Oh, and there’s someone else. Someone who cooks and cleans and makes sure I’m sitting in an ergonomically correct fashion. Someone who thinks I can do anything. Someone by the name of Mark Robins, who I tricked into marrying me and trained so well he doesn’t realize the doors aren’t locked and he could escape at any time. Without him, what would be the point?
Last but not least, I would like to thank my dear, sweet lovely little friend Yetti Redmond for insisting, all those years ago, that I spend winter in Dublin instead of going to Turkey. So, I didn’t get a tan but I did get to know and love her hometown and the surrounding country and for that, and for her eternal friendship, I am truly grateful.
Reading Group Guide
A Q & A with Sarah-Kate Lynch
Q. Cheesemaking is an unusual basis for a novel—you may in fact be the first author to choose it! You’ve also written about sourdough bread. Are you using food as a metaphor—or did you have something else in mind?
A. Well, I got the idea for writing a love story based around cheesemaking when I found out what an unusual process it is. Up until I was a judge at some cheese awards, I hadn’t really thought much about where it came from, only where it was going to—my stomach! After talking to the cheesemakers at the awards, though, it occurred to me that the artisan skill could be a metaphor for love. You can put all the ingredients for a romance in the same place together after all—that’s just science. But true love only results when there’s something in the air that you can’t see or hear or taste: it’s just there. It’s the same with cheese. You put your milk, your starter, and your rennet in a vat and you have all the makings of a deliciously creamy blue. But without the sun, the rain, a slightly salty sea breeze, and whatever you’re having yourself, it’s just a vat of milk, starter, and rennet, not cheese at all.
Q. You’re from New Zealand. This novel is set in Ireland. Why did you choose Ireland as your setting?
A. I’ve spent a lot of time in Ireland over the years, much of it in Dublin, where one of my best friends lives, but a good deal too in West Cork, which is where my mother’s family came from. It was while tracking down our sole living (only just, I might add) relative that I happened upon the artisan cheesemaking movement just around the corner from where my elderly cousin lived in a place called Ratooragh, which has no signposts. There’s nothing there, so just finding it was a mission. To me, writing novels is all about the ideas. And after my cheese-judging experience of finding out how cheese was made, then finding out my family originally came from the artisan cheesemaking heart of Ireland, I just had the idea: What if two old Irish cheesemakers made the world’s best cheese and magically mended broken hearts? That was the beginning of Blessed Are the Cheesemakers.
Q. Your protagonists, Kit and Abbey, are escaping disastrous marriages. In fact, virtually all of the characters in this book have had unsuccessful love relationships. Yet you bring Abbey and Kit together for a “happily ever after” ending. Are you saying that the key to a relationship that works is finding the right person? Are you also saying it might take some magic?
A. I’m constantly astonished that anybody ever finds the right person. There has to be some magic involved! And I totally believe that the key to a relationship is finding the right one for you, or even more importantly, recognizing the right one for you. Quite often, the person you find is not actually the one you were looking for and that has a certain magic to it, too. Had Kit and Abbey not met on the cheese farm, they would probably have walked past each other in the street, or argued at a mutual friend’s dinner party and loathed each other. But cheesemaker Fee knows they are right for each other so he helps them along, thanks, in part, to the crafty heart-shaped Coeur de Coolarney.
Q. Where did you get the idea for the pregnant, singing, vegetarian milkmaids, the “Pregnasaurs”?
A. Everybody asks me that! All I know is that I sat down to write chapter four and this ferrety little runaway called Lucy appeared on the page and next thing I knew she was listening to The Sound of Music and being auditioned for the job of milkmaid, for which you are required to be pregnant and vegetarian. I always knew that babies would be born at Coolarney because I wanted Kit to have a link to the farm, the obvious one being that his mother was a resident there at some stage. Where the singing vegetarian bits came from, though, I haven’t a clue. I blame (and thank heaven for) divine inspiration!
