A Lambertville Memoir: Blood, Bones, and Butter

We read Blood, Bones, and Butter, the Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, for our book group this month, written by Gabriella Hamilton, famous chef and now famous writer. It's a memoir, not a crime novel, so I'm out of my officially credentialed field of expertise here, but I found it to be an excellent piece of writing and I wanted to tell you so.

First of all, if her meals are as deliciously satisfying as her sentences and paragraphs, it must be a wonderful experience to eat at her Manhattan restaurant. Reading this book will make you hungry, although there are no actual recipes included in it. You will fly to your kitchen in search of something real to cook, and you will feel dismay because, not only is there nothing real to cook, but your pots, pans, and utensils are not in the state of rigorous order and cleanliness that Gabriella Hamilton would require.

Secondly, as far as the memoir goes, she dishes without oversharing. I think this is a good thing. Most of us could paint our ex-spouses naked (as they could paint us, if they had the skill) and people would be appalled. But we draw the cloak of charity, rightly. The reader understands that her mother is sore at her father, that she herself is sore at her husband, but she never tells us precisely why. We are left with the feeling that it is the nature of women to be angry at men, or in the nature of men to irritate their women.

And thirdly, the early part of the book is a charming picture of old New Hope and Lambertville. This is why the book club ladies picked it up in the first place, for we are Lambertville women. We heard that Jimmy Hamilton, Gabrielle's father, was unhappy with the book. Mr. Hamilton is a very big frog in our little pond. He runs a restaurant of his own, right across my back fence. No longer the penniless Bohemian of Gabrielle's childhood, he has enough money to endow various public works, and enough generosity to give cooking lessons to the old folks at the geezer health club where I work out. He is a helluva nice guy. I'm not sure what he hated about the book. I like him even better, knowing he was once a penniless Bohemian with romantic visions, like the rest of us. You'll be happy to know that now and then he still roasts lamb outside over an open fire.

Anyway, read the book if you get a chance. It's good.

Malice Domestic

Home at last from another swell conference.

Sadly, I was unable to find my camera at the last minute when I was leaving for Malice Domestic early Friday morning. As a result I was not able to take any movies of the view from the Hyatt elevator as it goes up and down (one of the fun things I like to do in strange hotels with fancy glass elevators). Nor was I able to take any pictures of myself posed with any of the Big Guns of Traditional Mystery. Nor was I able to photograph my roommate, Robin Hathaway, and me in our elegant outfits for the Malice Domestic banquet on Saturday night. That was not because there was no camera, but because we never got into those outfits. They were in our hotel room at three-thirty in the afternoon when the lock on the door failed, sealing us out, sealing our possessions (including our outfits) in.

Nor was I able to take any pictures of the kindly West Indian locksmith who slaved over the lock for two and a half or three hours before digging it out (you should see the scars on the door). He replaced it with a new one just in time for us to come staggering out of the banquet, still dressed in our day clothes, our hands numb with clapping, our lips stiff with cheers for the honorees, our bellies stuffed with delicious food, and fall into bed.

It was swell. The Hyatt took serious money off the bill for our inconvenience, not all that inconvenient for us, maybe inconvenient for people who wanted to see us in our glad rags. Next day were our panels, perfectly successful. Mine was put up on Twitter by Criminal Element
@crimehq. Interesting to see that. (See how reading tweets makes your sentences shorter.)

But as I said, I'm home now, and dying to get into my own little bed. Alas, The Washington Post says that President Obama wants to speak to us all in the middle of the night, and he won't say what about. It could be a message about the end of the world for all I know. I dare not go to sleep. What if the world ended while I was sleeping?

Later:

Went to sleep anyway. Awoke to hear the joyful news that Osama Bin Laden is dead. Distressed to hear that we buried him at sea. I can understand where that would discourage the tendency of his supporters to gather at his gravesite and make trouble, but what about the ones who are going to deny that he's really dead? Couldn't we have saved his head or something? Put it on a pike in Lafayette park? Such a waste.

