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I was a short-order cook for a few months through the winter of 1986 and into the early summer of 1987, at Roxy Hearts World Diner in Portland, Oregon, a silver-chrome-and-red-Naughahyde, vintage-movie-poster-decorated little place on Burnside, in the Pearl District, the rough part of town where the bums lived, near the seedy gay bars, the seedy straight bars. My friend James and I worked the night shift, so we handled the rush when the bars closed between 3 and 4 in the morning and the entire male gay population of Portland showed up drunk, spangled, howling, cruising, and hungry for omelets, burgers, sandwiches, and French toast. James and I threw garnishes at each other mid-rush, singing operatically, laughing, cursing, punchy.

James was a willowy, dark-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned English boy by way of the San Fernando Valley, funny and sensitive, arch, with a charming mean streak. Back then, at twenty-one, he was just coming out; now, he’s an AIDS activist and lawyer in D.C.  We’d been close friends as students, and we’d both stuck around Portland the year after graduation, feeling a bit lost, two lovelorn sensitive plants nostalgic for Reed and wondering what to do next with our lives.

We were both pining for hot, unavailable younger boys who were still in college. When we weren’t at our low-paying demeaning post-college jobs, we decked ourselves out and headed over to campus to cruise around the S.U. steps, the Café, the library, and the Great Lawn, hoping to “run into” one or both of them. We had nothing better to do. I was struggling to pay my rent ($165 a month for a dingy little studio apartment on SE Division) working fifteen hours a week at the Waldenbooks in the mall downtown, augmenting my tiny minimum-wage paychecks with government cheese and food stamps and an occasional babysitting job for my former thesis advisor.

Compared to me, James made pretty good money cooking at Roxy Hearts. He also worked much harder, twelve-hour shifts, but he always had money to go out drinking, and he was generous with it. When the other night cook quit, or was fired, I don’t remember which, James recommended me to take his place, probably so I could afford to buy my own damn cocktails. By that point, I was getting the bad feeling that that if I had to unbox and shelve one more load of slippery, glitzy romance paperbacks or help one more smarmy yuppie find a self-help book, I very well might kill someone, probably myself. I was ecstatic to get the job at Roxy Hearts.

We only once missed a shift. On what was supposed to have been a day trip to the Oregon coast, on the way back to Portland for our shift, James’s van skidded and slid into the guardrail and James broke his hand, gripping the steering wheel so hard the bones were crushed. The van was towed by AAA to a local mechanic’s. There was no public transportation that late in the day back to Portland from wherever we were, and we couldn’t rent a car, because I had no license and James was on painkillers and couldn’t drive with a broken hand. We had no way to get there, short of beaming ourselves via teleportation.

So we had to call Keith, the gay, tough, black day cook, and tell him we weren’t going to make it to work that night. He was a clean-and-sober ex-alcoholic ex-junkie who later died of AIDS (as did our favorite waiter, the tiny, doe-eyed Joey, who batted his Bambi lashes at James and swanned around the place as if he were an heiress on a cruise ship instead of a waiter schlepping heavy plates of food). Keith had tattoos from when he was in the Navy, he was covered in scars, his nose had been broken in fights, he was a battered guy who’d seen it all, and we were whining about a fucked-up transmission and a broken hand. Because of our ineptitude, he now had to work the kitchen all night alone after working there all day. He very understandably sighed and acted put-upon, but he didn’t fire us, and he didn’t get mad. He was a saint about it, and we felt like, and were, bratty little pussies.

After the van was towed away, we spent a few hours in the nearby hospital. Afterwards, James’s hand in a cast, we walked along the highway from the hospital to a convenience store and a liquor store. We holed up for the night in a motel room, eating Doritos and smoking and drinking cheap vodka with orange juice and watching TV movies. We stayed up all night; we felt too guilty about missing our shift to sleep. We called Keith at six in the morning, after we knew the rush was over and the place was empty and he was sitting around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and told him (our voices slurred, on the verge of alcohol-inspired tears) that we loved him. He told us to shut the fuck up and get our asses back to town, now.

We got the first bus back to Portland and went straight to Roxy Hearts, contrite and pale. We told Keith to go home, we’d finish his shift. James’s hand was broken, of course, so I did most of the cooking and let him do the set-ups and garnishes. We worked the rest of that day and all night. After we hosed down the grease-covered rubber mats, bagged and took out the trash, prepped for Keith’s shift, scrubbed the countertops and de-greased the grills, we said a bleary hello to Keith and went out into the drizzling grey early morning and walked to Pioneer Square and got a bus back to Southeast Portland.

We were feeling too sad, broken-hearted, and co-dependent to sleep by ourselves in our own apartments, so we both went to James’s, where he loaned me a pair of pajamas and a clean toothbrush. After we took showers, James pulled down his Murphy bed and made up a comfy foam pad for me on the floor. We slept all day, a whole eight-hour stretch, then woke up feeling groggy and seasick and took the bus back to Roxy Hearts to eat a big breakfast and drink as much coffee as we could before our shift.

