Singer lived an unusual childhood, to say the least, surrounded by fine food, fine wine, and adults who loved plenty of both, as she recalls in “Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories.” Her cradle was an oversized salad bowl in the kitchen of Chez Panisse, her mother’s landmark farm-to-table restaurant, and Singer herself found a measure of fame at an early age when she was featured as the central character in the children’s book “Fanny at Chez Panisse.”
There were summers in Provence, birthday parties in the Marin County enclave of Bolinas and cellar tastings with her oenophile father. No surprise that she developed a sophisticated palate and what she describes as olfactory superpowers.
Major news organizations (including The New York Times) have created their own good-news properties over the years. Now, more than ever, readers are seeing a need for them.
“It’s just been an avalanche of people writing and saying how much they need these stories or they read a story and tears are just streaming down their face,” said Allison Klein, who runs the Inspired Life blog at The Washington Post. “People are constantly saying thank you for showing something that made them not feel terrible.”
“We were a skipped generation, a hiccup in history,” says Hamid Mozaffarian, the narrator of Dalia Sofer’s novel “Man of My Time.” He is on the phone with his brother, who left Iran for New York with their parents during the 1979 revolution, while Hamid, a once idealistic revolutionary, stayed behind. Life has not turned out well for either brother, in a world that is, as another character puts it, “inclining towards darkness.”
Sofer, who was raised in an Iranian Jewish family that left for the United States when she was 11, explored the years shortly after the revolution in her first novel, “The Septembers of Shiraz” (2007). She takes a much longer view in her follow-up, a layered portrayal of a man who through several decades has carried with him the conflicting pieces — beauty and brutality, revolt and repression — of his country’s history.
on Forty-second Street and Third Avenue
where my grandfather in his brown suit and fedora
his vest with the silver pocket watch
used to take me for lunch—