Author On the Bookcase

Emily Gray Tedrowe

With pleasure, I welcome Emily Gray Tedrowe, author of Commuters. Emily's novel traces a year in the life of two families thrown together by the sudden marriage of their oldest members. Commuters is a tale of love, family dynamics, money, and surprising alliances. And food! Emily writes about her character Avery's obsession with food, how it  guides his some of his decisions, and how memorable meals can define one's life. 

"When it came to food,” my character Avery thinks, “food that he would be eating or just in the presence of, he just couldn’t abide any interference or outside opinions.” I’m not that bad, but I understand the obsession. Avery is 20 years old, an ex-drug addict, who stumbles on the crazy-genius idea of opening his own place in New York City—world capital for dashed dreams of restauranteurs. He is also food-possessed and food-besotted; cooking is one of the (PG-rated) ways he shows love for his sexy older girlfriend, it’s how he tries to make his grandfather proud of him. It’s the lens through which he sees the world.  As the characters of Commuters argue about whether a historic tree should be cut down to make way for a pool, Avery cooks. As they fight over money, get ill or get well, buy houses and sell houses, he eats. The more other people talk and talk around him, the more Avery is drawn to the heft of a good chef’s knife, the timing of a perfect popover, or the dizzying glory of a nine-course Michelin-star meal.

Avery’s deep passion for food is perhaps not the main story line in my novel, which traces a year in the life of two families thrown together by the sudden marriage of their oldest members. But as I worked on the book, I came to look forward to writing these “foodie scenes” more and more.  Contrary to what several people have guessed, however, I myself am not a foodie. I cook, sure, but my repertoire tends toward simple pastas or beans and rice. Though going out for dinner is a favorite activity, I wonder if I don’t enjoy the atmosphere and the conversation (and the wine) as much as the meal I order. Readers occasionally ask, then, how I came up with the details of Avery’s dream profession—not to mention some of the crazier dishes he concocts, like those Thanksgiving sweet potatoes he doses with lemon juice, Canadian bacon, apple chunks, and “tiny nuggets of jellied goose fat.”

Though I’ve never worked as a chef, I spent several years waitressing in a wide variety of New York City restaurants. And as anyone who’s done that job can attest, you get to see the cooks really up close and personal—not in a camera-ready faux-villain TV-chef way, but as overworked men (they are mostly men) who are driven as hell and suffer for their art. Yes, they can be cocky jerks because it goes with the territory. But I came to admire the grace under pressure and toughness of spirit in those nearest to the brutally hot stoves; I tried to show that Avery has the possibility to develop these qualities someday.

Another way I prepared for writing Commuters’ food-enraptured scenes is by indulging one of my strange proclivities: I love to read about food while I eat. I’ll flip through a cookbook and linger on a twenty-step recipe for beef bourguignon while eating a veggie burger. I like a snack of saltine crackers smeared with cream cheese while studying Cook’s Illustrated on the proper technique for interweaving lattice strips on top of a fruit pie; my leftover black beans and mango in a tortilla tastes better if I’m also reading a review of the newest Chicago hotspot for fusion cuisine. Though I’ve done this for many years, I only realized how useful my weird meta-food reading habit could be when I based so much of Avery’s action and decisions on his relationship with food.

As I write this, it strikes me that my own most memorable meals have to do with the stories of my life.  They are a key to who I am, and who I’ve been.  Of many, these stand out:

• Lunch on the frigid January day my husband and I proposed to each other; the iced-over trees outside the window; I couldn’t eat anything from excitement but he devoured a bowl of chili—awkwardly holding the spoon because his right hand wouldn’t let go of my hand, wearing its new ring.
• The forbidden sandwiches Andrea the pizza man would slip me when I gave him the signal—thick slices of fresh mozzarella toasted on a split roll, black from the heat of the oven.  Not supposed to eat on my shift, I would hunch down behind the waitress stand and work fast, burning my tongue, fortifying myself for the next few hours.
• Long weekend breakfasts at tiny Kitchenette in TriBeCa—eggs, pancakes, juice and coffee—with my two best friends. Having jogged there via the Hudson River path, we immediately demolished any benefit of the exercise, but talked and laughed enough to burn more than a few calories.
• Pancakes each time my dad was in charge of dinner; hot dogs for the nights my parents had evening plans and a babysitter on the way.
  • A bottle of cheap champagne and a single tin of pricy caviar. I took them with me onto the fire escape on the first night in the first (and only) apartment I lived in by myself. Opening both items, sans correct tools, took a while. One tentative fingerscoopful of fish eggs. Caviar, I thought. Strange. Kind of gross. Instead I drank too-sweet wine straight from the bottle and watched cars flowing west and east on Houston Street, five stories below.