At the end of that summer, in late August of 1987, the heretofore elusive boy I was in love with (who had just graduated, and who no doubt saw me as the perfect means to postpone having to figure out what to do with his life) and I bought a VW hatchback and put all our things in it and moved to Iowa City together.

James stayed on in Portland for a while, cooking at Roxy Hearts. He was still there when Keith and Joey died.

Meanwhile, I started my first year at the Writers’ Workshop. My boyfriend lasted until winter, and then he got fed up with me, his crappy job, the weather, and the town. He dumped me, moved back to Palo Alto, got a great job renovating someone’s house, and stole his best friend’s blonde, nineteen-year-old girlfriend. Devastated, in need of immediate distraction, I moved on to the next self-annihilating heartbreak.

Roxy Hearts Cajun omelet

Crack 3 eggs into a bowl with a dollop of cream and beat till frothy. In an omelet pan, melt a wad of butter and throw in a handful each of minced onion, red Bell pepper, and celery — sauté till soft. Sprinkle well with the Cajun seasoning you mixed earlier and threw into a shaker – paprika, dried powdered garlic, oregano, cayenne, salt, and pepper. Toss in a handful of chopped cooked shrimp and another of chopped Andouille sausage and stir and let sit on the flame another minute. Pour the beaten eggs into the pan. When they’re almost set, throw a handful of grated cheddar on top and run under a salamander to finish until brown and puffy. Plate with a spatula scoop of home fries, a sprig of parsley, and 2 pieces of buttered sourdough toast.

My father grew up in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. When he was in his mid-20s, he got his girlfriend pregnant. She was, literally, the girl next door – her family lived just down the lake from his family. Because they were proper Midwesterners, it was agreed that they should get married, so they did. My father’s first wife gave birth to twin girls in May of 1951. A year later, my father ditched his little family and headed out to Berkeley where, about a decade later, he met my mother and had three more daughters with her. More than anything in the world, my father wanted a son. When his fifth daughter was born, my sister Emily, he walked out of the room without a word to my mother.

After he abandoned his one-year-old daughters in Lake Elmo, my father never contacted or saw them; they grew up with no memory of him. My mother knew about them and told us they existed, so I always knew that I had two half-sisters who were 11 years older than I was. Through the years, I liked knowing they were out there. I had a strong feeling we’d find each other some day when we were grown up.

My father abandoned us, too, of course. It happened in 1972, four years after he and my mother had gotten divorced – the cops had a role in this disappearance; I was the one who called them. After they led him off in handcuffs for beating up my mother (he’d driven to Tempe from Oakland, possibly for this express purpose), she didn’t press charges, and he disappeared.

We didn’t see him again until I was 16, when my mother and sisters and I took a road trip to San Francisco to drop my sister Susan off at the ballet school for the summer and looked him up – we had a strange, intense, unfulfilling lunch with him, hippie food at a restaurant called (I am not making this up) the Edible Complex. Five years later, my sisters and I found him again when were in the Bay Area. We had another weird, charged lunch with him. He was living like an ascetic Boy Scout in his bare-bones law office, sleeping on his desk. From a pot on a hot plate, he served us bowls of something he called “Lebanese pea soup.” He seemed proud of this concoction, but I think he might have just opened some cans.

Later, when I was in my 30s and married, and the Internet had been invented, my husband urged me to find my sisters. We searched for Thea because I couldn’t remember Caddie’s name. We found her living in St. Paul; she was married, but she’d kept her maiden name. It had to be her. I wrote her a letter and sent it off with a mild, hopeful nervousness: maybe she wouldn’t want to know me, maybe she’d ignore my letter. And I was used to being the oldest sister. Being a little sister was a whole new identity I wasn’t sure I was prepared for.

Caddie happened to be visiting Thea when my letter arrived, so they read it together. Thea wrote back that she was planning to visit Caddie, who lived in Vermont, and they invited me to come up and meet them while she was back East. Her handwriting looked like a combination of Susan’s and Emily’s.

We drove up to Woodstock, Vermont on a bitterly cold winter day in 1998.  We checked into our hotel when we arrived – it was very late, almost midnight. My sisters had left a sausage and mushroom pizza, flowers, and a bottle of wine in our room.  Caddie had written a note welcoming us; her handwriting looked like mine.

The next day I woke up so nervous I couldn’t eat breakfast. We drove to Caddie’s house and knocked on the door. It opened, and there were my sisters. We all stared at each other. It was like looking into my own eyes in the mirror.

“Oh my God,” I said, “we look alike.”

We gave each other fierce hugs. During that day and night of nonstop talking, I had the surreal feeling that I had always known them, that we belonged together as much as my other sisters and I did. We were birds of a feather, all of us singers, readers, our voices similar, our characters shaped the same way, and they were, it turned out, passionate cooks and eaters. Caddie’s house felt familiar, too.  Their husbands got along with mine; we had all married great guys.

