Table of Contents: From Breakfast With Anita Diamant to Dessert With James Patterson - a Generous Helping of Recipes, Writings and Insights From Today's Bestselling Authors (2 page)

Photo by Joyce Ravid

SELECTED WORKS

Once Upon a Time, There Was You
(2011)

The Last Time I Saw You
(2010)

Home Safe
(2009)

The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted And Other Small Acts of Liberation
(2008)

Dream When You're Feeling Blue
(2007)

We Are All Welcome Here
(2006)

Open House
(2000)

Inspiration
Lots of things: nature, history, wacky incidents in the news, the yin and yang in everyone's life. But most of all, people: their mystery and charm, their accents and their widely differing points of view, the bigness of their hearts and their resilience. I'm also fascinated by
awful
people.

Readers Should Know
With every book I write, I try to tell the truth. Even though it's fiction, there's an emotional reality I want to get at, and I want to present it with a mix of humor and pathos.
The Last Time I Saw You
, my novel about a fortieth high school reunion, is told from five different points of view: two men and three women. I think readers will find it a lot of fun to read; I certainly had fun writing it.

Readers Frequently Ask
The question that comes up most often is: “How do you know so much about me when we've never met?” And the answer is: I'm like you. The first editor for whom I wrote told me, “You have the common touch, and that's a gift.” I do feel I have an intimate relationship with my readers. It's an honor and a joy.

Authors Who Have Influenced My Writing
I was galvanized by J.D. Salinger, charmed by E.B. White, and absolutely knocked out by Alice Munro. But influenced? It's more “real people” who do that. They and the extraordinariness of ordinary life.

Makes 6 servings

I love meatloaf so much I wanted to title one of my novels
The Hotel Meatloaf
. That idea didn't go over so well — the title became
Open House
. But there is still a line in the novel about the Hotel Meatloaf. This is a recipe for meatloaf I found in a woman's magazine that everybody I've served it to
loves
. And it's easy!

I serve this with mashed potatoes, green beans, and apple pie. If there's any left, it's wonderful the next day.

1
Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a 9″ × 13″ × 2″ baking pan.

2
Remove the crusts from slices of bread, if desired, and tear slices into 1-inch pieces. Place bread in a food processor and pulse until the bread forms coarse crumbs.

3
In large bowl, combine bread crumbs, beef, lemon juice, onion, egg, and seasoned salt. Mix well. Shape by hand into 6 little meatloaves and place in baking pan. Bake 15 minutes.

4
Meanwhile, mix ketchup, brown sugar, mustard, allspice, and cloves in a small bowl. Spoon sauce over loaves and top each loaf with a lemon slice. Bake 30 minutes more, or until internal temperature registers 160°F on a thermometer.

Ralph Alswang

SELECTED WORKS

The Postmistress
(2010)

Grange House
(2001)

Full Turn
(1989)

Inspiration
While I was working on
The Postmistress
, I returned to Provincetown, Massachusetts, the outermost town on Cape Cod. One morning I was walking down the single-lane main street and overheard two elderly residents in conversation. “Well,” one of them pronounced to the other sagely, “even good doctors have their little graveyards.”

I already had the character of Dr. Will Fitch firmly in mind, but this comment, and the way it was delivered, sealed his fate. From that moment on the street, I knew what his struggle would be. The woman's phrase went directly into the book. And the image of the tiny hidden graveyards all doctors — even good ones — carry with them was haunting and generative, the way all solid simple truths are.

My writing is always inspired this way: by things overheard that have the nugget of a story in them; or by people I catch a glimpse of whose faces suggest stories or questions. For me, the thrill of writing comes in chasing down those questions — catching the stories latent in scraps overheard or chance encounters held — that rise up over and over in our lives.

The Early Bird Gets Writing
When I am in the middle of writing a novel or a story, I like to wake up before anyone else in my house — this is very early! — and simply start where I left off the day before. I do this without thinking, before thinking really, and write as long as I can this way. Then, after lunches have been packed, the kids taken to school, other parents or teachers greeted and talked to, and other stuff of the morning done, I can return to that early morning voice and begin again, like meeting an old friend along the road. It is at that point too, that I like to read a few pages of familiar, beloved writers: Woolf, or George Eliot, Yeats or Calvino, taking in their language, their turns of phrases, like hands I grab hold of in order to pull myself up so I can let go into my own writing.