One of the coolest book club activities I’ve heard about is when a group makes food to accompany the book they are discussing, or meets at a restaurant that reflects the characters or the story. I’d be really interested to hear what food you think goes with Commuters—and also fascinated to learn about some of your memorable meals . . . as well as the stories they tell. Happy reading . . . and bon appetit!

Emily Gray Tedrowe lives in Chicago with her husband and two daughters. Her short fiction has appeared in Other Voices and the Crab Orchard Review.

Thanks, Emily, for sharing your thoughs of food and life and one idea for a Food by the Book discussion -- "Thanksgiving sweet potatoes he doses with lemon juice, Canadian bacon, apple chunks, and “tiny nuggets of jellied goose fat!"

Check out Emily's website.

What's your memorable story surrounding a meal?  

Author On the Bookcase

Ayelet Waldman

Ayelet Waldman, author of a new book Red Hook Road, writes about questions that readers asks of authors.  And, the one answer she is too embarrassed to tell.  

"There comes a moment at every literary event, a moment every author dreads, when the lights go up and the Q&A starts. The vast majority of the Q is fine (I can’t speak for the A, you’ll have to be the judge). What book am I reading now, when did I first want to become a writer, how do my children feel about the title of my last book. I like those Qs. I like especially the Qs that haven’t been asked before, the ones that give me a chance to depart from my practiced answers. I’m not as fond of the Q that begins with some version of, "I hated this book, but not as much as I loathed your last one," but I can handle that. (I find it usually helps to agree with the person and to suggest alternatives. Ian McEwan never disappoints.)

The Q I loath and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one:

Where, the reader asks, do you get your ideas?

It’s a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, "I don’t know." But I do know. I’m just embarrassed to tell you. I get my ideas from you, or from your mother, or from someone else I run across to whom something bizarre or sad has happened, someone whose life is miserable, but in an interesting way. "Write What You Know," goes the old adage, but once you’ve written about what an unloved geek and freak you were in high school (and every writer I know claims to have been the most unhappy teenager who ever lived. Where were these people when I was sitting alone at the lunch table at George Washington Jr. High? I’d like to know. Couldn’t we have been sitting together?), once you’ve mined the exciting tale of your grandmother/grandfather’s immigration to America from Russia/Italy/China/Vietnam, once you’ve spent an entire novel complaining about how much it sucks to have to wake up in the middle of the night with the baby, then what?

I’ll tell you what. Other people’s misfortune. That’s where we get those ideas that inspire us (and, we hope, you). Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, Aha, here is the story.

My new novel, Red Hook Road, began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper. A bride and a groom (or was it the groom and the best man?) were killed on their way from the church to the reception, when a speeding car smashed into their limousine. The horror of that happening on that day, at that moment, when you are about to embark on a completely new life, where everything is possible and the future is all that is on your mind... that stuck with me for years. I’d think of it time and again, as anyone would.

A normal person thinks about that tragedy, and maybe gets sad all over again. A writer thinks of it and wonders, "Can I use this?"

Until one day, you can, and you do."

This is a little bit of Pat Conroy's review of Red Hook Road.

In her latest novel, Red Hook Road, Ayelet Waldman has nailed the indelible mark that the state of Maine leaves on all visitors who fall for its subtle, insinuating glamour. Red Hook Road is a terrific novel, and might even be a great one. 

... The structure of Red Hook Road is so perfect that I didn’t initially notice the sacred reverence for the beauty of wood both families share. The people of coastal Maine are aficionados of wooden boats, and their harbors fill up with boats that perform the same service as the highest works of art. The same joy of perfect woodwork manifests itself in Kimmelbrod as he cradles his Dembovski or considers the famous violins of Giussupe Guarneri del Gesu. You learn in this book that there is a strange kinship in the mahogany fittings of yachts and the lacquered pear wood of violins -- Red Hook Road is an intricate dance between art and nature, between foreignness and belonging, between still waters and storm.

