Malcolm’s mother’s Pyrex dish

This isn’t what I was going to write about today. I was planning to pontificate about the structuring of non-fiction and how issues that you had no idea even existed can leap up and bite you hard enough to draw blood, like the contents list.

Today I was/am supposed to be creating a contents list. I have done something, although it doesn’t look like the model contents list I was sent, and that depresses me.

So I went to make a blackberry and apple sponge instead, for three reasons:

1. It’s comfort food
2. I have the ingredients to hand (picked kilos of blackberries at the plot yesterday)
3. I want to use the recipe in the book.

And in making the sponge, which is a small whale of a sponge (like a cetacean of average size if sponge puddings were sea creatures) I found my hands cradling this dish. It’s old, kitsch and not at all elegant. It’s big, which is one reason I still have it, but there’s another reason. It’s Malcolm’s mother’s Pyrex.

Once we were homeless. Sounds like the beginning of a story, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t a story, it was bitter and real and sordid. Our baby son was a day old when a supposed friend told us that if we brought the baby back into her home, she ‘wouldn’t be responsible for her actions’. We’d been staying with her while we tried to find a place to live, on returning from Europe, but London in 1992 was not a good place to try finding a flat when one of you is nine months pregnant and both of you are unemployed.

So I was kept in hospital until a place was found for us in a hostel. The hostel housed people who locked each other out of rooms, with the locker-in screaming abuse through the keyhole while the locked-out attempted breaking in with fire axes or car jacks. Our baby son had to have an emergency stomach operation and the ambulance men refused to come up the drive because the place had such a bad reputation.

Malcolm was the friend of a friend and he let us live in his natal home. His parents had both died, and their terraced ex-council house in Dagenham became our nest. We tore down the wallpaper and ripped up the carpets and made it our home for a year.

That was probably insensitive of us. I don’t know how Malcolm felt about us destroying the (literal) fabric of his life – I do know he never said a word. We dug the garden over and I planted everything I could afford. Our baby son grew fat and happy and we acquired a kitten who’d been dumped.

I got a job. A good job. We moved to a house of our own, half the size of Malcolm’s, but in Tooting, which was as much as we could afford then. We were on our way to being normal people again.

But I took Malcolm’s mother’s Pyrex with me. To remind me that once I was homeless…

Once a virtual stranger gave us the chance to put ourselves back together and I hope our lives have in some way repaid his generosity. We lost touch with Malcolm – I think that was probably a necessary part of the process: how could I bear to be in contact with somebody who’d seen us in that extremity of vulnerability and need? Now I’d love to hear from Malcolm again, because the wounds have healed and anyway, I was never ashamed of homelessness, just of my own inability to be properly gracious in thanks.

And I still think of that house whenever I make a blackberry and apple sponge.

They do things differently here …

‘Expect the unexpected’ is a truism. Like most truisms, it seems banal until it has meaning for you, the individual, or me, the other individual.

My life looks very weird from where I am now. To start with, I am a contracted writer. Oh yes! Of course, I need to say immediately that being a contracted writer is a nice long stride towards being a published one, but it’s wise not to cheer until you land on the other side of that particular hurdle. Publishers do reject books they’ve contracted for, or require massive, time-consuming rewrites of same. They do (rarely) ask for writers to return advances, and I am hearing that this rare occurrence is becoming slightly more common, a bit like some exotic equatorial bird being found wintering on our shores, it’s the heat that makes it happen, but in this case it’s the heat caused by the pace of economic descent that’s causing the friction around the advance.

So … caveats and all that. I am still contracted. But not for what I thought I would be. I had assumed I knew the trajectory pretty well:

1. Spend years writing a novel
2. Get an agent
3. Rewrite novel to please agent
4. Get rejections via agent while writing second novel
5. Get acceptance of novel
6. Get advance
7. Rewrite to please publisher
8. Get published
9. Get excited
10. Work like stink to promote novel while rewriting second novel to please agent

Repeat from 3 to end of life.

But no. I am contracted to write a work of non-fiction, which means that my NaNoWriMo training is coming in very useful, because instead of having a finished work to faff with, I have a lot of new words to write between now and my deadline. Some of those words are recipes which I need to road-test for publication because I have never bothered to write down all the steps that are in my head that turn X raw ingredients into Y dish. So it’s a twin track approach of bake and write, write and bake, while worrying about imminence of deadline and being discovered to be a total fraud.

Best friend advises me that I am not a total fraud and that having spent twenty years doing the thing I am writing about, and thirty years cooking from scratch, is qualification enough. I am not entirely convinced about this.

They do things differently here … and I am frightened and exhilarated to be doing them too.

Book Review: The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery, published by Gallic Press

Oh the joys of Proust! I had to go and re-read this book after talking to a friend about it. Said friend contended that it wasn’t a novel and while I concurred (it had never occurred to me that it was a novel in the first place) I didn’t think it mattered.

Actually, it matters. But it’s the ‘where’ of it mattering that is intriguing. Barbery is a French writer, her characters are often obnoxious, none more so than Pierre Arthens, the eponymous protagonist, and that’s okay by me.

Is it okay by the British novel-reading public? I’m not so sure. There’s a tendency here to want to like characters, and Barbery doesn’t write about likable people. There’s also, in the English-speaking world, a trend towards giving pre-eminence to shelf categorisation of books, so knowing who you would ‘shelve’ next to has become a requisite of pitching your work to a publisher. Barbery shelves next to nobody I’m familiar with in this generation, except perhaps Bauby, not because they are both French (although that might be a necessary condition of their enshelvement) but because they both explore ideas, rather than people.

In The Gourmet we are invited to consider what talent, hard work and ego do to a young man who becomes France’s greatest food critic. And what that young man, as he grows in ego, power and disdain, does to those around him – ranging from his cat to his wife and through all his human and possessive relationships. This is a philosophical journey and if you know your Proust, the end is visible from the beginning, although its exact topography may still surprise, and that is fine because what Barbery is doing here is dissection – and she does it ably.

So it’s not a novel, it’s not a memoir, it’s a creative (non)fiction treatise on the role of talent and power in shaping life and an immoral fable on where that life ends. The humour is black, the description of food lyrical and the intention laudable – but I think this ‘novel’ unlike The Elegance of the Hedgehog – will sit less comfortably with the shelvers. And bravo to Barbery for that!