Caffeine for the soul.
Ironically, I’m not much of a cuddler when it comes to sleeping with humans. When past boyfriends have gallantly invited me to lay my head on their shoulder, I invariably get pins and needles in my ear. And I know it’s cute when girls complain of being cold all the time (we get it, you’re skinny), but I run hot. I get overheated sleeping against another body, and it’s not fun for anyone. An ex called me his “little furnace.”
A dog, on the other hand, takes up less space, doesn’t have to get up for work before you, and only farts above the covers.
And to get serious for a minute, my dog was crucial to my emotional recovery after being assaulted. I struggled the most at night; when I would close my eyes to go to sleep, my mind obsessively replayed the attack. But placing a hand on Pip, burying my fingers in his soft coat, and listening to his little snorts were the only things that broke that cycle. His tactile presence pulled me back to the safety of the moment and filled me with a sense of comfort and love.
So the dog stays.
My eyes will just have to be more careful going forward.
And look, the ophthalmologist also said that cats are typically the pets that cause eye injuries. So I told the cat she is not allowed on my bed.
She just jumps up anyway.
(I’d wink, but I already am.)
In the Soup
Lisa
Once upon a time, I had the great idea that I was going to try to make butternut-squash soup.
And as soon as I started, I realized almost immediately that this was a terrible idea.
By way of background, I got the idea because I had just come back from a book tour, so I was meeting a lot of wonderful, brilliant, beautiful people, by which I mean, people who read my books.
Yes, you.
I love you.
I’m grateful to my readers because I feel so blessed and/or lucky to be able to make a living telling stories, whether fictional or all too real, like the ones contained in this book. And because I feel so grateful to my readers, I love to go on book tour and actually meet them, and my book signings are not typical, to say the least.
I don’t read my own book aloud at my book signings because my readers are fully capable of doing that all by themselves. Instead I tell them the story of what inspired the book, how I got to be a writer, or funny family stories, and the conversation opens up pretty quickly into questions, which begin with readers asking me about my creative process and end with us gabbing about life, love, dogs, and carbohydrates.
We even exchange recipes.
It’s not a cookbook signing, it’s a girl signing, which is basically the same thing.
This is even more true when Francesca and I tour for these books, because we put on a little mother-and-daughter show which entertains our readers, and we all end up hugging, fighting, or weeping.
Which is basically the same thing, too.
It’s an estrogenfest.
Or an estrogen-replacement fest.
Bottom line, it’s fun.
So it was during one of my signings that one of my readers started telling me about all the wonderful soups she made for autumn; and then the conversation segued into Crock-Pots and soup recipes, and you can see how this led to the butternut-squash recipe in question.
Which begins with butternut squash.
And should end right there.
By the way, I have never ever owned a Crock-Pot, though Mother Mary did, and I ordered one up right away, excited. It’s just my kind of toy because it came with no directions, except plug it in and don’t burn down the house.
Gotcha.
I had a butternut-squash recipe in mind because my reader told me that all I had to do was get a butternut squash, peel it, chop it up, roast it with olive oil, and throw it in the Crock-Pot with water and voilà.
But I was stumped at the threshold.
First off, thank God for the signs in the produce section, because my grocery store has a positively bewildering array of squash, most of which is decorative.
I didn’t make that mistake.
I’m not cooking the centerpiece.
Before I saw the squash signs, I had no idea which squash was the butternut and I became dazed scanning the squash varieties, all of which are shaped like a blunt object, color-coordinated to autumn.
Finally I found the butternut squash, which looked nothing like butter, nuts, or whatever a butternut is. Next to the butternut squash was a special bin that showed butternut squash already chopped and covered in plastic.
That should’ve tipped me off, right there.
But no, I was a butternut-squash virgin and didn’t recognize the red flag, produce-wise.
I bypassed the precut squash in favor of the real experience.
Accept no substitutes.
I hoisted the biggest of the butternut squash, which qualified as working out, and sat it down in the front compartment of my cart, showing it off like the small child that it resembled.
Also it was visible proof that I was buying an actual food thing, marking me as a true home cook.
Then I brought it home and gave it a bath.
I should’ve put it to bed, because at this point, it was ten o’clock since I hadn’t had any time to food shop that day. But no worries, I figured that it would take maybe an hour at most to make the soup, since that’s what I had remembered my reader telling me.
So I located a peeler and set to work.
Already it was annoying.
My peeler is ancient, and it rattled away as I managed to scrape off the weird outer skin of the butternut squash, apparently made of plastic. The shape of the thing—I don’t know whether it’s a fruit, a vegetable, or a lethal instrument—was almost impossible to peel evenly, but I persevered, feeling vaguely colonial.
I was connecting to all of the women through time who dug up the earth, scraped off vegetables with sharp rocks, then boiled them in cauldrons over fires, like witches with better clothes.
But peeling was only the first hurdle, because then there was chopping.
