Did she consider that year she spent writing a failure? I don’t know. I still remember the night at dinner when she told me she wasn’t going to pursue any more publishers for her book. “The first three times I read it, I cried,” she said. “And then the fourth time, I thought it was sort of boring.”
But it was not a failure to me. For a year, while she typed away on an old IBM in her tiny office off the kitchen, her story inching out from a printer my older brother was constantly being called upon to fix, I had a mother who was writing a book. In a moment of rare and glorious impulsiveness, she’d quit her job after her first cancer surgery and decided, “Screw it, I’m going to follow my dream.” And in doing so, she made her dream my dream as well. I was 8 years old, and someday, I told myself, I would write a book too.
The first time I forgot to breathe. Trader Joe’s. Hyperion Ave. Silver Lake. And I didn’t even notice. Coconut milk, coconut milk, coconut milk. That’s what I kept saying to myself. I scanned the shelves, refrigerators, those end-of-the-aisle holiday displays. Two cans needed for Thai yellow curry and I couldn’t find one. I wanted to Control+F the store. You should be able to Control+F, I mean, we’ve been to the moon. But I was too proud to ask anyone who worked there. I was thirty-six, an adult man. You can find a can.
When is a restaurant no longer a restaurant?
At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I’d say it’s when the dining room is no longer a priority. Because that’s where the joy happens, where a restaurant’s spirit lives. Without it, you cannot possibly practice hospitality, an act of giving that requires warm bodies and lots of tequila.
Ben's observation sums up the hopeful coda, "[I]t would take a lifetime to make a place lived." This idea implies that his family's resettlement history, despite spanning over a quarter century, is still not settled. Similarly, New Orleans — devastated by Hurricane Katrina at the end of Things We Lost to the Water — would be rebuilt over time. Dislocation is therefore a temporal state, like the proverb Thương hải biến vi tang điền, phonetized from the Chinese 蒼海桑田, which has now become an integral part of Vietnamese literary tradition — everything will turn in time, as the blue seas will turn into mulberry fields.
Uh, you say, why exactly would anyone care to read almost 900 pages about politics, art, music, fashion, journalism, architecture, education, drama, censorship, war, sex, scandal, social unrest, insider trading, rioting and much else in late Victorian and Edwardian England? Simple: What Heffer recounts is fascinating in itself, but also eerily familiar, almost contemporary. History, after all, provides perspective on the present.