Q. Along with the lightheartedness and delight permeating the novel, there is a much darker element—that of Kit Stephens’s alcoholism and his wife’s drug addiction. How difficult was that to write about? Did anything you’ve experienced move you to tackle it? Do you feel your portrayals are true to life?
A. I’m fascinated with addictions, I must admit, and while I’ve seen only a few drug-addled folk up close, I know a lot of people for whom drink is the demon. I was quite flattered, at one stage, to have a recovering alcoholic tell me I must be in AA myself to have captured the pain and reality of it so well. I’m not, but I have enormous sympathy for people who try to live a decent life but are handicapped by an involuntary lust for something that can seriously mess up their future.
Q. You contrast those who are unhappy in the city with those who become healthy and whole in the country. Are you implying that today’s urban culture is destructive or promotes self-delusion? Do you think that returning to the land, honest labor, and a more “rooted” existence are antidotes?
A. I think happiness can be found in the city or the country but that, wherever you are, you need someone to help you look for it, whether it’s a partner, a sister, a grandfather, or a neighbor. I think we all need a little hand-holding no matter what our surroundings.
Q. You include whimsy, clairvoyance, and even a bit of “cheese-inspired” magic in your story. Is that part of the fun of creation— that you can include the impossible and the improbable, along with the probable?
A. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry, don’t they say! Actually, it was a real cheesemaker who told me that there has to be magic in the air for cheese to be cheese, so I guess I just went with that. I’ve worked as a journalist for more than twenty years so I’m about up to here with the definite, which makes the probable and the impossible very appealing to me.
Q. Writing does seem to be fun for you: certainly your prose sparkles with that kind of energy. What is your writing process like? Do you have a whole story in your head before you start? Do you write every day? Do you write quickly or labor over single sentences? Do you read aloud chapters in progress with friends and relatives? How does writing make you feel? Share with us please.
A. When I start off I can probably sum up my book in a sentence, not a very well constructed one either. For example: “Two lovable old Irish cheesemakers need new blood to carry on their magical cheesemaking empire, so they bring together two damaged souls from opposite ends of the world to save their farm . . . and their broken hearts.” That was Blessed Are the Cheesemakers. Then I sit down at the beginning of chapter one and take it from there. I write most days, and try to do at least a thousand words. I don’t write that quickly but I don’t labor over much either, and if I do labor it is usually over the idea or the scene I am tackling. Having been a journalist for so many years I can’t bear the thought of wasting words, so I spend a lot of time thinking before I commit them to the page. And if it gets too hard, I grab the dog and walk up the hill saying to myself, “If I want Yoo-hoo and What’s-his-face in bed by chapter nine, what should they be doing in chapter seven?” A lot of it is problem solving. I never read chapters aloud to anyone and for the first time ever I let my husband read my new novel, BY BREAD ALONE, before I sent it off to the publisher. It’s not that I’m scared of criticism (hah!), it’s probably more that I am scared of being swayed away from what I really believe in, which is what I cling to for the year I spend writing each book. There’s so much pleasure and pain in being a writer. I love creating people and stories, and conversations are my favorite: I feel like I’m right there
with my characters or watching them as if they’re in a movie. There’s nothing like the high of sitting down to a blank page and looking up two hours later to find you have a whole new bunch of people and they are having one helluva great time. On the other hand, I hate the days when I wake up wondering what the hell makes me think I could write a book; I’m just a two-bit nobody with nothing to say and no one to say it to. Still, for those days, there’s always chocolate!
Q. Some critics had a hard time pinning down the genre of your writing. They suggested “light literary, quality romance, commercial literature.” Is it possible your writing (consciously or not) has a more traditional basis? The story uses many of the stock characters and situations of both classic comedy and the pastoral (i.e., the setting is rural, fecundity abounds, and several characters “come back from the dead”). Where would you place your novel on the “genre spectrum”?
