TBR is on a brief hiatus. Looking forward to featuring new books and authors in the fall!
Thursday, July 3, 2025
Monday, June 9, 2025
TBR: The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins
Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
A mysterious phenomenon called ‘the unmapping’ causes city
streets and neighborhoods to entirely rearrange each day, leading to broken
down power grids and other such chaos. Our two main characters, Esme Green and
Arjun Varma, work in the New York City Emergency Management Department; Arjun
is in love with Esme, but Esme has a fiancé, who disappears on the first day.
The book is about climate change, about disasters, and ultimately about
humanity. Also, lucid dreaming cults.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And,
which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
I loved writing from Arjun’s perspective. He tries so
hard—at his job, at friendship, at love—and fails in ways that are endearing to
me and generally brings levity to this disaster story with his particular brand
of neuroticism.
As for the one that gave me trouble, each chapter features a
brief perspective from an unnamed character, and the hardest one to write was
one of these side characters known as ‘the wife’. Her husband is a disaster
prepper yet he himself goes missing the first day, and the wife, meanwhile,
stays locked up at home, full of fear, until she gets pulled into a strange
lucid-dreaming cult. At one point, I realized I didn’t know very much about
her—who she was before all this. That bothered me, the not-knowing. Then I
realized this missing sense of self was actually perfect for the story—that’s
the type of person who would get swept away in dangerous ideas. I thought her
story was about fear, but I learned it was about a missing selfhood.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
Three years elapsed between when I finished the book and
when I got the book deal. In that time, as I secured an agent and my agent
pitched out The Unmapping, I kept writing madly, finishing two more
books: a novel and a novella collection. When I heard that Bindery had put in
an offer to publish The Unmapping, it was both a high and a low, because
I went back to my draft and realized how much I had changed as a writer, and
how much I wanted to change in this book. I’d really grown in three years!
Luckily, they were responsive to my wishes to make some pretty massive edits,
which were in line with what they wanted, too, so I said yes, then embarked on
an utterly insane two months of rewriting. It was the hardest I’ve ever worked
in my life, and very difficult, but also wonderful, with my mind always at
least one foot in the dreamscape of the novel. Since then it’s only been high
after high, working with an amazing team on editing, choosing the cover, and
everything else that goes into turning a book from words on a page to a
physical reality.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
I am a diehard reader of George Saunders’s Substack, Story
Club. In many of his essays he talks about the importance of finding and
following the energy of a piece. Basically, when you read back what you wrote,
what is it that gives off little sparks? Follow that. Let that energy lead the
story. Take it as far as it can go.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
Writing this story involved discovery on every level. In a
broad sense, when I was first working on this years ago, I didn’t realize I was
writing a slanted analogy of climate change. I work in climate change advocacy,
but considered my fiction as an escape from reality. Nope. It’s a disaster
story very much about our own reality, even as it’s based on an unreal premise,
and once I realized this, a lot clicked into place. On a smaller scale, when I
was reviewing the book for copy edits I laughed out loud at a joke I’d included
in the penultimate chapter—one I’d completely forgotten about. I took that as a
good sign that I’d created characters with a life of their own.
How did you find the title of your book?
I initially called it “Sidewalk n.” I graduated undergrad
with a degree in statistics, so this is a super nerdy math reference, because
in statistics, instead of solving for “x,” you work with “n,” which is the
number of observations in your sample. The idea was that if all the sidewalks
rearrange (along with everything else), the one you’re looking at is “n”: it
could be anything. Also, the name sort of rhymes with “sidewalk ends.” My
husband also loved this title because he’s also a big math nerd, but I secretly
knew it was too esoteric, that no one would get it, and right there on the
first page people were talking about cities becoming “unmapped,” so it just
became obvious that I should name it after that.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book?
Oh, lord. In this book, people are mostly eating to survive.