That day, Caddie and Thea taught me to cross-country ski. I loved how bossy they were and how they seemed to assume the roles of my older sisters naturally, without any discussion. After dinner, an Italian feast of eggplant parmesan and roast chicken made by Caddie’s husband, Vin, we sat by the fire and drank poire and they showed me photos of themselves as children, teenagers, college students, young women. Thea’s husband, Pop, a singing cowboy, played the guitar; we all sang.

At almost midnight, I realized how late it was and suddenly felt awkward and shy, as if I had overstayed. For the first time in my life, I felt like a pesky little sister wanting to stay up late with her cool older ones. In that moment, my sense of who I was in my family shifted, rearranged itself, and became, in a deep way, complete.

Delicata squash with pepitas and goat cheese

Thea, who is an amazing cook, taught me about pumpkin seeds, among other things – how to roast them, how to add them to things and cook with them. I recently made a loaf of bread with finely-ground pumpkin seeds, which was excellent, and last fall, after a trip to the farmstand, I made the following lunch:

Cut one large delicata squash into 4 pieces and scoop out the seeds. On an oiled baking sheet, bake the squash quarters till soft, about 40 minutes at 375 degrees. Put two pieces face up on each plate. Into each squash cavity, pour a splash of balsamic vinaigrette. Add a tablespoon of goat cheese and top with plenty of toasted pumpkin seeds.

In the months after the Twin Towers fell on September 11^th, I started the novel that would be The Epicure’s Lament. I was writing it to cheer myself up; I was undergoing a kind of internal, shell-shocked, nerve-wracked breakdown, and I was not, by a long shot, the only New Yorker in this state.

I worked in a rented room in a falling-down 19^th century house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, down by the river. My landlady, Nancy, was Italian, born and raised in Bensonhurst. Her dad had been a mobster, and so had her dead husband. A Mafia princess and mob wife turned Realtor, Nancy was frank, smart, a born raconteur, with a round, impish face and a hoarse smoker’s chuckle that always made me laugh, too. Her house was a sort of SRO for sad-sack men who lived on public assistance and sat all day in their shirtsleeves, smoking and waiting for their Meals on Wheels to arrive.

She lived in the cozy, renovated basement apartment and rented the two or three empty, uninhabited upstairs rooms, cheap, to writers and artists– first to my friend Anna, a poet, who recommended me to Nancy when I needed a studio, and then, on my recommendation, to a photographer friend named Hal, who almost got kicked out for having a nude model in his studio who hung out the front window, smoking. He frantically explained to Nancy that there was nothing pornographic going on – this was art. She grudgingly, good-heartedly went against her own better judgment and accepted this explanation and let him stay. Soon she was his greatest fan.

I paid $200 a month for the large room on the top floor at the back of the house. My two windows faced north and looked out over flat tarpaper roofs, old brick warehouses, backyards and treetops, all the way to the green, shining Citicorp tower in Queens. The room had a linoleum floor, a boarded-up fireplace, and a falling-down plaster ceiling; the roof leaked, there was no heat, and I shared the place with a noticeable but not intolerable population of mice. I warmed the room up with plants, my husband’s paintings, and a large old rose-colored flower-patterned wool rug. I brought a small coffee maker and a radio. In the cold months, I worked in my hat, scarf and coat.

Every day, I packed myself a lunch – a sandwich of sardines and mustard on rye, roasted nuts and dried fruit, a Styrofoam container of instant black-bean or lentil soup to which I later added hot water from the coffee maker’s carafe – and walked the mile and a half from the loft I shared with my husband in Williamsburg over to Greenpoint, along the waterfront’s angled, industrial streets with astoundingly beautiful views of Manhattan and the sky above it. In my workroom, I sat at my grandfather’s old desk – an old door on two heavy wooden filing cabinets.

That winter, it was too cold to write in my north-facing room, so I moved my desk into a smaller room at the front of the house that was filled with warm sunlight on clear days. Just outside my new window was a huge old chestnut tree whose bare branches were inhabited by a plump-chested, medium-sized brown bird. There only seemed to be one of him; if he had a mate, or any friends, they were nowhere around that winter. I had the feeling that he was as aware of me as I was of him. He cocked his head and stared back at me through the window that separated us.

One day, the tree and the bird found their way into the novel I was writing and became a sort of fulcrum between the fictional, imagined world I was living in that winter and my real life, a symbolic hinge that joined the two together. I named the bird Erasmus, since he seemed to have a philosophically stalwart cast of mind. All winter long, he watched me write while I watched him going about his birdly business.

