The Love Season (36 page)

In Her Own Words

A Conversation with Elin Hilderbrand

Your novels
—The Blue Bistro, Summer People, Nantucket Nights
, and
The Beach Club—
are all set in Nantucket. Could you take a moment to talk about this small Massachusetts island as literary inspiration?

“There is no other place in the world like [Nantucket].”

I have lived on Nantucket for thirteen years now, and to paraphrase John Denver, when I arrived in the summer of 1993, I felt I was “coming home to a place I’d never been before.” I immediately understood that I belonged on the island, that it was my home. There are so many aspects of the island that inspire me—the beaches, the open moors dotted with ponds, and the historic downtown. What I like best about Nantucket, however, is the fact that it is an authentic place. There is no other place in the world like it. There are no stoplights, no chains of any kind, no strip malls or fast food restaurants. It is original, singular, unique.

In writing
The Love Season
, how did you draw from your own personal and professional experience—as a “foodie,” an avid traveler, a mother?

This novel started out as a short story called “Cooking with Herbs” that I wrote while I was in graduate school at Iowa. I wanted to write a story about cooking, which is an avocation of mine. I love to make everything from scratch—my own baguettes, soups, salad dressings, pasta sauces, my own mayonnaise even.

The wonderful thing about transforming this short story about cooking into a novel about cooking, love, death, and family was that I got to enhance every aspect of the novel with the things I had learned since leaving graduate school. I traveled extensively with my husband, and I had three children. Having children expanded my world and my understanding of human nature.

Are you a list maker, like Marguerite? What’s on your to-do list at this very moment?

The list is never ending! With three kids, it is a litany of pickups and drop-offs and doctor’s appointments and basketball games and playdates. I also sit on the board of three island nonprofits and I am chairing one benefit, editing a major publication, and heading a PR committee. Only a part of my day is spent writing—the rest is dedicated to my kids and to my attempts to make Nantucket a better island for all who live here.

Could you please list, for your readers, some of your favorite books?

Must start with
The Riders
, by Tim Winton. He’s an Australian writer and the most brilliant mind I’ve ever encountered. I wish he was better known in America. Move on to anything by Richard Russo, especially
The Risk Pool
, and anything by Jane Smiley, especially
The Age of Grief
. Other favorites are
Family Happiness
by Laurie Colwin and
Crooked Little Heart
by Anne Lamott.

And what books appear on your To-Be-Read list?

I just started
The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai, which won the Man Booker this year, and I’m trying to hunt down
The Emperor’s Children
by Claire Messud because the readers I trust have been raving about it. Because there are so many demands on my time, I’m pretty picky when it comes to what I’ll read. I do read constantly, though, because reading really good writing inspires me to do better work, to concentrate on my language and the flow of my sentences.

“I like surprises and developments to unfold as I write.”

Is writing like cooking for you? Do you have a recipe in your head before you approach a writing project?

Never the whole thing. I tend to start out with characters and a general idea of where I want the novel to go. But I like surprises and developments to unfold as I write. I discover the characters and a lot of times they will dictate what happens next. For example, in
The Love Season
, it wasn’t clear to me that Renata would escape the dinner party until I actually saw her having cocktails with Cade and his former girlfriend. And I thought, “The poor girl. I have to get her out of there.”

What, if any, special ingredients do you bring to the (writing) table?

You asked earlier about my travels. My husband and I have been all over the world—through southeast Asia and Nepal, Thailand, Singapore, Bali; across South America and in Costa Rica and Belize; and to Africa twice—Morocco and South Africa. We also spent three winters living in western Australia. I don’t write about my travels as often as I would like to, but having been across the globe has given me a better understanding of people in general, and a sense of adventure and story. I find the older I get, the more deeply I feel things…and this (hopefully) is reflected in my writing.

And what are you working on now?