There are microwaved pizzas and American cheese sandwiches and Oreos and
granola bars. Actually, there is one strange scene involving a table full of
smoked fish. So maybe make a good bagel with cream cheese and lox while you eat
this. That would probably taste better than the cheese sandwich.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://denisesrobbins.com/
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-unmapping-denise-s-robbins/21660442?ean=9781964721064
SUBSTACK: https://deniserobbins.substack.com/
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
TBR: Behold the Bird in Flight, A Novel of an Abducted Queen by Terri Lewis
Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Behold the Bird in Flight is a coming-of-age story
and a royal love triangle filled with danger and longing and inspired by real
historical figures—Isabelle d’Angoulême, her fiancé Hugh de Lusignan, and King
John of Magna Carta fame. Set in a period that valued women only for their
dowries and childbearing, Isabelle has been mainly erased by men, but the
medieval chronicles suggest a woman who developed her own power and wielded it.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And,
which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
Isabelle was an absolute delight. I imagined her as a
stubborn young girl with romantic tendencies and let her loose. That
stubbornness served her well in a world where women were disregarded; the
romantic fantasies got her into trouble. I loved watching her grow into a
strong woman capable of acting to save herself and even others.
Isabelle’s betrothed, Hugh de Lusignan, was the most
difficult. He came to me as a dreamer, not a doer, and under the thumb of his
powerful father, but somehow Isabelle had to love him.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
I started the novel in 2009 and began to query in 2014. Several
agents mentioned a problem with Isabelle’s youth, but she was a real historical
figure and I couldn’t just make her older. I set the novel aside to marinate.
When I picked it up again, I decided to show how a medieval girl prepared for
the world earlier than a modern girl. After another round of queries (87 in
all, with seven requests), a friend suggested I try another route. The novel
was accepted by She Writes Press two months after submission, a nanosecond in
publishing time.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Editing is not rewriting. Polishing the prose won’t fix
structural or character issues. Your words may seem engraved on the page, especially
if you’ve lived with them for years, but be brave: cut, write new, merge
characters. That lesson took me a long time to learn.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I was surprised how entertaining I found King John. His
reputation as the worst English king is probably earned, but in person he was
growly, full of excuses and complaints, oddly insecure, but when he got mad, he
let loose. Not the kind of character I’d written before. I mean, swords and
threats and swearing. As I wrote, I became convinced he really loved Isabelle
and only treated her badly when he felt she didn’t love him alone. Which of
course, she didn’t, at least in my telling.
How did you find the title of your book?
My title came late. Because religion resonated through the
middle ages, I had given each chapter a quasi Biblical quote. Curse Not the
King. Suffer the Little Children. Also, Isabelle always noticed birds,
not only in the sky and woods, but the hawks men carried, a little chicken she
took into her heart. After several misfires, my subconscious handed me Behold
the Bird. I added in Flight for her curiosity about the world and
her need to flee danger. Voila!
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
Isabelle has a sweet tooth and loves honey balls. (She uses
them to bribe a skinny guard…) She also loves eels which look like a ball of
black string licorice. I doubt a modern audience would like the latter, but
here’s a recipe to the former, baked not deep fried for ease: https://www.almanac.com/recipe/baked-honey-balls-italian-struffoli
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://TerriLewis1.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Behold-the-Bird-in-Flight/Terri-Lewis/9781647429102
SUBSTACK: TerriLewis1.Substack.com
Monday, May 12, 2025
TBR: ARE YOU HAPPY? by Lori Ostlund
Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
The nine
stories in this collection explore class, identity, loneliness, and the specter
of violence that looms over women and the LGBTQ+ community. For personal
reasons, I spend a lot of time with characters who try—and often fail—to
make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and
notions of self. I often say that I write sad, funny stories, and I
think that is true of this collection.
Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which
story gave you the most trouble, and why?
