How to measure up to my mother’s kitchen? That wood-paneled heart of the house, where the fridge overflowed with vegetables and juices and nourishments of all sorts, and when she heard me open it she’d tell me not to spoil my appetite.
Dinner was as close as we got to religion. Less the meal than the idea of it: sitting down around a table to eat together, to commune. We didn’t say grace, we perfunctory Jews, but it sometimes felt like we did, and the looks that friends assumed when I mentioned I had to make it home for dinner were the same looks I expect one receives after mentioning their membership in certain questionable sects. We didn’t even eat the same things, so different were our diets, but my mother cooked for all of us, often three dinners a night — a meaty entrée for my father and brother, a meatless one for me, and an equally meatless non-entrée for herself, like an undressed salad, or cottage cheese with half an avocado and a few squirts of Sriracha — all after coming home from her own all-consuming job, a feat of selflessness that I now apprehend in its properly herculean proportions.
Every novel should teach you at least one thing. If you’re looking for a meticulously detailed breakdown of surf culture, look no further than Melanie Benjamin’s new novel “California Golden,” about a broken family of surfers and a national cult of beach life that flourished after World War II in Southern California.
Is this a romance? Yes and no. Is it a womance? Yes and no. Is it a classic enemies-to-lovers story? Yep. The ingredients are there for a heroine’s journey and the result is a delicious Christmas pudding — crunchy, sweet, rich and a little bit hot once you set it on fire.
The body as deserted burning witness
as ghost
as primeval leper