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.)