The answer to both questions is the same: the final story,
which is a short novella entitled “Just Another Family,” gave me the most
trouble and the most pleasure, probably for the same reason. That is, when you
struggle for a long time with a story, as I did with this one, the pleasure of
finally figuring it out is considerable. I don’t know when I started the story,
but my records indicate that I got my first rejection in 2015. I kept rewriting
and sending it out, and it kept getting rejected. I set it aside finally for
around five years, and when I returned to it in late 2022, the voice just
kicked in and pulled me along, and the story nearly tripled in length. In the
process, the story became more hopeful, the humor darker, the main character
more dynamic.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
During the pandemic, my former agent went out with a novel
that was not quite ready. She was struggling with the pressures of the
pandemic, as we nearly all were, and the submission process fell apart. We had
always had a good relationship, so it was with some sadness that I parted ways
with her. By this point, I had stopped writing, a fallow period that lasted a
couple of years. I wondered whether I would ever write again, but then one day
something turned back on, and I sat down at my desk and opened up the novella
that I mentioned above. I wrote several more stories, and these combined with
stories that I had written and published in journals earlier formed the basis
of ARE YOU HAPPY?, which meant that I found myself in the awful position of
having to query agents with a story collection. I was lucky enough to secure
representation by an agent I had long admired. The process of selling the
collection in some ways went smoothly, and in other ways was stressful as hell.
I got an offer from Emily Bell, whom I had nearly worked with on my last book. Since
then, she had moved from FSG to Zando, and shortly after I accepted the offer
for a two-book deal, she moved to Astra House, ultimately taking me with her.
There were lots of twists and turns along the way, but that is the tame
version.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to write for an audience of one. The
advice, on the surface, seems counterintuitive, but the most unusual
voices—which is what I am always drawn to—details and observations evolve out
of this advice, I think. In my case, if my wife—who is my first and usually
only reader—laughs or understands the nuance, I go with it.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
Oh, lots of things surprised me, but one of the things that
surprised me only later, when a reader pointed it out during the galleys
process, was that there were lots of cats in the book and they were all
named Gertrude. I have never had a cat named Gertrude, but I thought it was a
funny name for a cat, I guess, and somehow the joke just kept getting retold.
How did you find the title of your book?
When I submitted the book to my now agent during the
querying process, I had tentatively titled it JUST ANOTHER FAMILY, which was
the name of the novella. The title works for the novella, but felt flat as a
book title, not memorable. Another story was entitled “The Peeping Toms,” and I
had toyed with that as a title also, since some of the stories deal with themes
of voyeurism and being or feeling watched. When my agent and I had our first
conversation about the book, he said, “Why not call it Are You Happy?”
That was the name of another story, yet somehow I had never considered this as
a title, but as soon as Henry said it, I knew that this was the title.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book?
In “Clear as Cake,” several of the scenes take place in a
dive bar that I spent a lot of time in during college, and the only food
available came from a huge jar that sat on the counter. It was filled with
pickled gizzards, which I occasionally sampled. In the story, I went with
pickled eggs.
*****
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: Either your
favorite independent bookstore or Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/are-you-happy-stories-lori-ostlund/21741930
READ A STORY FROM THIS BOOK, “The Gap Year”:
Monday, May 5, 2025
TBR: Duet for One by Martha Anne Toll
Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Duet for
One is a lush and rewarding love story that follows the journey
from grief to love within the world of classical music.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And
which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
I most enjoyed creating three members of the supporting
cast. The first is Thaddeus, a cellist who looks and sounds more like a
lumberjack. Thaddeus is a person who calls it like it is. He’s an important
counterweight to Adam Pearl, as Adam pushes through/and avoids grief following
his mother’s death.
I also loved fleshing out Yvette, a professor of Caribbean
studies at Penn who is humorous and grounded, in contrast to Dara’s tendencies toward
seriousness and self-absorption. The same is true for Dara’s old friend Lydia, a
fierce pianist whose cynicism masks a compassionate person whose life is filled
with struggle.
I have worked hard to bring Adam Pearl to the page. Over
time, as he’s moved to center stage, it’s been a challenge to render him with
nuance. He’s a gifted violinist, who needs to know himself a lot better. He can
be angsty but also kind and generous. He’s conflicted, like all of us.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
This book took twenty years to get born. There were a lot of
lows. Too many rejections to count, including an agent in the distant past.
Highs include my yearly revision of Duet for One, a book that is close
to my heart and that has grown and thickened with time. Another high has been
trying to render music on the page, which will always be a failing proposition,
but brings me great joy!
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Get your tush in the chair and ignore all writing advice.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I don’t know if it counts as a surprise, but if you would
have told me in 2004 that this book was going to be published in twenty years,
I would have been surprised on all fronts—that it was getting published and
that it would take so long!