The Epicure’s Lament is narrated by a 40-year-old hermit and failed writer, Hugo Whittier, who’s simultaneously smoking himself to death in his ancestral mansion on the Hudson River and cooking a lot of old-fashioned, comforting, hearty food for the very people he professes to want to get away from. I found that, for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time, writing about the things Hugo chose to make, shrimp Newburg and spaghetti puttanesca, eased my terrible, gnawing depression. So did cooking and eating them myself. After the day’s work was done, I went home and made dinners that were inspired by Hugo’s culinary repertoire. Food was the other hinge between this novel and real life, between Hugo and me.

When I was about halfway through the novel, my bad state of mind worsened, and I couldn’t write anymore. I stopped going to my room at Nancy’s, stopped work on the novel, stopped doing much of anything. Soon, I found I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t stop crying. To pull myself out of this depression, I spent three months during the summer I turned 40 training for the 2002 New York City marathon. After ending up in the hospital with hyponatremia and then overcoming severe IT-band pain, I ran the marathon in 3 hours and 52 minutes. Afterwards, I moved my desk back into my workroom, got back to work, and finished the novel.

Years later, after my husband and I had bought and renovated an old row house just up the street from Nancy’s, after I’d moved out of my workroom and begun to write in my study at home, after my marriage had disintegrated and finally come apart for good, after I’d moved out of our house to an apartment way up on Monitor Street, near McGolrick Park, lightning struck the tree in front of Nancy’s house and killed it. Walking Dingo one day down my old street, I saw that it was gone. I stood there for a long time, looking at the charred stump that was all that was left of Erasmus’s chestnut tree.

Hugo’s Shepherd’s Pie

Hugo doesn’t actually cook shepherd’s pie in The Epicure’s Lament, but he could have. In fact, I am certain that he made it with some regularity outside the book, and so did I, during that cold winter of 2001-2002. This ground beef and mashed potato casserole is one of the most comforting, cheery dishes I know of.

Peel, cut in half, and boil 4 large potatoes till they’re soft. Drain them and mash them with 4 tablespoons of butter, a cup of grated Gruyere, salt, pepper, and half a minced onion.

While the potatoes are boiling, melt 4 tablespoons of butter in a large skillet. Saute a large chopped onion and 2 chopped, peeled carrots until the vegetables are soft. Add a cup of frozen peas, 1 ½ pounds of ground beef, ½ cup beef broth, a large dash of Worcestershire sauce, a dollop of ketchup, and stir till the meat is cooked.

Put the meat and vegetable mixture into a glass baking dish. Spoon the mashed potatoes on top to make a thick peaks-and-valleys layer. Grate another handful of gruyere and sprinkle on top. Bake for half an hour in a 400 degree oven till bubbling and brown.

Serves 1 hermit and three tedious interlopers.

Back in 1980, the year Lennon was shot and Reagan was elected for the first time, it was still fairly safe for teenage girls to hitchhike around Europe. I hitched to the South of France and later Paris with my friend Monica, who was the only other au pair girl at La Mhotte. She was a placid but intrepid girl from Leeds, also eighteen, who earned several times more than I did from the family she worked for, taking care of one small baby instead of four energetic, demanding boys.

Our hitchhiking trips together were weekend adventures, larks. Often a trucker stopped for us, a genial, bored Frenchman who wanted to bask in the company of two girls for an afternoon in exchange for driving them a few hundred kilometers. We understood the deal. When a truck pulled over and stopped for us just up the road, we ran to it so the driver wouldn’t have to wait long, hopped up into the cab, and introduced ourselves with profuse thanks to the driver. We were a good team – two fresh-faced, pretty, friendly, seemingly innocent teenagers, both fluent in French. We were also good at gauging people. We were smarter by far about the world and men than we looked. We obligingly flirted and chatted with our truck drivers, shared our picnic lunches with them, and always arrived safely, exactly where we wanted to go.

In Provence, in the lilac and sunflower fields near Aix, we stayed with an older couple on their spread of land that included an orchard, a garden, a vineyard, and a goat pen. Acquaintances of Monica’s parents somehow, they fed us rounds of their excellent homemade goat cheese of three different ages, young, middle-aged, and old, that they took from wire baskets hanging from trees in their orchard. I had never eaten chevre before; at first it tasted strange, and then, all at once, it was unbelievably good, gamy and creamy.

The sun was hot there, early in the spring. We ate meals outside, lunches of chewy, crusty bread and chevre, salads made with the lettuce they grew, and for supper, a soup or stew, and once, a leg of lamb. We sat at long wooden table in a shady arbor of grape vines. Our hosts were great cooks and had good wine, not that I knew anything about wine, but their local red vin de table tasted fantastic to me. Their stone house was cool and dark and sprawling. I never wanted to leave. I wanted them to adopt me.

During Monica’s and my trip to Paris a couple of months later, we saw a man jump off the newly-built Centre Pompidou. I saw him standing up on the roof. Before I could wonder about this, he fell and hit the courtyard with a hard, wet crunch. We watched as an ambulance came screaming into the courtyard to pick up his corpse. Dazed afterwards, we didn’t say much for a few hours.