A. You know what? I didn’t even know novels had to have a genre until I’d finished my second one. I realize now that it makes them difficult to categorize, but I think if I started out trying to write a book that was specifically one thing or the other, it would drive me crazy. Like I say, it’s all about the idea, and so far my ideas have not slotted themselves conveniently into one genre or the other—confound them!
Q. You write, “Every good cheesemaker needs a secret ingredient. That’s what makes your cheese better than the next bollocks’s.” (p. 43) Is that also true for good writing? And if so, what is your secret ingredient?
A. I think it’s all about secret ingredients when it comes to writing. You start with an idea, then add a year of sitting on your own staring at a computer. Frankly, it’s a miracle any books ever get written if you ask me. I need to have a lot of sleep, get a bit of exercise, eat nice food, and have absolutely no noise whatsoever. I also find that going to the beauty spa and having massages and pedicures is extremely beneficial, although I have a hard time convincing my husband of this. I’ve taught him to do good shoulder rubs, though, cook all my meals, and to recognize when he needs to drag me out of my office and take me to a movie. Actually, I guess he’s my secret ingredient.
Q. Sometimes an author strongly identifies with one of the book’s characters. Does any character in this work reflect your own sensibilities . . . or speak with your voice?
A. No. But I love Corrie. I am a woman whose grandfathers had both died by the time I was born and I’ve always thought of grandfathers as wonderful, warm, loving characters and wished I’d known mine. Also, the scene where Corrie dies in Fee’s arms always makes me cry, even though I wrote it myself and must have read it a hundred times. I used to wonder why I always felt so emotional. And then it occurred to me that my own father died when I was twenty-seven while I was on a plane coming back to New Zealand from Ireland and I never saw him again. I think a therapist would make pretty short work of that, don’t you?
Q. Issues of identity loom large in this book. Abbey doesn’t know who she wants to be. Kit doesn’t know who he really is. Do you feel self-discovery is a central theme in your writing? What was your own journey to self-identity, and was writing part of the process?
A. I think the answer to the question above will alert you to the fact that self-discovery is an ongoing process and definitely a central theme in my writing. Human beings are such complicated creatures and I guess I like to think we can all be unraveled and put back together in a slightly different way to make life more enjoyable. It can be hard to do in real life, although I personally found my fortieth birthday a turning point. It seemed to me that my teens were a nightmare, my twenties were spent wishing I were someone else, my thirties trying to be someone else, and at forty everything clicked and I was just happy being me. I just turned forty-two and I still am happy being me, by the way.
Q. Your title comes from a line in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Is the allusion a joke or something more? Who makes you laugh? Are you a John Cleese fan? Did any humorist serve as your guiding light?
A. I have always loved the opening sequence from Life of Brian where the crowds are mishearing the Beatitudes and so think that the cheesemakers, rather than the peacemakers, are blessed. I watched the film on video not long after my cheese-judging experience and before I went to Ireland and found out about the cheese farms there, so the moment I had the idea for the book I knew it was going to be called Blessed Are The Cheesemakers (although in New Zealand it is called just Blessed Are). It’s not really a joke; more a sign, I thought, that the book was going to have a slightly twisted sense of humor, which it has. Anyone who knows Life of Brian that well would laugh at reading the title, I figured, and assume the book was not going to be straight as an arrow. Humor looms large in my life. I come from a very humorous family. Get-togethers are a riot. I can’t think offhand of any humorist who served as a guiding light, but when I was growing up I absolutely adored Erma Bombeck’s books, even though she was married with kids and I was just a kid myself!
Q. What are some of the elements in our culture that you feel need to be deflated or exposed by satire and humor? What might you take on next? Is there some other kind of food or beverage in your writing future?