How do you approach revision?
For me, revision is the heart of writing. Everything happens
there. I revise a lot as I am in process. I do multiple entire-book revisions
where I review character arcs, nuance, interior life, plot, dialogue, and
structure structure structure. My last revision is the one where I put every
word under a microscope to ensure it has a purpose. Otherwise, that word has to
go!
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book?
I wouldn’t say there are foods associated with this book
(other than coffee, there is a lot of caffeine!), but I love to cook and bake
and so I commend you on this question!
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.marthaannetoll.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781646036004
Monday, April 21, 2025
TBR: The Odds by Suzanne Cleary
Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
I usually write a narrative poem that, along the way, dives into single
moments and/or explores associations that arise as I write. I like poems that
think-on-the-page, and find those especially fun to write.
Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which poem/s gave you
the most trouble, and why?
I most enjoyed writing “For the Poet Who Writes to Me While Standing in
Line at CVS, Waiting for His Mother’s Prescription” because the subject
welcomed a wide range of material and emotion. It’s about those early months of
the COVID quarantine, when I compulsively surfed the Internet for both information
and distraction, which is how I got to reference both the royal family and
snack food. It’s also one of the poems I most enjoy having written because it’s
found a wide readership, especially in England and Ireland.
I most struggled with writing “At the Feet of Michelangelo’s David.” The ending originally included lots of facts about the statue’s
long trek to the museum, and lots (and lots) of speculation on my part as to
what that might have looked like to passersby. Eventually, I realized I needed
to look again at the statue itself in order to find the poem’s final lines.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to
publication.
First, the low: For four years I submitted The Odds manuscript to all
the best publishers and competitions, where sometimes it was a finalist or
otherwise near-miss. I found this mostly encouraging, until the day that my
dream publisher told me that The Odds had
lost publication to one other book,
essentially because my poems “sound too much alike.” This observation felt
damning, and too accurate for comfort. So I gave up on The Odds. I turned my
attention to a new-and-selected manuscript I’d begun a few years earlier; maybe
that manuscript, instead, might be my fifth book. When, slowly and grudgingly, I
returned to The Odds, I reordered the
poems to highlight variation of subject, length, and form. I added poems I originally
thought hadn’t fit. When Jan Beatty selected the revised The Odds as winner of the 2024 Laura
Boss Narrative Poetry Award, I’d won the jackpot! Not only did a fabulous and
accomplished poet select my work, but I had “grown as a poet.” Ultimately, the
struggle was good for me and for my book. As a bonus, that new-and-selected
manuscript is nearly complete, which also feels good.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
“Follow the poem, don’t lead.” I’m all about discovering as you write,
about welcoming unforeseen ideas, associations, images, sounds. If I begin a
poem knowing where the poem will end, the poem hardly feels worth writing; it
feels restricted to the conscious mind, closed to the subconscious. Discoveries
add resonance and depth to the poem, and—really important for me—add fun to the
writing process.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.”
What surprised you in the writing of this book?
Every poem includes something that I did not foresee, but, overall, I
didn’t expect that the pandemic, either overtly or covertly, would appear so
often in this book. I knew that I’d write about the passing of time, since I
often do, but with The Odds I found
myself feeling as if I were a historian, responsible for recording the
quarantine years.
How did you find the title of your book?
I like a short book title because it’s easy for readers to remember. The Odds is my fifth full-length poetry
collection and the odds were against this happening. The odds were against my
living this long. Not coincidentally, I am drawn to writing about odd things,
things that are unlikely subjects for poems. Also, I love the iamb, love it.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s
associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
A figure in one of the poems eats a granola bar. Salted cashews also
appear. As for recipes, sorry. I’m better at recommending restaurants.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://nyq.org/books/title/the-odds
Monday, March 24, 2025
TBR: If You Say So by Michelle Herman
Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
If You Say So is a set of true stories about loss and
reinvention, longing, loneliness, friendship, community, and family. It’s also
about grief, and the way it lives in the body—and joy, and the way it lives in
the body too.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?
