From Toni Morrison, in Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir: "When I hear someone say "truth is stranger than fiction," I think that old chestnut is truer than we know… it doesn’t say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it’s stranger, meaning that it’s odd. It may be excessive, it […]
night drive with rain, arrows, gingerbread crumbs, too-big numbers, and, as always, questions
"… so perhaps the work is the arrow, flying from the writer towards what she will become…" This may not be the exact quote, but it’s more or less what I remember from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, which I read some thirty-five years ago. It was a book I found self-indulgent even then, […]
Still life with owl, food writer, and cosmic goofiness
I’ve been working on culinary writing today. Besides my cookbooks, I do short pieces for Relish Magazine, which is kind of like a food-only Parade, and has hands-down the two nicest, best-to-work-with magazine editors for whom I’ve ever written, Jill Melton and Candace Floyd … I’ve just finished, minus one recipe I still need to […]
A few quick post-Mother’s Day P.S.’s, re writing
1. The New Yorker cartoon showing the sullen college-age girl in seated in a window seat, cup of tea on the floor beside her, writing in a notebook balanced on her knees. Caption: "“Dear Mom and Dad: Thanks for the happy childhood. You’ve destroyed any chance I had of becoming a writer.” 2. My late […]
me & my semi-famous aging mother: navigating love with fierce persistence
“Happy Mother’s Day,” we say, as if it were that simple. It usually isn’t. Complex, ambivalent, contradictory, with more layers than a baklava: that begins, barely, to describe the relationship my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, and I have with each other. That it has at last grown simpler and less ambivalent in the last couple of […]
transparency, part 2: a little madness in the spring
Sometimes it seems to me that everything reflects everything. Becoming transparent in the human sense, as I wrote about in the previous post, means that more light gets in, and out, in a spiritual, or maybe for some, emotional or psychological sense. Transparency in the culinary sense, as I understand it, is both like and […]
transparency
So I have this thing going on with the tendons on in my left foot. The details don’t matter; it’s getting better. What does matter is this: I see a doctor at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, approximately a 55-minute drive from where I live in Vermont. DHMC, in my view, has a lot of stars in […]
“You’ll get a big kick out of this.”
This was the subject line on an email from Patti, who handles sales of my, my late husband’s, and my mother’s out-of-print books. Some we still have actual copies of; others we are set up (thanks to Patti) to offer digital copies of, for downloading. (My mother, BTW, is the children’s book writer Charlotte Zolotow. […]