKE HAVE A BLACK ONE, KAREN’S IS RED.
• She suspects that Dennis is having an affair (he is) and she’s really curious about finding out the source of this affair.
• Karen’s a San Francisco native, that rare bird. Oddly, she’s not what you would expect, some “granola” girl with extreme leftist tendencies. She’s surprising “normal.”    
• She loves Ben because he brings things to her life that she would never normally experience.
• She’s also extremely nurturing, helping, and can very much be in charge and throw her weight around when she wants to.
• She doesn’t talk much about her family of origin, though they are scattered about the Bay Area. Her parents are dead, her mother was sick for a long time and that really affected her having fun as a girl. She has a younger brother, Jim, and a younger sister, Peaches (nickname for Persephone) who has two children. Karen’s somewhat jealous in that she’ll never be a mother, “but that’s the choice Dennis and I made.” That’s a lie, they married too late to have kids.

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Like I’ve done with other working biographies, here’s a few rando photos from the Internet to illustrate what was in my mind when I thought of Karen (but blond):

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