It was a strange trip. We walked through the city all day, crisscrossing the Seine. We stayed in a tiny apartment that a guy we barely knew had generously loaned us while he stayed with his girlfriend. We couldn’t afford to eat any meals in restaurants; we lived on those excellent staples of the young backpacker, baguettes and cheese and tomatoes and cheap red wine.

We were attacked by two men, on our last night there, in a deserted side street near the Place de Pigalle. Each of them took one of us by the arm, firmly, and tried to pull us into an alley. I protested in French; they answered in Arabic, which scared me even more for some reason – we had no common language. Monica went passive and quiet, but something exploded in my head, some surge of pure red-hot rage that enabled me to throw my attacker sprawling into the gutter and then to slam Monica’s against a parked car. I grabbed her hand and pulled her, sprinting, back to the apartment, where we both collapsed into bed in hysterical tears.

The next day, having completely run out of money for a train home, I was going to hitchhike alone back to la Mhotte; Monica was going on, by train, to stay with friends in Dijon. It was my first solo hitchhiking expedition. I was too scared to sleep that night, imagining various scenarios, the attempted rape naturally fueling my already paranoid imagination. I had no other way to get back, though, and I was expected on Monday morning, early, to make breakfast for the boys. Just after dawn, I took the Metro to the end of the line, got out, found the highway south, took a deep breath, and put out my thumb.

After a few minutes, a Citroen full of boys about my age pulled over. I got in with some trepidation, but they were a nice bunch of rambunctious French mecs who treated me like a kid sister, lecturing me about hitching alone, teasing me about my bravado when I protested that it was no big deal and complimenting me on my French. Because I had not one sou, they bought me lunch in a roadside place, a ham-and-cheese baguette I ate much too fast, since I was ravenous. They left me off about an hour from home and drove away honking and waving. I was sad to see them go.

My next ride was a lone middle-aged man in an old Deux-Chevaux. I was even more worried this time, but there was only one of him, and he was grey-haired and slight. I was cautiously, warily confident that I could fend him off. I’d beaten two strong would-be rapists last night, after all. So I got in.

My new chauffeur turned out to be even more protective and solicitous than the boys. He was a sociology professor at the Sorbonne, a deeply kind and fatherly man who gave me a very frank, touchingly agitated lecture about traveling alone.

“Not everyone is like me!” he said. “There are bad people in this world.”

“I know,” I said. “Believe me. I can’t thank you enough.”

He went more than twenty-five kilometers out of his way to drive me to the front gates of La Mhotte so I wouldn’t have to take my chances with another ride. He waited until I had walked halfway up the long driveway, I suppose in order to make sure no one attacked me before I was safely inside, and then he drove off down the little country road lined with poplars, back toward the highway and wherever he’d been headed.

Flageolets en pissenlits

I love the French word for dandelion greens, which means bedwetters, probably because of their diuretic properties. Our Provencal hosts made this beans-and-greens stew to serve with a rare, tender, garlic-studded roast leg of lamb.

Soak a pound of dried flageolets or navy beans in water overnight and then drain them. In a Dutch oven, heat a tablespoon of vegetable oil or bacon fat (I might throw a handful of lardons in, too, if I had some on hand) and sauté a mirepoix (minced aromatics — onion, carrot, and celery) with two crushed garlic cloves and thyme. Add the beans with enough water or stock to cover by one inch, plus a bay leaf. Cover and bring just to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for two hours, adding additional liquid if necessary to keep beans covered. When the beans are soft, add 2 cups of chopped pissenlits or other bitter greens and continue to cook for another half hour, until the beans are creamy. Stir in 2 tablespoons of butter and season with salt and pepper to taste. Eat immediately.

Brendan and I went to Italy in late October of 2009 to spend the winter, writing. We lived most of three months in the large stone villa where Brendan’s aunt and mother had lived as schoolgirls, a former convent up in the Florentine hills, an hour’s walk from the city. We watched the dawn on our first morning, standing out on the bedroom terrace, listening to roosters yelling all over the valley while the sky over the wooded hills turned neon pink and orange.

The place has its own vineyard and olive grove, as well as persimmon trees, rosemary and sage bushes, potted lemon trees, a few scraggly chickens, and a vegetable garden. It was olive season. The air was smoky from the olive branches burning everywhere. Nets lay under the olive trees, and men stood on ladders reaching into the branches all day. When it was time to press the villa’s olives, we went with Fabio, the caretaker, to the Cooperativa Agricola. The huge truckload of olives was dumped onto a conveyer belt that took them into the washer and sorter; they embarked on a long, intricate journey of pressing and turning until finally, two hours later, streams of fresh golden oil poured from a spout to fill eight or nine enormous, stoppered vats. We came home with a glass bottle of freshly pressed, super-virgin, organic oil to keep by the stove. It was bitter and rich and tasted like nothing else on earth. We poured it on salads but didn’t cook with it – it was too raw. For cooking, we used oil from the last year’s pressing, which had mellowed and aged a bit.

