If I have been asked one question more often in my writing life than any other, it’s this: Why write such sad stories?
The short answer is this: I believe that they matter more. They mean more to us. They are the protein of prose, not necessarily the most appealing confection on the plate but with the power to teach us the big lessons, when we write them and when we read them. Writing them is not easy, but it feels necessary to me. As every good writing professor will tell you to do, I write the stories I want to read.
Why write about prison? Every story needs hope.
In our stories, we may have started out the murderers, rapists, thieves, and addicts, the monsters, the bad guys, the adversaries, the villains, the defendants, but prison does not have to be the end of our tale. If we don’t write our own endings, we hand our pens over to the legislators, owners of privatized prisons, and propagators of the lies behind mass incarceration.
It’s part of a growing wave of tasting menus that are shifting the traditional format to something more casual and distinctly Los Angeles. The Eurocentric foods and dinner bills that could easily cover a month’s rent are being replaced by folding tables, ‘90s rap music and cuisines that span the globe.
These are tasting menus born in the early days of quarantine, the need for a creative outlet, staffing constraints and a city’s constant appetite for something new.
At a time when many of us are staying closer to home, it is exhilarating to join the author on a pilgrimage to some of the last strongholds of traditional food culture. The book is an immensely readable compendium of food history, cultural lore, agricultural science, and travelogue. There are new flavors to imagine and places to visit on every page.
The book is also inevitably a eulogy for a vanishing world.
Imagine tasting a full English breakfast whenever you heard the words “Tottenham Court Road”. Or the flavour of pineapple chunks at the tinkling of a piano. For James, who is a synaesthete and one of the extraordinary people described in Guy Leschziner’s new book, words, music and life itself are saturated with striking taste sensations. Leschziner, a professor of neurology at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, has brought together a collection of exceptionally unusual and interesting stories in his second book, dedicated to the wonder of our senses.
In a tenement shared with a dozen others,
I sleep in a closet just long enough to stretch out.
Sometimes I bring guys there.