“Enjoy” is such a funny word when it comes to writing! (Or
is that just me?) I mean, if I’m not writing (something, anything), I feel
pretty miserable, so just working on a new essay or story or novel is
enjoyable by comparison (my paternal grandma used to say, if I complained about
being bored and unhappy, “Go bang your head against the wall”—presumably to
make me better appreciate the feeling of not banging my head against the
wall—but I digress). Still, I guess I could say that the two essays I most “enjoyed”
writing were the one called “Old House” (both because it required me to do
research on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century house I’ve lived in for going on
four decades—and research with a personal angle is one of my favorite
things—and because I wrote it in the months directly following my retirement
from full-time university professing, thus wrote pretty joyously all the
livelong day) and the one called “On Balance,” because I wrote it very fast and
with great certainty, clarity, and ease, which doesn’t happen all that often
(and which, come to think of it, is a pretty meta thing to say about this
essay).
The one that gave me the most trouble was the book’s final
and title essay, “If You Say So.” I started writing it in the immediate wake of
a close friend’s death, while still in the thick of dealing with it (not just
my grief, but all of her belongings and everything else that a death leaves
behind), which in itself made it hard to get my arms around (but I felt I had
no choice—I had to write it, then and there; I feared that if I didn’t,
my heart and brain would explode), but I also had to figure out what it
was “really” about, which took a while and a bunch of drafts.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
I could tell a long version, full of heartbreak, but as I
went on at such length in my answer to the last question, I’ll just say this,
about the lows: My former literary agent read it and said, “Nope, can’t send
out a miscellaneous essay collection! Nobody’s publishing them.” My
current literary agent declined to read it at all (“What’s the point?”). And so
I sent it out myself, carefully--agonzingly. The “high” in this road is having
landed at Galileo Press, where working with my editor, Barrett Warner, has been
a dream.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
If you’re stuck, it’s most likely not a writing problem—it’s
a thinking problem.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I wrote each of these essays separately over a period of
about five years. When I put them together—and especially when I read the final
one in the context of the others—I was stunned to see the threads that ran
through all of them and bound them tightly together. So, not a “miscellaneous
collection” at all! When I revised them as a whole, now thinking of them as
a whole, I kept that surprise in mind . . . and let myself be surprised along
the way, all over again.
What’s something about your book that you want readers to
know?
This book is a love letter: to my friend Judith—who used to
say, “If you say so,” sweetly and utterly insincerely, whenever I said
something she didn’t agree with or just didn’t want to hear (which was
often)—and to the tight community of serious amateur dancers we were, and I
still am, a part of; to my father, who looms as large in my life a decade after
his death as he did for the six decades before it; to all the rest of my human
family, as well as all the animals (the dog who was supposed to be mine, but
who was singularly devoted to my father; the dog who was supposed to be my
daughter’s, but was singularly devoted to me, and was my closest companion and
only consolation after my father’s death; and all the others—including, most
painfully, the pandemic-adopted puppy whose life story is at the heart of the
essay “Animal Behavior”) I have considered family; the Victorian-era house that
has come to feel like part of me; and, well, to be completely honest, just
about all the other things and people that constitute the story of my life.
(Except for a few things/people that it’s the opposite of a love letter to,
like my high school boyfriend, or a love/hate letter to, like the cigarettes I
smoked for fifteen years.)
Oh, my goodness, one of the essays in the book—“Like an
Egg”—is all about food (yes, so also a love letter to the objectively
disgusting foods of my childhood—the TV dinners and canned ravioli and instant
mashed potatoes—and the wonderful ones my grandmother cooked and taught me how
to cook, and to learning to cook, and cooking for friends, and now cooking for
my mother). I actually had considered including recipes in that essay, but I
decided they would have overtaken the essay itself. So I am delighted to offer
the recipe here for the “healthy” (it isn’t) pound cake my daughter and I
invented together over a quarter of a century ago, inspired by the “plain,
unfrosted cake” mentioned in the Betsy-Tacy*
books by Maud Hart Lovelace—books that she and I were/are in love with. It’s
dense and moist and delicious and sort of healthy, in that it calls for
whole wheat instead of white flour.
