I long ago lost count of how many times I’ve made this cake. The recipe, clipped from the Boston Globe in the pre-internet age, is pasted with rubber cement into a notebook of recipes I began keeping the year before I got married in 1987. The pages are all loose now, held together with a rubber band. But I know exactly where the yellowed, glaze-spattered cake recipe is, should I ever need a quick refresher. In fact, as I realized while creaming the butter and sugar yesterday morning, I don’t really refer to the recipe anymore. I know it by…
“Everything that is not written down disappears except for certain imperishable moments, people and scenes.” — James Salter, “The Art of Fiction No. 133,” The Paris Review On the bed where I sit cross-legged, leaning against the headboard: eyeglasses, a couple of paperbacks, a new but already much loved hardcover novel, half-read, its pages folded over, the margins scattered with lightly penciled exclamations, each one a silent, emphatic yes. Two pens, gray and black, a notebook with a dark brown cover and magnetic clasp. A pile of down pillows pushed aside, the familiar quilt, softened by age and use, sun-faded….
February 21, 2013 – 11:52 am
A mother’s midlife memoir paired with a gardening book? What, you might well ask, could these two volumes possibly have in common? And why would a married mom of two and a resolutely single, encyclopedically knowledgeable, former-Martha-Stewart-publishing-executive-turned-rural-hermit ever become writing partners, let alone dear friends? Well, if age teaches us anything, it’s that life is full of surprises – and that the relationships that bloom and blossom in the langorous afternoon of life are often quite different from those of its bright morning. No longer bound to our friends by social stratifications, proximity, or the shared duties of parenthood,…
January 21, 2013 – 6:50 pm
Just over a year ago, I hit the wall. I’d been writing for months, throwing away more pages than I kept, feeling less sure of myself and what I was doing with every passing day. I had a deadline, the end of March. But I wasn’t at all sure I had a book. Two days after New Years, with both sons back at school, I flew to Florida and set up camp in the guest bedroom of my parents’ house. My mom, keeping her promise not to tempt me with distractions, went about her carefree retiree’s life. Meanwhile, I holed…
January 7, 2013 – 2:32 pm
We were an unlikely pair, Olive Ann Burns and I. She was sixty, a gentle, charming Southern housewife with dreams of finally publishing the enormously long novel she’d spent years writing — years when cancer and chemotherapy and its complications had kept her confined to her house, and the joy of creating characters she loved had kept her going. I was twenty-five, an earnest, aspiring New York editor who was certain I’d just discovered my first prize in the slush pile. “Cold Sassy Tree could become a classic,” I confidently predicted in my typewritten manuscript report. “It needs some cutting,…