Readers Frequently Ask
Since both of my novels take place in different eras from our own — the late nineteenth century and the 1940s — people often ask about my research: how I go about it, how much I do, and how I know when I'm done.

I like to steep myself in the era I write about, reading history books of course, but also getting my hands on magazines, novels, and poems written in the time period so I can get the diction of my characters just right. And when I decided to set
The Postmistress
during World War II, I knew little about that period and I had to start from scratch. But the wonderful thing about research is that it leads you toward true stories or details that are incredibly generative. When I read that a town in Maine cut down its town flag-pole because of fear of U-boats, I knew I had to use that detail. This one fact also suggested a whole series of scenes between Iris and Harry. It's details like these — and there are many that never made it into the finished book — that make it very hard to leave off researching. But you know you're done when the story takes on its own true contours.

Authors Who Have Influenced My Writing
I return to Virginia Woolf every year, and reread her often to get myself set back on track or if I'm seeking inspiration. Woolf's vivid impressionism — in which shocks of life bolt from the pattern of daily life, “moments of being,” as she called them — is my touchstone.
A Room of One's Own; Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts; Moments of Being.

As a child I read Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre
and fell in love with this passionate rebel who talked back. Reading it again as a literature professor, I was able to study the perfect narrative that is the backbone of this book, the three-story structure with a madwoman in the attic. Now as a writer I return to
Jane Eyre
, over and over, dipping in anywhere just to pick up and study this incredible single voice running along the tracks of a well-conceived plot.

Makes 16 squares

“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Virginia Woolf wrote in
A Room of One's Own
. Both of my novels,
Grange House
and
The Postmistress
, take her words to heart as I imagine the lives of earlier generations of women to better understand my own life. But I could easily follow Woolf's dictum with this one: we cook back through our mothers, if we are women. I learned as much about making characters as I did about baking, by cooking (or not) with the three women I grew up with.

Though my mother's mother sailed through her kitchen as through foreign waters, leaving all matters culinary to her family's cook, and my mother mostly shooed my sister and me out — cooking being for her a terribly fraught and uncertain operation — my father's mother pulled me into her kitchen, sat me down, and set me going. Granny Blake had been a surgical nurse before she caught my grandfather's eye. She left it all to follow him to Arizona, where she bore him two sons, only to be widowed at thirty-five. Tiny, with a shock of white hair, she was tough-talking and very firm. She wore a skirt every day of her life, and settled at six each evening with her scotch, the news, and two Kent cigarettes. When you cooked with her, you lined up all your ingredients, like soldiers going into battle, and then you began. If Frankie Bard from
The Postmistress
had become a grandmother, this is who she would have been.

Romance cookies are a mouth-watering confection, a two layered cookie, with short-bread on the bottom and butterscotch brownie on top. They were the first things she taught me to make, and making them seemed like an act of derring-do, a high-wire act, a race against time to wash and dry the single bowl from the remnants of the first layer and then assemble and mix the ingredients of the second layer in the ten minutes it took to bake the first. As I would later do as a writer, I learned how to build with her, how to plan and build. And then, when the cookies were pulled from the oven and handed around, I learned the secret life of words. These are Romance Cookies, she'd explain again and again, so-called because they are sticky and sweet — she'd pause — like romance. And the grown-up laughter that greeted her signaled a world I didn't understand or know but that the cookies promised somehow to carry with them, a story unto themselves.

1
Preheat oven to 350°F.

2
To make the dough: In a medium mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, and butter (you can use an electric mixer if you wish). Use your hands to shape dough into a smooth ball.

3
Place dough in 9″ × 9″ × 2″ baking pan. Press dough into the pan, pushing into the corners so that you make a flat surface, completely covering the pan. Bake for 15–18 minutes so that it is baked but not brown. Don't overbake.

4
While dough is baking, make the topping: Combine eggs, brown sugar, flour, baking powder, vanilla, and walnuts in a medium mixing bowl.

5
Pour mixture on top of shortbread layer and bake for 20–25 minutes, until top layer is set. Cool completely before cutting into 16 squares.