Michelle and Grace’s Plain, Unfrosted Pound Cake
Ingredients
1 ¼ cups good quality butter
2 tsp vanilla
5 large eggs
2 ¾ to 3 cups sugar (depending on just how sweet you want
it)
3 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp ginger
8 to 10 ounces evaporated milk or canned full-fat coconut
milk (see below)
-
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter up a tube
pan, springform pan, or bundt cake pan.
-
Let the butter soften so that it’s easy to beat
(microwaving on lower power very briefly is OK—just don’t let it liquify).
-
Beat softened butter, vanilla, eggs, and sugar
together in a large bowl (I use an immersion blender—I use an immersion blender
for everything, always).
-
In a separate bowl, stir together flour, baking
powder, salt, and spices.
-
Add the dry mix and the canned milk alternately
to the large bowl, beating gently after each addition (you’ll want the batter
to be very moist but not soupy; you’ll need at least 8 oz of milk, but after
that, proceed carefully, a very little bit at a time, alternating with pinches
of the dry mix).
-
Pour into pan and bake. Start checking on it at
an hour and five minutes in (wood toothpick-test). It’s never needed more than
an hour and fifteen minutes for me, but every oven and kitchen is different.
-
Let cool completely before turning the cake
upside down onto a plate from the pan. (Or, if you’re lazy like me, release the
sides of a springform pan and just leave the cake in the bottom of the pan.)
-
It’s very good while still warm, but even
better, I think, after it’s been in the refrigerator. (I bet it would be better
still taken out to a little bench on the top of a hill and shared with your
best friend.) (I should admit here that I used to send Grace to elementary
school sometimes with nothing but a big hunk of it, wrapped in foil, for lunch
[it was full of fiber, in the form of whole wheat flour, and protein, thanks to
all those eggs, after all], but that’s probably not the most excellent parenting.)
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://michelleherman.com/
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://freegalileo.com/
(but anywhere else books are sold would be fine too J)
READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “Armed for a Panic”:
https://theamericanscholar.org/armed-for-a-pandemic/
* As an
adult, my daughter’s constellation of tattoos includes a quite large one of
Lois Lenski’s drawing of Betsy and Tacy’s beloved tree—the one Betsy climbs, in
the first book, in order to carefully place a dyed-blue Easter egg in a bird’s
nest in one of its highest branches, “for” Tacy’s baby sister, who has died.
This was my daughter’s introduction to the idea of death—and its aftermath for
those who remain. (The nest and blue egg are part of the tattoo too.)
Monday, March 17, 2025
TBR: Lucky Bodies by Marianne Jay Erhardt
Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Lucky Bodies is a collection of essays on motherhood,
imagination, and care. The essays range from the personal to the political and
include subjects such as Aesop’s Fables, 90s television, mythology, family
lore, fairy tales, religion, and Busby Berekly chorus girls. These essays take
inventory of what we demand and withhold from mothers. Together, they imagine
how we might make and inhabit stories that cultivate an ethic of care.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which
essay gave you the most trouble, and why?
“Blueberry Hill” was the first essay I wrote for this book.
I was reading Richard McClosky’s Blueberries for Sal with my son -- 5 or
so at the time -- and he asked me why the mother in the book didn’t have a
name. We then turned to other storybooks on his shelf and saw that those
mothers, too, were nameless. I wrote “Blueberry Hill” as a letter to Sal’s
mother. It was the first time I’d written creative nonfiction in years. And I felt
a whole world of possibilities open up...how I might explore personal questions
through some of the stories that have made me.
I struggled with writing “Relentless Healing.” This essay has been many things, including a deep dive into a 1990’s TV show (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman). I struggled with allowing it to be as odd and focused as it is. The essay itself is interested in what is worth remembering / saving / writing about. In one episode I discuss, the town gets ready for its Founder’s Day celebration and prepares a time capsule. There is a debate about what to include. A bottle of whiskey? A newspaper? Hair clippings from the barber shop? The characters argue. Are these things artifacts or symptoms? As I wrote this section, I realized that this is a question that lives in me every time I sit down to write. Why this? Why this? At present, I think what’s important is the attention, and not the object or subject of that attention. Put anything in the time capsule. It will tell the story.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
I pitched this book to a number of agents, some of whom loved it but said they couldn’t sell an essay collection. I submitted to different presses and contests and was a finalist for a number of prizes. Along the way, I published many of the essays individually. Last year, I made peace with the fact that this book might never be published as a book, and I was happy enough that a number of the essays had found a home. Soon after, I learned that I won the Iron Horse Prize!
