![]() They will hide under carpets and in linen closets and will collude with your kids and steal your credit cards. They will swing from the chandelier and slither up the walls and mess up your bed. The parts that you cut will become ambulatory too. It will slip from your fingers, dance around the room, run out the door. Even in this state, your novel is wily and wild. ![]() Cut until your fingers bleed, or your heart bleeds – whichever is first.ĥ. Cut away what is not beautiful, or what is too beautiful. Cut away that which detracts the eye or the tooth or the tongue. Take a very sharp knife and a measure of strong twine. Still, it’s best to know such things up front.Ĥ. This is not to say there is not a market – or indeed an appetite – for a roasted three-headed chicken, or a chicken with a dolphin’s tail, or a chicken with jeweled eyes. What you’re looking for is signs of illness, mutilation or genetic distress. There will be scars, of course – there always are with a thing that is alive. As with a roast chicken, anomalies will exist – a thickening here, a flaw there. Run your fingers through the words, making sure to massage between the consonants. Grease your hands (butter works the best, but you may use olive oil if you are concerned about saturated fats). Pay special attention to the eruptions on the skin. Run your hands along the pages, feeling for cracks, gaps, and bulges. Or, in other words, what Julia did for the roast chicken, I am now attempting to do with my novel. It needs a willingness to appreciate the raw materials in its ugliness, in its shyness, in its unstructured state, as well as a willingness to coax it into a place of beauty, into a delight of the eye and ear and tongue and nose, into a thing whose very existence requires it to be shared. It requires patience, planning, insistence, and love. The process is difficult, painstaking and sometimes a pain in the butt. It’s not a happy place necessarily, or an easy place. Or, more specifically, my revision practice. Still, despite the fact that much of what she taught me does not apply to how I cook now, and how I eat now, I have absorbed lesson after lesson of her cooking practice into my writing practice. My family is vegetarian – a state of being that she regarded with the utmost suspicion – and in the summer we eat lots and lots of raw foods straight out of the garden. Now, I know – I know for sure – that Julia, if she was to visit my kitchen, would likely turn up her nose at the kinds of foods I typically cook. ![]() And I love that my kids have gotten into the habit of watching bits of her show on youtube. This is the woman who taught me to make omelettes for 300 (a skill I use all the time, though for five instead of three hundred). Neither did a bottle.”Īnd, “Cooking is like love: it should be entered into with wild abandon, or not at all.”Īnd, “How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like kleenex?”Īnd, “The only time to eat diet food is when you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”Īnd, “If you’re afraid of butter, use cream.”Īnd, “You could use skim milk, of course, but I don’t know why you would.” ![]() The woman who said, “A few drops of Cognac never hurt anything. She loved the communal nature of a meal, the shared experience, the moment of delight and euphoria and grace. She love the fact that the food she made existed solely to spoon into another person’s mouth. That combination of exasperation and delight, that careless tenderness combined with a firm belief in the democratization of pleasure. I remember watching her show as a little kid and, after being first entranced by her voice and by all the cool stuff in her kitchen, I remember being struck by her relationship with food. My father gave me a copy of Julia Child’s letters ( As Always, Julia), and, as always, that woman is a revelation.
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