The wine from the villa’s vineyard was thin and light and very subtle, almost like liquid Valium. Fabio filled wine bottles for us from the demijohn in the tool shed and corked them with a manual press — he put the bottle in and set a cork in and pulled the lever and presto, a bottle of wine. We drank legendary quantities of it – apparently it was the talk of the village.

There was a tenant in an attached apartment, a Botoxed, boob-jobbed, trout-lipped So-Cal 40-something divorcee who might have seen “Under the Tuscan Sun” one too many times. She held spiritual meetings for her expat friends and didn’t speak any Italian although she’d been there for 2 years. Her poor cringing little son was obviously yearning to be back in L.A. with his friends. She wore a shawl and twitched it self-consciously. I was fascinated by what I took to be her hilariously cartoonlike personality — until she cooked us dinner near the end of our time there. She turned out to be funny, vulnerable, and self-deprecating, totally impossible to dislike. I had probably looked askance at her because I was also a 40-something divorcee, and in those days, I was sad and raw and shell-shocked still over the end of my marriage. All I wanted to do in Italy was escape. Laura’s own situation reminded me too sharply of what I’d just been through.

And that winter under the Tuscan rain turned out to be a great escape from the past, exactly what I needed. After a euphoric but sometimes rocky beginning, Brendan and I became true friends there. We had a lovely, solitary, productive life in our hermitage in that beautiful but freezing-cold place that cost a small fortune to heat. We were like wacky children together, laughing and singing and babbling in various accents, wandering around in our bathrobes, cooking meals, playing Scrabble by the fireplace.

We took the same walk every day, at around two o’clock: along a high ridge through vineyards and along tiny Tuscan country roads, a big loop that brought us through the village, where we often had a little coffee and bought supplies — clementines, a whole chicken, a broccoflower — and then climbed up the steep hill through a big olive grove and came home again a slightly different way, two hours’ fast walking. On the ridge, there was a memorable view — Florence down below on the left of the ridge and on the right, a lush terraced valley and mountains with long fingers of fog in the high gulches.

We slept in the master bedroom with the doors to the terrace closed, the heat on. We slept deeply in the absolute darkness and silence that was broken only by the zanzara tigre, “tiger mosquito,” but the English translation doesn’t convey the kamikaze-airplane-like quality of this animal. When I heard the zanzara tigre speaking in its hideously intimate deep voice right in my ear, I offered up my arm and hoped it would feed, be appeased, and go back up to the rafters to sleep it off, but its bloodthirstiness was unrelenting; it liked to stalk its perfect spot for hours.

We set up small worktables in the two deep casement windows, side by side against the wall opposite the big, cozy bed, separated by a trunk and an armchair. We spent our days and nights in this room, writing, listening to music, sleeping, watching movies. The huge kitchen was down a stone staircase and at the other end of the house through a long tiled hallway. We cooked enormous feasts in that cavernous room every day, some of the best food I’d ever had.

In January, we went with Brendan’s father, Michael, to Perugia, the medieval mountain town where Michael and his 5 siblings grew up while their father was translating The Odyssey. We had lunch in the Fitzgerald villa, a vast, drafty, very beautiful place with a view all the way across the valley to Assisi, apparently, although we couldn’t see a thing because the day was dark and foggy, so I took Brendan’s word for it. It was a bitterly cold day, and the massive stone house was as cold as a walk-in refrigerator. We all sat hunched for warmth by the fire in the kitchen hearth at a long wood table while Brendan’s aunt and uncle, who lived there with their son, served an Italian Sunday lunch –  spaghetti al pomidoro (I gave up and ate gluten in Italy and was therefore bloated and churlish much of my time there, but it was absolutely worth it), then flank steaks and cauliflower — they grilled the steak on the open kitchen hearth. We drank prosecco first with olives and cheese, then Chianti with lunch, then vin santo with dessert: pears poached in red wine and cinnamon and sugar, and the pignoli we’d bought in town before lunch. It was a dreamlike, memorable afternoon.

Marcella’s Pizza

While he was growing up, Brendan learned to make classic, simple, rustic Italian dishes from his father, who’d learned many of them from Marcella, the villa’s now-retired cook and housekeeper: roast leg of lamb served with green pepper-apple-onion curry, Arborio rice, and Major Grey’s mango chutney; tender osso buco; an eggplant-pepper peperonata so silky it melts in your mouth; lasagna made by alternating layers of two sauces, Bolognese and Bechamel; breaded veal cutlets, crisp and thin, with fresh chopped tomato-and-basil sauce. Brendan also makes a Sicilian eggplant pasta known as alla Norma, a pure alchemy of olive oil, garlic, eggplant, basil, and ricotta salata, mixed well into a bowl of hot, freshly cooked pasta and served with more grated cheese.