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
At a Tin House Winter Workshop lecture a couple of years ago, Paul Tran said something that I now think of every time I sit down to write: “Write the thing that will set you free and then give it a body.”
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I was surprised at how winning the Iron Horse Prize brought me a clearer vision of the book. I knew what I needed to revise (and I revised a lot!) More importantly, I knew when the book was done. I was shocked to find myself at the end of it!
How did you find the title of your book?
The word “luck” shows up more than 25 times in the book. At one point in the essay “Luck Now,” there is a 20-year gap in time between a formative teenage experience and my marriage. I wake up next to my husband “many lucky bodies later.” The bodies here are mostly mine -- the versions of me that have had good fortune, or narrow misses, or bad experiences that could have been much worse, and also the things I have worked for and earned but have been dismissed as mere “luck.” The bodies are also the essays themselves. Lucky to be written, published, gathered in a book. (Maybe they don’t feel lucky; I will never know.) For a while, the book was called Lucky Bodies Later but eventually I settled on Lucky Bodies.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
In the essay “Relentless Healing,” we spend some time in a 1996 television commercial for Kellogg’s Rice Krispy Treats. If you were to make them as they appear in the ad, simply use the standard recipe. Once they are cut and cooled, stay in your kitchen reading and eating them alone. Call out to your family, “These things take time!” When you have had your fill, smudge your face with flour. Sprinkle yourself with water from your kids’ fishtank. Make it look like these treats were a lot of work. Carry the plate into the next room, where you family waits, perpetually hungry.
****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.mariannejayerhardt.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/lucky-bodies-essays-marianne-jay-erhardt/22032505?ean=9781682832523
READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “You Call That Wild”:
https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-106/you-call-that-wild
Monday, March 10, 2025
TBR: Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson
Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters explores the world’s strange and relentless desire to reduce women to stock characters, and how easy it is to find ourselves complicit in this process, until we no longer know what parts of us are real. I mine this territory by writing as intimately and honestly as I possibly can about the ways fiction has infiltrated my life—as a girl, a young adult, a mother, and a woman at middle age—and by searching the work of my literary foremothers for clues to truer ways of being. In some ways, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is as much about the subversive power of reading as it is about womanhood.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this
memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?
My
whole purpose in writing this book was to break boundaries! The
boundaries imposed on women to keep us in our place, the boundaries between the
surface stories we tell about ourselves and the messier truths below, the
boundaries between our genuine selves and the selves we’ve been conditioned to
project.
To
crack through these boundaries, I knew I had to be as honest about my
experiences and internal weather as possible, which often led me into territory
considered taboo, especially for women. In one essay, I write about my brief
but utterly destabilizing extramarital attraction to a younger man when I hit
middle age. In another, I explore the tension of being both an introvert and a
mother of three, and my recurring urges to flee my family for solitude; and in
another, I write about the difficult chemistry between me and my middle child,
whose temperament is so different than mine.
These
are all things we as women aren’t supposed to feel or admit to. We aren’t
supposed to lust after other men when we are happily married; we aren’t
supposed to fantasize about abandoning our family; and we aren’t supposed to
talk honestly about the difficult aspects of our relationships with our
children. But these urges and desires and complexities are precisely what make
us human. I’ve tried to show in my book that when a woman stifles her own
complexity, she stifles her humanity—which I’d argue, in a patriarchal culture,
is precisely the point. In her beautiful blurb, Kelly McMasters describes Mothers
and Other Fictional Characters as an “urgent searchlight, shining across
the most complicated parts of existing as a multidimensional woman in a binary
world.” I love this description so much. This is precisely what I longed
to do on every page.