A. Well, my next book, BY BREAD ALONE, is about a woman who bakes sourdough bread. The reason I chose sourdough is that its only ingredients are flour, salt, water, and a starter, which is made up of flour, salt, and water from the dough of previous loaves. What appealed to me was the element of a little bit of the past being used to make something new, which suited the story idea I had of a woman hankering after her past in a bid to escape a present marred by an awful tragedy. So again the artisan skill became a metaphor for life: We need our past, it makes us who we are, but we don’t need all of it. The choice is ours as to what we leave behind to give us a future. I loved learning to make bread; I’m still baking with the sourdough starter I began myself two years ago and I went to Paris to see the experts do it, too.
The book I am currently working on is about a Manhattan restaurant critic. The research for that has been equally sensational, let me tell you!
Q. If you had to put yourself in a literary tradition or identify yourself with a group or great writer, what or who would you choose?
A. Oh, that’s too hard!
Q. You have made writing your profession, first as a journalist and now as a full-time novelist. Do you think the discipline of writing on deadline and on demand enabled you to become a writer able to live by her pen? What advice would you give writing hopefuls?
A. My experience with deadlines is absolutely a huge enormous plus. But also, I am not scared by a blank page. It is how I have started every day of my working life, so I don’t suffer much angst about whether I can write or not. It’s whether or not anyone will read it that gives me heartburn!
My advice to writing hopefuls is always the same: just sit down and get writing. A person can spend a lifetime talking about it, but once you stop putting it off and just do it, it feels pretty darn good, even if you do delete it the next day and start over again. I tell people who want to start writing but don’t have a clue how, to get a china teapot and set it on the desk and just look at it, then write about who they think owns that teapot. Then, if the teapot was cheap, smash it, rub dirt into it, set it on the desk, look at it again, then write about who owns that teapot. Once you’ve cranked up your imagination and started typing, you’re a writer!
Discussion Questions
1. The author hails from New Zealand, but she has spent time in Ireland, and she has made that land the location of her fiction. What does the Irish setting contribute to this novel? In other words, are there events or people that are unlikely to have occurred somewhere else?
2. Before the female protagonist, Abbey, leaves her marriage, the author says: “It wasn’t a bad life, but she wasn’t entirely sure it was her life. She clung to her love of Martin like a drowning man to an inflatable life raft . . . She wasn’t herself, Martin was right about that. But then who the hell was she? She didn’t belong
in this paradise, but she didn’t belong anywhere else, either. She was nobody. Nowhere.” (p. 42) It seems that Abbey feels lost. What has she done to lose herself? How can she find herself? How typical do you feel this situation is for married women?
3. Both main characters, Abbey and Kit, have had failed marriages. What was wrong with their relationships? In your opinion, when should you fight to save a marriage and when should you walk away from it? Do you think Abbey and Kit’s marriage to each other will endure? Why or why not?
4. One of the oldest themes in fiction is to have someone who is dead, or thought to be dead, return. Why do you suppose that idea is so appealing? Who returns in this book? What are the consequences of those returns?
5. A related theme in this book is that of change or transformation. Who or what changes? Does change always involve loss?
6. The book has been compared to Joanne Harris’s Chocolat. Besides the focus on a food, both novels have a “whiff” of magic. In fact, magic abounds in this book, from “the magic of coincidence” (p. 185) to the magic of cheese-induced attraction. What does magic, by its very nature, do? Is magic real or just fiction?
7. One reviewer of this novel compared it to the old TV show Green Acres. The author says one of her first books, written as a child, was based on Anne of Green Gables. Does this book have anything in common with either of those “green” works?
8. The book begins, “You can’t hurry cheese. It happens in its own time and if that bothers you, you can just feck off.” What else in life can’t you hurry? What is the purpose of the opening quotations for each chapter?
9. Much of this book has to do with finding a place to belong. What is the secret of belonging? Is family or heritage part of belonging? Can you create your own family or are you stuck with the one you were given at birth?
10. Although often disguised by humor, symbolism looms large in this story. In other words, what does the cheese represent? What is the connection between the setting and Pregnasaurs? What are some other symbols?
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