I grabbed a utility knife that I use all the time and tried to cut the squash, but the blade would only go through a quarter of the way. I moved it down off the nonbulbous portion of the squash, but that was equally dense, and as hard as I pressed, it wouldn’t work.
I dug in the drawer for another knife and tried it, but its blade was too thin and got stuck.
I went back to the drawer and tried my last good knife, which was a paring knife, but it was too short and cut only a wedge.
By now, I’m sweating.
So I’m cutting and sweating, and sweating and cutting, then swearing and mangling the butternut squash with my tiny paring knife.
And I’m wishing I’d bought the precut slices.
Because instead of the neat one-inch slices that my reader told me to make, I’m excising chunks from the body of the butternut squash, like Shylock getting his pound of flesh.
It wasn’t pretty.
And it took forever.
I wasn’t ready to start roasting the chunks until eleven thirty and I’d remembered my reader telling me they have to roast for an hour, so at twelve fifteen at night, I was standing drowsily in front of my oven, praying for sleep.
So of course I take the squash chunks out of the oven before they’re completely cooked and try to purée them, which only jams up the Vita-whatever, but I persevered, and even though I’d made a chunky mess, I dumped it in the ceramic part of the Crock-Pot and stuck it in the refrigerator to cook it tomorrow.
Which is today.
Even if it tastes good, I’ll never do it again.
What a crock.
Look Out! There’s a Feminist Behind You.
Francesca
As Halloween approaches, scares pop up everywhere: haunted houses, spooky decorations, horror movies. The scariest word?
Feminist.
Boo!
Are you terrified? Was Meryl Streep? When asked in a rece
nt interview if she considered herself a feminist, Streep answered:
“I’m a humanist.”
My head spun like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist.
I barely flinch at the nervous equivocating or outright rejection of feminism coming from young starlets. I chalk that up to the ignorance of youth or the real fear of alienating the powerful men who remain the gatekeepers in Hollywood.
But my beloved Meryl? Sixty-six years old, nineteen Oscar nominations, and three wins deep, and she’s afraid of “feminist”?
To use horror-movie jargon, I thought Meryl was our final girl. The one who escaped the career-axing patriarchy and survived to tell the tale.
If we lose her, there’s no hope for a sequel.
I understand Meryl was trying to say she believes in the equality of all humans (which, for what it’s worth, isn’t what “humanist” means), but our society does not currently offer equality between the sexes, so if you’re for equality between men and women, then you are a …
Feminist.
I’m going to keep saying it until we all get comfortable with the word. Exposure therapy is the best way to treat phobias.
And I’m not suggesting Meryl is a sexist, she’s not. Later in the Q&A, she articulated several pointed examples of the way Hollywood needs to change to achieve equality for women.
Yet she wouldn’t say the word.
I also get that she’s trying to sell a movie, and it’s imperative that she avoid scaring off ticket buyers. But the irony here is the film is Suffragette.
Somewhere, Susan B. Anthony’s zombie hand just shot up from her grave.
Does it matter if someone accepts the word “feminist” if her actions and opinions support the cause?
Yes.
Words matter.
Imagine you are a child, and you watch adult women shudder and sidestep the word, or you see men roll their eyes at it, what do you learn?
Feminists are bad. Feminists are annoying. Feminists are unwanted. Feminists are scary.
Perpetuating the fear around the word “feminist” perpetuates sexism.
We fear what we don’t understand, so let’s review an accurate definition for the word:
A feminist is a person who believes that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.
It doesn’t mean a person who hates men (that’s a misandrist), nor does it mean you think men and women are exactly the same in all ways. It definitely doesn’t mean any of the boogey-women that misogynists like to whisper about across a campfire:
“I held the door for one of those feminazis, and she cried, ‘RAPE!’”
“I asked a feminist out on a date, and when she said ‘no, thanks,’ I saw that she HAS NEVER SHAVED.”
These are urban legends for idiots.
And yet the more subtle myths have seeped into the mainstream. For example, women, do you fear that if you call yourself a feminist, boys won’t like you anymore?
The ones who won’t weren’t the ones you’d want anyway.
Men, do you fear that if she calls herself a feminist, she won’t need you anymore?
Equal pay will buy sheets with a higher thread count, but it doesn’t keep us warm at night.
If you’re afraid of a feminist, you’ve been duped by those who wish to maintain the sexist status quo. The bad juju surrounding the word is all just spooky violin music and jump cuts that the patriarchy adds in post-production.
Look there at that female CEO, she’s not a “dragon lady,” you can see the boom mic in the corner of the frame.
That girl with “resting bitch face”? She’s not being nasty, she’s just not flirting with the male character beside her.
A feminist might be your hardworking mother or your well-brought-up son. We’re reasonable people supporting a more-than-reasonable cause, with nary a ski mask in sight.
So I dare you to go into the bathroom at midnight and say “Bloody Mary” three times, and then look in the mirror—a feminist will appear!
You.