In terms of courage, I have my children
to thank for this. Becoming a mother magnified all of the concerns and
injustices that had always consumed me, because having children made the stakes
more urgent than ever. It was one thing, say, for our culture’s misogynistic
beauty standards to turn me against my own body, but the thought of my
daughters one day despising their own perfect bodies, or of my son suppressing
his tender spirit to adhere to masculine norms, pulled me to the page in whole
new way.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
One of the
high points has been the incredible creative community writing and publishing
this book helped me find. I began the writing process in a very solitary way—it
was just me and a vision and the page, and this could often feel scary and
lonely. But over time, working on the book became a portal to incredible
friendships and connections with other writers and aspiring authors, both here
in Boston where I live, and elsewhere--thanks to the internet, online writing
groups, and conferences. I’ve drawn so much comfort and inspiration from these
relationships.
I wouldn’t
necessarily call this a “low,” but one challenge I grappled with was navigating
writing about loved ones. My story is so rooted in domestic life and the
nuances of family relationships, and it was impossible to tell such a story
without conjuring the people who animate the landscape of my daily life: my
husband, my children, my parents, and my dearest friends. I wished so often
that there were a single hard and fast rule I could follow to ensure I would
handle this flawlessly, but really, I just had to feel my way through, making
sure at every turn that I’d rendered the people in my life with truthfulness,
compassion and kindness. I don’t mean a saccharine or glossed-over sort of
kindness, but rather a spirit of deep regard for the humanity, complexity, and
struggles of others. I don’t think what we as humans most deeply yearn for is
to be seen as perfect. I think we yearn to be seen in all of our complexity and
imperfection, and loved nonetheless. It was this type of love that guided my
choices on the page.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
I’ve
recommended Brenda Ueland’s totally charming craft book If You Want to Write
to so many fellow writers and aspiring authors over the years. It’s frank,
big-hearted and full of helpful wisdom. Ueland wrote the book in 1938, which is
miraculous to me because her insights feel so modern. You’ll have to excuse the
dated universal male pronouns in my favorite quote from the book, which is:
“Everybody is original if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it
must be from his true self, and not from the self he thinks he should be.”
This is such simple but profound advice. I know firsthand how easy it is to default to writing from a place of should, which in the end is a pretty dreary place to write from. While I was working on Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, pushing past should to write from a place of what is—in all its messiness and weirdness and beauty and splendor—made the writing process far more interesting and unexpected than it would otherwise have been. And I’m hopeful that this openness of spirit shows up in the writing.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
As
a bookworm and former high school English teacher, I knew that my encounters
with literature would be an important part of the book. From the start, there
were some writers I knew I’d focus on—like Kate Chopin and Adrienne Rich—because
their influence has been so central to my life. But otherwise, the process of
weaving in literature was very organic, and I was often surprised by the
connections that emerged between my reading life and whatever lived experience
I was writing about: Philip Roth shows up in an essay about raising a son.
Gwendolyn Brooks shows up in an essay about trying to decide what do with my
unused frozen embryos. Michel de Montaigne shows up in an essay about my love
for my closest friend Sara. I wasn’t aware how much these writers had shaped my
world view until they showed up unannounced in my work!
What’s something about your book that you want readers to
know?
I want readers to know that I wrote the book for them. Over coffee recently, a novelist friend of mine mentioned
that he never thinks about his audience when writing. “The moment I picture a
reader,” he said, “I start doubting myself, ruining the entire process.” While I was working on Mothers and
Other Fictional Characters, my feelings toward my own imagined readers
could not have been more different. I wrote with an awareness that my
words—like any writer’s words—were only half the story, a tale lying dormant
until another human stepped in to give it pulse and meaning. My greatest hope
for the book is that it helps readers feel seen, understood, and a little less
alone.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated
with your book?
I
love this question! I had to go back through the book to jog my memory, and a
few tasty things do appear in its pages, including cherry wine, birthday cake,
mint chocolate chip ice cream, cheese fondue, tostones, hamburgers, macaroni,
Runts, lasagna, canned soup, potato chips. It’s dawning on me that I may need
to see a nutritionist.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://nicolegraevlipson.com/
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/mothers-and-other-fictional-characters-a-memoir-in-essays-nicole-graev-lipson/21565078?ean=9781797228563
READ AN EXCERPT, “Macho Baby”: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22506-macho-baby
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