Author On the Bookcase

Heather Barbieri

I'm thrilled to welcome Heather Barbieri, author of The Lace Makers of Glenmara. to On the Bookcase. Heather tells the story of her grandmother, Esther, and her mother, Michelle, and the joy of reading they shared with her. As a result, Heather's childhood was filled with books as Heather read from "quiet corners—behind the Christmas tree (the lights were particularly magical to read by) or the sofa (not on the sofa, behind it, right by the heat register)"

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, Heather!

"Who instilled a love of reading in you? A teacher? A parent? A bookseller or librarian?

For me, it was my mother and grandmother, who escaped from difficult childhoods within the pages of Little Women, Great Expectations, and Hans Christian Andersen. My mother, Michelle, as solace for being the child of divorced parents, at times written off by the nuns at her parochial school as the product of a broken home; my grandmother, Esther, for a life filled with far too many tragedies.

After losing both her parents at a young age, Esther climbed into the branches of her “Scottish tree” with a novel from her grandmother Frances’ library. Frances wasn’t a kindly sort of grandmother by any means. A formidable woman to say the least, she’d been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, whose family had fallen on hard times after moving to the States and making—and losing—a fortune in the oyster business. Yet she had her books, shelves filled with leather-tooled, gilt covers; novels mostly—she liked a good story, perhaps needing an escape herself. Of the  twelve children she bore, only four survived. What with her husband being an alcoholic, she was left to run the household herself—and she did, with an iron hand.

My grandmother didn’t fit in with her idea of what made a lady. Esther’s sister, Ruth, was considered the beauty of the family. Esther grew up feeling chubby and plain, with fiery red hair and a temper to match. That she didn’t hear well—due to a childhood illness—didn’t help matters; she was only considered more intractable, eventually sent away to live with distant, at times abusive, relatives, then on to boarding school.

Books offered her an alternative world. They provided adventure, hope, and comfort her entire life—through an early marriage at 17, the death of her first child a year-and-a-half later, and a divorce at a time when divorces were nearly unheard of.

I had a relatively idyllic childhood by comparison, and yet books became my early companions too. An only child for over six years before my younger sisters were born, I loved to curl up in quiet corners—behind the Christmas tree (the lights were particularly magical to read by) or the sofa (not on the sofa, behind it, right by the heat register) on rainy afternoons. Many times, I’d read through the night, by the light of the bathroom fixture across the hall (that I was afraid of the dark came in handy), or later, after my parents went to bed—my dad’s thunderous snores shaking the house—the bedside lamp.

The books came from the Pioneer Elementary library (the librarian, Mrs. Davis, whom we not-too kindly dubbed Mrs. Skunk on account of the wide streak of white in her beehive, hid the much-sought-after copy of Judy Bloom’s Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret—because the author dared write about periods, the kind that had nothing to do with punctuation); Weekly Reader book order forms (which, to my delight, were heavy on mysteries at the time); the old Carnegie library downtown, a leaning tower of bookdom straight out of a Lemony Snicket novel; and much-anticipated holiday presents (my mother had excellent taste; several of her selections became favorites, especially the work of British authors Joan Aiken and Elizabeth Goudge). And, of course, from my grandmother’s and mother’s bookcases; they both had a fondness for sweeping sagas, such as The Thorn Birds, Trinity, and anything by Herman Wouk). Even now, my mother and I share book recommendations. (Her most recent favorite: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.) We can’t stop reading.

Now that I’m a writer myself, fulfilling a life-long dream, I’m continually in awe of the wide variety of voices at work in fiction—and nonfiction—today. There’s always a new story to tell—and book to read. I hope that, like my grandmother and mother, you too are transported, that The Lace Makers of Glenmara gives you a window into another way of life—and into your own."

Thanks again, Heather! More on Heather.

Who instilled your joy of reading?

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme by BermudaOnion's Book Blog where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading. 

I only have one word today from The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst.

"Milo's band is called Pareidolia, and they've had a fair bit of success, though whether they're here to stay or are simply the taste of the moment remains to be seen."

pareidolia -- a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, religious figures on pieces of toast, interpreting marks on Mars as canals, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. 

Have you found a new word in your reading?