Elinor Lipman Visits the Reds

LUCY BURDETTE: I am so excited about today’s guest, as I’m a huge fan of everything she writes. She is funny, witty, smart, well, you’ll see...if you haven’t yet read Elinor Lipman’s books, you are in for a big treat. She has written ten novels, including the latest THE VIEW FROM PENTHOUSE B, along with TWEET LAND OF LIBERTY, and a book of personal essays. Welcome to Jungle Red!
Will you tell us a little about the new novel--and if you can stand it, what your writing process is like?

ELINOR LIPMAN:  The new novel is narrated by Gwen-Laura Schmidt, widowed two years previous, now living with her divorced sister, Margot, who was--as I like to say--"Madoffed."  Margot's ex lives in the same building, newly sprung from prison for practicing amorous medicine.  So it's about these two middle-aged women finding their way in the world, with a little forgiveness and reluctant internet dating.  

As for my process:  When I'm working on a novel, I aim for 500 words per day. I don't move forward until I've revised and polished every chapter because I send each one to my two first readers, novelist Mameve Medwed and biographer Stacy Schiff, who was my first editor.  When I'm finished, despite all the polishing along the way, there's still revising for consistency and because I know my characters better at the end than I did when making my way through it, pretty blindly. 

 Also, I never outline, so I have to go back and cut scenes that went nowhere, or amplify ones that proved to be important.   And then revisions that my editor asks for.  I find 90% of those to be good suggestions and very much worth addressing.    

LUCY: The personal essays in I CAN’T COMPLAIN started out not terribly personal. But then wow, the last few about your husband’s death and what it’s like to be single and 60 were so open and touching. How do you figure out what feels okay to write about and when, and what is too personal and private?

ELINOR:  I didn't quite appreciate how personal they all would be in the aggregate.  One section, "Coupling," was made up of essays that appeared in the Boston Globe, so that had been boot camp for marital exposure.   And even more so: The essay about my husband's decline and death was a NY Times "Modern Love" column in 2010.  So what feels the most personal are the new ones in the section "Since Then."  

LUCY: Here’s the way your essay “It Was a Dark and Stormy Nosh” begins: I write novels and I cook dinner, and some days the edges blur. Like me, my characters know their way around a kitchen, and like my family, they are good eaters. Increasingly my plots thicken in restaurants, as waiters hover, and increasingly readers ask, “What’s with the food in your books?”
We are food-crazy here at Jungle Red Writers too! Please tell us about that--how you use food and eating and cooking to show your characters’ style.

photo by Michael Lionstar

 

ELINOR:  I go on to say in that essay (which originally appeared in Gourmet) that food likes and dislikes can be shorthand characterization:  What does a fussy eater who annoys with her (yes, mostly her) complaints and special requests say about her personality?  A lot, I think.  A man who makes himself  franks and beans is one kind of guy; the one who poaches a fish and whips up his own vinaigrette is another.  It's almost too easy, isn't it?  I love to quote a New Yorker cartoon caption where a woman is saying to her dining companion, "I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, then it became a moral choice, and now it's just to annoy people." 

LUCY: I love that one of the characters in the new novel bakes cupcakes. In fact, I got so inspired by the sound of Scarlet O’Hara cupcakes that I made a batch. (And one of my characters will be making them in the fifth food critic mystery.) After consulting with my Facebook friends, I decided that they must have been red velvet cakes with raspberry cream cheese frosting. But now I’m dying to hear how you imagined this recipe would be constructed.

ELINOR:  I imagined it not at all.  I just thought it was a cupcake Anthony would like to own.  

LUCY: Unbelievable! Well just let me say that they were divine...

 

Tell us about your book of tweets.  

ELINOR:  In June of 2011, I thought it was time I joined Twitter.  Actually, I didn't want to, but publicists and such want you to do it, all hoping you'll get a zillion followers like Susan Orlean has.  I didn't want to tweet about nonsense or nothingness, so I pledged on impulse to write one rhyming political tweet per day until the 2012 election--without counting how freakin' far away that was.  I put my pledge on Facebook, and the Boston Globe picked up on that promise, so I couldn't back down.  Then at the (wonderful) Grub Street Muse and the Marketplace conference in May of 2012, Helene Atwan of Beacon Press said, "Someone's doing your tweets as a book, right?"  I said, "No, nobody."  She said, "Well, I am."  Three months later it came out:  TWEET LAND OF LIBERTY: Rhyming Tweets from the Political Circus. (You can follow Elinor @elinorlipman.

LUCY: And finally, you have a new blog in Parade.com?

ELINOR: It's called "I Might Complain." It appears every Wednesday and covers life's little annoyances. So I try to strike a balance between amusing and cranky. 

 

LUCY: thanks so much for visiting! Reds, Elinor will be stopping in to answer comments and questions, so please pile on!