Muted
Lisa
There’s an old Italian proverb that says, great griefs are mute.
I believe that because I live it.
I lost my father Frank Scottoline to blood cancer on December 10, 2002. He lived his life as a peaceful, easy-going man, and he passed away the same way. His life, and his death, were in many ways the polar opposite of my feisty Mother Mary, such a force of nature that once I began to write about her, she got all the headlines.
But that doesn’t mean my father didn’t matter, or that his loss wasn’t felt.
I don’t know if you’ve had this experience yourself, but grief is the gift that keeps on taking.
You think you’re over it, whatever that means, but grief crops up from time to time, triggered by a memory or thought, an article of clothing, or even a song.
For me, it’s a time of year.
Autumn.
My father’s illness was chronic CLL, which is a form of blood cancer that isn’t life-threatening unless it morphs into its most aggressive mutation, called Richter’s Syndrome. Though the odds of the Richter’s mutation are very low, that was exactly what happened to my father, and by summer, he was fighting for his life, and by Thanksgiving we worried we were going to lose him.
He didn’t live until Christmas.
Though I had already bought presents for him, a child’s wish unfulfilled.
He passed away in the hospital, with my stepmother Fayne and me by his side, only an hour after my brother Frank had arrived. It was a predictably horrible scene, and I’ve written about it in previous books, but I’m making a different point herein.
Because now, almost thirteen years later, as the days get shorter and darker and the air begins to chill to the bone, my heart knows before my brain does that it’s the time of year that my father died.
There’s no fooling the memory of the human heart.
And so today, on Veterans Day, I found myself online, trying to find his military records because he was in a branch of the armed services that existed then, the Army Air Force, as a radio operator. I couldn’t find his records because I had the inevitable tussle with ancestry.com and other sites to sign in, remember my password, and all that fol-de-rol, which put me off. But the search turned up his death notice, which is so remarkable that it took me back to the days following his passing, and I felt again the sorrow, confusion, and oddly inappropriate humor of that time.
If you have ever written a death notice, planned a funeral, or tried to think when your world is crashing down around you, I’m hoping you can relate to the following story.
We were at my house, having just picked out my father’s casket. My stepmother was over my house, slumped in my living-room chair, heartbroken. Francesca was only in high school then, so she was home but she was upstairs. My brother Frank was also there, but he was in the kitchen with my husband at the time.
My second ex-husband.
Or, Thing Two.
Only two days later, I would ask Thing Two to leave the house for good, immediately after my father’s funeral, but we didn’t know that then.
That’s another story.
I know, right? I have a dramatic life.
Don’t we all?
In any event, I was at home and I got a telephone call from The Philadelphia Inquirer, which is our local newspaper, asking me if I wanted to put in a death notice. I told them yes, and I figured I would handle it to give my stepmother a break, so I began to dictate what the death notice should say.
As you may know, if you have read either my fiction or previous volumes in this series, I have a half-sister that I didn’t meet until I was an adult, who was my father’s daughter, born outside his marriage to my mother. Her name is Jeanne, and she was put up for adoption and lived a very happy life with her adoptive family, but decided to find her birth father when she was an adult, and we all got to know one another, after we got over the initial shock.
I was shocked, my
father wasn’t.
Neither was my stepmother. Or Mother Mary.
Dramatic, right?
Jeanne was going to come to Philadelphia for my father’s funeral, and when it came time to compose a death notice, I wanted to make sure she was included. My father had a wonderful relationship with her, and so had my stepmother, and I wanted Jeanne to know she was part of the family.
So my intent was pure, but my execution horrible.
I described to the woman from the newspaper all of the relatives that needed to be named in the death notice—the children, the stepchildren, and when we came to Jeanne, I wasn’t quite sure what to call her. I figured that she was my half-sister, so that would make her my father’s half-daughter, and that’s what I told the woman on the phone.
“What did you say?” the woman asked, her tone surprised.
“I said she’s my half-sister, so she’s his half-daughter. Please make sure you include her.”
“Are you sure?” The woman still sounded surprised, which I chalked up to the fact that I was including my heretofore-unknown half-sister in the death notice.
“I’m absolutely sure,” I told her, then I launched into the story, because I can tell a story on autopilot, especially when I am exhausted, sad, happy, or all of the above.
I wake up emotional.
I finished the story by saying, “… and so she came to look for her birth father, and she found him, and that was my father, so I would like you to include her in the notice as his half-daughter.”
“Okay, if that’s the way you want it.”
“Yes, that’s exactly the way I want it. Thank you.”
I hung up feeling good about myself, and just then Francesca came into the room.
“Mom,” she said, frowning, “what did you just say to that lady on the phone?”
“I told her that I wanted to include Jeanne in the death notice because she deserves to be acknowledged and welcomed into this family.”
Again, proud of myself. Demonstrating to growing daughter that there was a way to rise above family secrets and do the right thing.
Francesca was still frowning. “But you know there’s no such thing as a half-daughter, right?”
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