Together, Brendan and his father reproduced the recipe for Marcella’s pizza, which is the best pizza, and I mean this, that I have ever had. They were never able to replicate her crust; the recipe is a secret, but they do know that it involves the usual flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and water. So all I can say is, make a perfect dough and roll it out perfectly, however you can; I invented a gluten-free facsimile that is of course in no way as good as wheat dough but which is perfectly edible.

Next, open a can of crushed tomatoes and pour it into a bowl. Add olive oil, dried oregano and basil, crushed red pepper, black pepper, sliced garlic (optional), and a touch of salt. Finely chop a handful of black olives, four or five anchovies, and a handful of capers and mix in a small bowl. Slice some fresh mozzarella and roughly chop some prosciutto cotto. First, layer the salty-savory mixture of olives, anchovy, and capers onto the lightly oiled dough. Then the sweet, mild cheese, then the ham, and last, the tomato sauce on top. Bake it hot and fast.

In 1971, I left my mother and little sisters in Tempe and flew to the Bay Area alone to spend the summer with my father in Oakland. We’d moved from Berkeley the summer before, so I hadn’t seen him in what felt like a very long time, all of third grade – he felt like a stranger suddenly.

My father had started a commune in his huge Victorian house. I was given my own room on the third floor under the eaves, a small room with a secret passageway behind the wall. There was a tiled koi pond in the backyard. There was a laundry chute in the butler’s pantry off the kitchen, and a dusty green velvet couch in the front parlor I liked to lie on.

I was the only kid around the place that summer. My father, a Marxist activist lawyer, had filled his house with young, righteous politicos, all of whom seemed to revere him. They did a lot of sitting around and talking through clouds of pot smoke. I don’t remember what I did all day, but I do remember feeling out of place and homesick and intimidated by my father, who was charming, charismatic, handsome, and intelligent, but distant and gruff with me. I felt awkward around him, like a big lummox. I wasn’t sure why I was there. Maybe he just wanted to upset my mother by enforcing his custodial rights.

One night, at a dinner at some friends’ of my father’s, as I watched a bearded giant frying an odd dish he called “peachburgers,” which were literally hamburger meat mixed with chopped peaches, I blurted out to the entire assemblage of guests that my father used to hit my mother, and she cried. I remember saying it, I remember the shock I caused, and I remember how angry my father was at me afterwards.

With his girlfriend, a sweet, solid woman named Karen, we took off in a tomato-red VW bus to drive around the Southwest, just the three of us.  I remember straddling the Four Corners grid, my hands and feet in four different states. We went to Bryce Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, the cliff dwellings in New Mexico.

I couldn’t stop annoying my father. I pestered him to play cards with me and bragged when I won; I could feel, viscerally, how tense this made him. One night, very late, long past my bedtime, he left the campfire where he’d been talking with a group of people we’d met and found me whimpering and crying outside the bus, standing in the darkness.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked.

“You forgot to feed me,” I said. “No one put me to bed.”

“You’re almost nine years old,” he said. “Old enough to speak up. Don’t let this happen again!”

I recoiled. I hadn’t spoken up because I was not a kid who whined or asked for things, and I was shy with him sometimes.  He gave me some yogurt, which I ate in silence, and then he packed me off to my little bed in the back of the bus. I lay there with a knot in my stomach, still hungry, fiercely mortified.

One day, Karen walked me into the desert alone and told me that I had to stop being such a pain in the ass. “Your father can’t take it anymore,” she said. “He’s really at the end of his rope.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try, I swear.”

After this little talk, which felt like a Mafia hit, things deteriorated. And so, after a summer of looking like a wild animal, rat’s nest hair, dirt-streaked face, ratty clothes, I found myself suddenly, abruptly scrubbed clean, with freshly washed and braided hair, wearing travel-worthy clothes, being driven to the Albuquerque airport.

My father looked at me in the rear-view mirror as he drove. “If the cops stop us, they’ll think we kidnaped you,” he joked.

He had called my mother and told her I was flying back to Arizona that night. She was in the middle of her weekly poker game with her psychologist pals; luckily, she was home, or she wouldn’t have known. She drove to Sky Harbor airport, leaving my sleeping sisters in the care of her sweet, clueless-about-children friend, Fred, who looked panic-stricken at the thought that they might wake up, but who manfully offered to babysit nonetheless.

The stewardess who’d been put in charge of me walked me off the plane, and there was my mother at the gate. I’ve been happy to see my mother many, many times in my life, but this particular reunion stands out.

Farmer’s Fritters

My sister Emily just sent me our mother’s recipe for the cottage-cheese pancakes we all used to love so much on Friday story nights.

This recipe comes from an old index card and is written in our aunt’s handwriting, our mother’s older, deaf, mentally retarded sister, Aillinn, with parenthetical additions by our mother.