I just finished writing a novel called
Barefoot
, about a mother of two who is diagnosed with lung cancer, and who goes—along with her sister and her best friend—to Nantucket for the summer. I have started a new, new book called
Cocktails, Dinner and Dancing
, which is about a mother of four children who takes on the task of chairing a huge charity benefit. It looks at the whole world of do-gooding with a new eye. It is very fun to write, which I can only hope means it will be fun to read!

ELIN HILDERBRAND grew up in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a teaching/writing fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in
Seventeen, The Massachusetts Review
, and
The Colorado Review
. She lives with her husband and three children in Nantucket, Massachusetts. This is her fifth novel.

The Dinner Party

She pulled out her blender and added the ingredients for the pots de crème: eggs, sugar, half a cup of her morning coffee, heavy cream, and eight ounces of melted Scharffen Berger chocolate. What could be easier?

—Marguerite Beale,
self-exiled chef in
The Love Season

Nantucket author Elin Hilderbrand is making dinner. This is not the Black Angus steak cheeseburgers and Bartlett corn she would normally serve her husband and three children on a steamy summer day. This is a very special dinner—the same dinner her protagonist, Marguerite Beale, makes in Hilderbrand’s fifth novel,
The Love Season
.

A fictitious chef who has given up cooking to punish herself after her best friend’s death, Beale crafts the dinner only because her godchild is coming for the first time—to learn more about her dead mother.

Hilderbrand is making the dinner for twelve people who helped inspire the novel, which she originally titled “The Dinner Party.” The group is gathering at 5 Quince St., in the circa 1730s home where the novel is set.

At 11:30 a.m., Hilderbrand darts into the fish market to pick up smoked mussels, which she will serve with a homemade aioli. “In the book, Marguerite smokes the oysters herself, but that’s beyond me,” Hilderbrand says, driving toward Bartlett’s Farm to pick up fresh dill, basil, and thyme, along with island-grown tomatoes and zucchini. In the novel, Hilderbrand specifically notes that Marguerite does not go to Bartlett’s Farm, but says the farm she does visit is modeled on the local landmark.

“There’s a little bit of me in Marguerite, in how I cook.”

Making A Novel Dinner

Then, it’s back to the house Hilderbrand and her family are renting while their own home—just down the street—is being remodeled. Although some of her equipment—like her tart pan—has disappeared into a box marked “assorted kitchen stuff,” Hilderbrand is unfazed.

The biggest challenge to making dinner for twelve, she says, is the refrigerator—finding ingredients in it and then finding space for things like the chocolate pots de crème, which need refrigerating until the 7 p.m. dinner. She plops down in front of the open refrigerator, to start rearranging from the bottom shelf up.

Reading
The Love Season
and then watching Hilderbrand make this meal is a little odd—like playing with a set of nesting dolls or strolling through a house of mirrors.

One can see Hilderbrand in Marguerite, in the list each makes to plan the dinner; in the way the author expertly cracks eggs into the blender for pots de crème and uses her own morning coffee; and the fact that she actually says, “What could be easier?”—unaware she is echoing the words she put in Marguerite’s mouth when writing the book sitting on the beach a year ago.

“There’s a little bit of me in Marguerite, in how I cook,” Hilderbrand says.

And, yes, that’s her jogging in Morocco, unaware—like her character, Candace Harris Knox—that her blonde hair, baseball cap, and running shorts would draw so much attention in the Muslim country.

“
The Love Season
’s scene in Morocco was a conscious effort on my part to get one of our travels into a book,” says Hilderbrand, who traveled extensively with her husband, Cliffside Beach Club manager Chip Cunningham, in Southeast Asia before they started a family.

Capturing The Island

But
The Love Season
and Hilderbrand’s other novels are also a reflection—and usually a composite—of the people, places, and experiences she encounters living on Nantucket.

Cunningham (a character in his wife’s first Nantucket book) says many repeat customers at the hotel he manages look forward to his wife publishing a new novel each season.

“It’s part of what they associate with Nantucket,” he says. “I’ll have Elin come down and sign it for them.”

Hilderbrand sees her books as souvenirs—little pieces of the island visitors can take home with them to evoke the feeling of Nantucket long after they’ve left.

