I feel almost bad, after bitching yesterday, about the flood of emails and comments I received saying “hang everything else, we the fans appreciate how close together the books are appearing.” I should have known I wasn’t the only one involved. *wry grin* Writing is such a mostly-solitary job (except for signings, conventions, and interacting with one’s agent/editor) that one often forgets everything except one’s own viewpoint.

So, thank you for the support. I had no ideas the larger, usually-silent mass of Readers felt so strongly about this, and I am glad you love the books enough to be happy when they come out close together. I can assure you, they all took a long time to write, and I hope they are all of a quality to suit you. I tried very hard.

Last but certainly not least, thank you for reading them. I would look mighty funny talking to myself out here, blogosphere or no.

Upward and onward, as Jewel the Unicorn said! Today I have to take the brioche dough out of the freezer and put it in the fridge to defrost. Tonight I make the caramel rolls–two whole pans of them–for tomorrow’s breakfast. Other things on the menu tomorrow are: a half-cloved ham (a ham in dishabille, for two of the three under-18s in the household are not fond of clove), asparagus and haricots verts, mixed-starter bread (from pizza dough starter today) or rye if I cannot manage, baked potatoes which will be scraped out and mashed with plenty of butter and sour cream.

Plus cookies. And two apple pies. Nobody in the house wants pumpkin. Apple is all they want. Good enough.

We’re lucky to have a lot of food. I can remember several holidays when I, as a young sprout, was seriously at risk of having it otherwise. Somehow things usually worked out, but I remember those times with a pain just under my heart, just like Dorothy Allison talks about the hunger of being poor.

There are two different types of hungry poverty. There is the actual grinding physical poverty, which is the worst. It makes you angry and sullen and fiercely ashamed, it gives you pride like a wrecking ball and malnutrition like a gun to the head.

Then there is the poverty of spirit, where food is used to bludgeon you and family gatherings are a means of mass torture. It’s not as bad as actually starving–nothing is as bad as that–but it is bad enough and gives one deep emotional damage.

It’s kind of funny (in that you-have-to-laugh-about-it-or-cry way) how _________’s (name blacked out deliberately, sorry) food troubles parallel my own. We compare notes sometimes about how food was treated as a leash, a chain, a punishment, a double-edged reward in our childhood and teen years. Part of learning to deal with something like this is talking to someone who went through it, who can validate one’s own experiences. Sometimes, just hearing that someone else felt the same way in a similar situation is enough to lift a huge weight from your back.

Learning to bake (and trying to learn how to cook) is helping, too. I feel I am taking control of an alchemical process that has wreaked havoc in my life–the bugaboo of food. I am so very glad the kids seem to view food as barely important–it’s fuel and it’s good, but they don’t have the angst and complex rage I remember feeling about food at their ages. To them, it’s just food…and that’s good.

Maybe this year I’ll be able to see the food as just food, and when I remember the pain and terror of family gatherings during the holiday season I’ll be able to wryly smile instead of cringe. Hey, it’s possible. Anything is possible, and now I know how to bake rye bread and brioche. Which is as much a miracle as anything else, in this world of wonders.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Real Life, Deep Thoughts, Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.