Cold Turkey

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I have kicked the online shopping monkey and can devote all my computer time now to writing the thriller, answering my emails and playing mah jongg. The bad news is that my credit card is no good.

Not only is my credit card no good, the online account I used to use to look at what was going on with it has been scrubbed. I can't access it. My ID and password are okay, but the account has ceased to exist. But, as I said, this is very exciting. Think of the hours I'll now have to write, play mah jongg, do housework, eat, and go to the gym. Not necessarily in that order.

This all started on Saturday afternoon. The phone rang, and it was a robot from my credit card company hinting darkly at questionable charges that might have been placed on my account. I was offered a number of choices, one of which was to forget the whole thing, roll over, and go back to sleep. It sounded too sinister for that, so I held out for choice number four, which was to speak to a live human. The human was very helpful. Someone had tried to use my credit card number to reserve a room in a cheap motel somewhere in the U.K., she said.

"Nope," I said. "Not me." She said that was what they figured, since whoever tried it had used an address different from mine. The charge had been denied. Still she told me to destroy my credit card and wait till they sent me a new one.

Hey, at least I'm home. The same thing happened three years ago when I was at Malice. I had no way to pay the hotel bill until I discovered a branch of our bank across the street from the convention hotel where I was able to score some cash. We are so vulnerable in the modern day. At any moment credit card failure can strike, leaving one stranded between endeavors like a losing musical-chairs player stranded between chairs.

So now to return to my work in progress. Or my game of mah jongg. Too bad; there are some really cute dresses on the Nieman-Marcus site.

The Fashion World -- Can You Find Perspecitve There?

Reese Witherspoon has famously -- infamously? -- suggested in an interview in the May issue of Vogue magazine that people who love fashion often lack perspective. The blogosphere is in an uproar over this; Ms. Witherspoon has been denounced by some as an ingrate. You say this in a Vogue interview? When they're putting you on the cover? But the fact is that she's right. And the fashionistas aren't alone in this. Almost everybody lacks perspective nowadays.

Last week I stumbled onto a long discussion on a West Coast guy's blog about building things. He invited people to comment on what they were building. Not one of them boasted about building anything the country needs, or the world needs, unless you count the families some of them said they were building, or their gardens, or new parts of their houses. One young woman said she was building her brand. Her brand. The world holds its breath.

I like fashion. I'm pretty sure I lack perspective, although I'm also pretty sure I know the difference between my navel and the universe. Fashion -- pretty people in pretty clothes -- is one of those things, like music, that can distract the mind from the grimmer realities of life. And who doesn't need something like that? Who can bear, after all, to have perfectly clear perspective?

Not Blogging Today. Working on Book.

Instead of throwing together my usual fevered stew of random observations I'm taking the day off to go and look at the Lambertville Free Public Library up close. I'm trying to write a scary thriller set in that building, an old mansion that used to belong to the first mayor of Lambertville. Doctor Lilly.


Much of the book takes place there. Being an old building, rumored to be haunted, it can be creepy at times. I'll tell you the title of the book later. Here are the first few paragraphs. They scared the children's librarian:


On the night when I first discovered Thora in the library, I thought I was alone. All the lights in the building were out but the one in my office. The old building was quiet except for the creak of the heating system, the slow tick of my office clock, the far-off scurrying of mice, and the hiss of freezing rain falling on the crust of the snow piled up outside.

I never believed the stories about the Wetherford Public Library being haunted, even though they say a man was found dead of an overdose in a bathtub upstairs, back before I was born, back before the borough took the Beasley mansion for taxes and turned it into a library, way back in the days when some slumlord rented it out for apartments. No haunts had ever troubled me in my years as library director.

And yet, a sound like someone moving around in the reading room reminded me of the rumored haunt. Could someone besides me be in the library? Had the clerks left one of the doors unlocked again? I called out: "Is someone there?"

The noise stopped.