The Love Season
earned a four-star critic’s choice rating in June from
People
magazine reviewer Sue Corbett, who wrote, “Hilderbrand, who wrote 2002’s
Nantucket Nights
, serves up a mouthwatering menu, keeps the Veuve Clicquot flowing and tops it all with a dollop of mystery that will have even drowsy sunbathers turning pages until the very satisfying end.”

“Hilderbrand sees her books as souvenirs—little pieces of [Nantucket] visitors can take home with them.”

Hilderbrand honed her writing skills at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Her cooking got its polish from taking lessons with cookbook author and former Que Sera Sarah owner, Sarah Leah Chase, one of the guests she has invited to this dinner. Hilderbrand explains how she decided to write a couple of novels (
The Love Season
and
The Blue Bistro
) based specifically on Nantucket’s food scene: “I did the hotel books, and a restaurant owner came up and said to me, ‘You could never write about a restaurant. It would be too scandalous.’ I thought, ‘Aha, then I have to write it.’ ”

She prepped by reading copiously, from Anthony Bourdain’s
Kitchen Confidential
to Ruth Reichl’s
Garlic and Sapphires
. She redoubled her usual food magazine reading of publications like
Gourmet, Bon Appetit
, and
Food & Wine
.

“Rarely do I come across something on a menu that I don’t know what it is,” says Hilderbrand, who eats out frequently with her husband.

Foodie Stories

To further give her books a sense of behind-the-scenes restaurant work, Hilderbrand volunteered to work at Nantucket’s well-known 21 Federal restaurant during Christmas Stroll one year. They told her she could pour water, then demoted her to the coat room, saying they were afraid she would spill the water. But she interviewed chefs, bartenders, and waiters, soaking in details—like the banter among kitchen workers—which she re-creates in the conversation between brothers who work in the kitchen of
The Blue Bistro
.

Jane Silva, former owner of the Galley at Cliffside Beach Club (the model for
The Blue Bistro
), is one of several muses Hilderbrand invited to this recreation of
The Love Season
dinner. Silva spent hours telling Hilderbrand stories about The Opera House, a now-closed, glamorous restaurant where the island’s artists gathered and Silva once saw Judy Garland sitting on the piano to sing. Silva says that The Opera House chef, the late Lucien Van Vyve, was her mentor and friend, who often hosted elaborate dinner parties, with hand-painted menus, at his home in the off-season.

Now a T-shirt and souvenir shop, The Opera House is the model for Marguerite’s restaurant, Les Parapluies, which, in the book, drew ardent fans willing to eat whatever chef Marguerite felt like having on the prix fixe menu that night.

“It wasn’t so much a reflection of The Opera House as it was that she captured the mood of those grand old restaurants,” Silva says, sitting on the terrace at 5 Quince St.

Dining With Friends

On the night of the dinner party, it is quickly apparent that the dining room of the 275-year-old house was not built to accommodate a dozen. Since her book focuses strongly on female friendship, Hilderbrand asks the guys if they would mind sitting in the kitchen. After some good-natured ribbing about being relegated to the kids’ table, they cordially agree.

But first, Hilderbrand says raising her glass: “All of you were important to me while I was writing this book, and that’s why we’re here. A toast to all of you!”

Dusk is falling hard outside the dining room’s bay window as the women sit down to feast on dinner and conversation. Someone asks Wendy Hudson how things are going at the bookstore she owns downtown; someone else asks about when a neighbor will be back on island. As wineglasses are refilled, there’s talk about how local produce compares to hothouse; and about the stifling hot weather, which has caused Hilderbrand’s homemade baguettes to rise beyond the edges of the pan and form tasty globs of bread.

But quickly, conversations around the table shift to more personal topics: how couples met, children, grandchildren, and friendships. In the wash of words, in the candlelit dining room, it is easy to see these island ties; to imagine Marguerite Beale and her godchild, Renata Harris, in this place, resurrecting secrets of past and present.

By Gwenn Friss, Food Editor

Excerpted from
Cape Cod Times
© 2006