1 cup Blossom Time cottage cheese
1 egg (2 are better)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 (is that really an 8?!?!) cup milk
(or a very little cream)
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon peel
2 tablespoon melted butter
1/4 cup flour (+ a little wheatgerm)

Place first six ingredients in bowl and beat well with rotary beater. Stir in flour, drop by tablespoons on greased griddle. Serve with butter and hot syrup. Serves 4.

These are thin and crisp and taste like home, long ago.

At about the same time I outgrew children’s books, I became addicted to detective novels. In many ways, they’re the adult version of children’s adventure stories – instead of going off on adventures in giant peaches or in boats or behind the wardrobe, there’s a crime to be solved. In the tradition of Huck Finn and Pippi Longstocking, a fictional detective is very often not a decent, responsible citizen; he’s a loner, sealed off with nogoodniks and perps in a shadowy underworld of lawless derring-do, tracking the murderer by trying to think like one. Often a former cop who’s been kicked off the force for breaking the rules and flaunting protocol one too many times, often picking up the pieces of a failed marriage, the detective is courageous and intrepid but flawed, self-destructive, prickly, hard-drinking, at odds with everything.

And almost all fictional detectives know how to eat. Marlowe arms himself for stakeouts with ham-and-cheese sandwiches and a bottle of whiskey, V. I. Warshawski escapes danger and makes a beeline for a Hungarian goulash at the Golden Glow; Kinsey Millhone girds her loins for trouble by slapping together a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. Robert B. Parker’s Spencer eats as grandly as he spouts half-pretentious literary allusions, and I like him for it; I hate his psychotherapist girlfriend, however, because she nibbles at a lettuce leaf and calls it a meal. Smugly self-denying asceticism is a character flaw for me akin to meanness or hypocrisy. Likewise, if I have one criticism of Dick Francis, it’s that his narrators are jockeys who have to make weight and therefore are career anorectics; there’s never enough food in his novels, although his heroes often crave it, which endears them to me.

Growing up, I was raised on homemade bread, cottage cheese, and Graham crackers. I got Trix, Ding-Dongs, and Coke only at my luckier friend’s houses, and our Halloween candy was parceled out to us so slowly it lasted until Christmas (and would have lasted longer had our mother not pirated much of it after we were in bed). I was hardly deprived, but the point is, I wasn’t allowed to eat whatever and whenever I wanted. Writing about food, I discovered very early on, gave me a sense of heady power that was in some ways even better than reading about it. I couldn’t always have what the characters I read about ate, but I could feed my own characters all the things I wasn’t allowed to have.

In my first story, “My Magic Carpet,” written when I was 6, the narrator and her sister go around the world and into outer space on a magic carpet and get home in time for “tea,” as I called it, budding Anglophile that I was. Getting home in time for a big meal was evidently the happiest ending to an adventure story I could come up with.

When I was 13, I wrote a short novel called Life Can’t Be a Penguin that might be pegged these days as a YA thriller. The 13-year-old heroine and her brother go into the remote Arizona desert on the heels of their evil band teacher, a kidnaper and possible murderer. After the scary parts are over, after everything has resolved itself, they end up in a diner and order almost everything on the menu. I remember hungrily listing with the bottomless appetite of pubescence every conceivable thing I myself would have ordered in such a situation – French fries, baked beans, chicken, hamburgers, meat loaf, blueberry pie, ice cream, etc. I wasn’t trying to be funny; I wrote it in vicariously swooning, single-minded earnestness.

I still let my characters have things I generally can’t or wouldn’t eat myself. In my own kitchen, I admit to a preponderance of gluten-free, organic, hormone-free, sustainably caught, free-range, cage-free items, but the characters in my books eat with anachronistic, cheeky, devil-may-care defiance – cheesy, meaty pasta and cheeseburgers with fries, kielbasa and chorizo and as much bacon as they damn well want.

Stakeout Provisions

Take a loaf of rye bread, a package of pastrami, a package of sliced Swiss cheese, a jar of mayonnaise, and a jar of mustard. Slap together three thick, hearty sandwiches oozing with mayo and wrap them in wax paper. Put them in a big paper sack with a large bag of potato chips, a small pack of chocolate doughnuts, an apple, and a bottle of rye whiskey. On the way to the address in question, stop for a large Styrofoam cup of strong, black coffee. Add whiskey to it. Drink it and eat the doughnuts as you drive.

In the front seat of your 1974 Chevy Nova, at 11 p.m., without taking your eyes off the suspect’s darkened windows, eat one of the sandwiches, washed down with handfuls of potato chips and sips of whiskey. Repeat at 4 a.m. At 7:45 a.m., eat the last sandwich and the rest of the potato chips and finish whatever’s left of the whiskey. When the suspect appears in his doorway at 8:27 and heads for his 1972 Camaro, throw the apple out the window, put your car in gear, and tail him.