What I'm Reading
The Shortest History of Germany, The Cost of Living and In Praise of Home Cooking
The boys finished their school year last week and we leave next week for our summer travels. So this week is a hodge-podge of sub-par but free after-school care (that converts to all-day care once school is out for the summer) and sleepovers and trial classes for art and soccer and Hugo’s drum lessons and time with Oma, all choreographed (and chauffeured) by me, because one maddening aspect of the kind of partnership I inhabit, in which one parent is a full-time company employee and the other one is a self-employed writer, is that the children’s fates once school is out is entirely up to me.
One nice thing is that Hugo is old enough now that he gets to stay home during the day (unless he has plans), because I can tell him to leave me alone while I work or I can take him along on my errands and he does helpful things like texting my father back while I’m driving and finding good radio stations in the car and running into the store with change to get a carton of milk so I don’t have to. Eleven! A delight.1 The not-so-nice thing is that Bruno considers it a deep maternal betrayal to be forced to go to the after-school care while his big brother gets to stay home and this makes everyone (ha ha, me) feel guilt-ridden and terrible.
I have exactly 10 1/2 weeks until my cookbook manuscript is due, so our summer travels will be a vacation for the rest of my family, but very much a working-from-the-various-rooms-I-will-find-myself-in for me. I’m still chewing on whether I should print out the manuscript as it stands now (100 recipes DONE, can you freaking believe it) and do all the fiddly, write-y work by hand, or if that is madness and I should just take my temperamental laptop that fills me with terror every time I boot it up (YES, I back up my work, but I am STILL HAUNTED by the Great Manuscript Loss of 2020) but is less likely to irritate the living shit out of me each time I find myself leafing madly through the pages to get to Hühnerfrikassee or Kartoffelklöße or WHATEVER. (I think I may have just answered my own question.).
From where I stand (sit) right now, I figure that all my thinking hours will be channeled into the cookbook while we’re away, and I won’t have much capacity for other intellectual thought, so I will be pausing subscriptions until mid to late August. This means that your billing cycles will be frozen, new readers will not be able to purchase a paid subscription plan and existing paid subscribers won't be charged. That’s not to say that I won’t write at all - who knows, maybe I won’t end up being quite as depleted as I imagine and perhaps inspiration will simply course through me like freshly churned yogurt gelato, so if I feel the urge, I will write from Italy. But if I don’t, you will know why. Chicken fricassee is why!
Speaking of fricassee, THIS BOOK YOU GUYS. It was recommended to me by my friend Lu when he was over at my apartment eating up round 76 of the Bratkartoffel tests and I ordered it nearly as soon as he was gone again. I was already intrigued by what he told me, but when it arrived and I saw Philip Pullman’s blurb, even more so. I gobbled it up in a few days and now I want to run around pressing it madly into the hands of everyone I know who lives here, plus all the Germans too. It is both a condensed history of this strange and wonderful and contradictory and infuriating and perplexing place where we live and an attempt to explain the centuries (!) old forces that have been pulling Germany in two opposite directions, both literal and figurative, and it explains SO MUCH.
At a dinner party earlier this spring, my friend and I (she was also born to non-German parents who have made a life in Germany) were trying to describe to a visiting American writer what it feels like to be at home in a place that has such a complicated and agonizing history, and what it feels like to, yes, love a place like this. At an event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Germany’s president Frank Walter Steinmeier said something that got to the very heart of that feeling: “Germany’s past is a fractured past, with responsibility for the murdering of millions and the suffering of millions… And that is why I say that this country can only be loved with a broken heart.” At the time, and still, the accuracy of his words pierced my heart. It was extraordinary to hear a German official publicly put words to something that often feels strange and heavy, deeply personal and always bewildering. In a way, The Shortest History of Germany is the perfect historical companion read to that complex feeling.
Speaking of complex feelings, I read The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy while waiting for Bruno to finish an afternoon art class yesterday, which felt very on the nose. The Cost of Living is the second slim volume of Levy’s “living autobiography,” which starts with Things I Don’t Want to Know (I read it here) and ends with Real Estate, and in it Levy grapples with the inherent conflict between being a wife and mother, the person responsible for making a nice home for others, and trying to make a living as a writer. But of course she does it in her inimical, metaphorical way and it is both funny and awful, because on one hand you feel grateful that someone is able to put into words this ridiculous dance we find ourselves doing, and also furious that this dance is our status quo and very little really ever seems to change. This morning, after sending a very melancholy Bruno off to his sub-par care situation, and as I try to write about this book and the constant internal battle that rages in the hearts of writers who are also mothers, as well as work on the manuscript of my book due in less than three months, Hugo is literally moaning from the sofa about being bored.
Serenity now.2
To finish things on a lighter note, or maybe just a different side of the same coin, I wanted to tell you about this lovely, meditative cookbook that my friend Liana Krissoff published this year. In Praise of Home Cooking is, first and foremost, a cookbook for young people, for people new to the kitchen, a thoughtful manual on how to make a good pot of beans, or a nice simple cake, how to take care of cast-iron and how to do the dishes in a sensible way. But it is also an manifesto for getting younger children to take on a more active role in the kitchen, encouraging you (and them) to fry eggs and cook pancakes and make stir-fries. But because Liana is such a gifted and delicate writer, it is of course about so much more, like how to step up to the table and start to take responsibility not just for feeding yourself and others, but how to find value in it too. She wants you to trust in your children’s inherent capabilities, and in your own too. Buy this for yourself if you have younger kids in the house who want to take on a bigger role in the kitchen, and for any older kids you know heading out into the world. My fervent hope is that just as many boys as girls will learn the lessons this book has to offer.
My book club’s next pick: Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
My summer library books: Eating Animals, Cloud Cuckoo Land, LaRose, Girl Woman Other and Harlem Shuffle
On my bedside table: Fatherland by Burkhard Bilger
I have an affiliate account with Bookshop.org, so if you purchase any books through the links in this newsletter, I receive a small commission.
Pride comes before a fall; just wait for it…
See?
Love all the recommendations, and empathize entirely with the awful summer scheduling challenges that fall on the mom (typically) to figure out and manage. I wish there was some way to erase the guilt. I comfort myself a little with the fact that our sons are learning palpably that their moms have needs and careers and contributions to the world, too, and their wives or friends or other female people in their lives will also. And that's incredibly good and useful for both them and us in the long run. (And one day Bruno will be 11 and get to savor the freedom!) Right before your newsletter in my in box was this one Substack newsletter from @melindawmoyer (do tags on Substack work? Let's find out. Melinda, if you are not reading Letter from Berlin, it's absolutely marvelous.) https://melindawmoyer.substack.com/p/the-motherhood-fallacy-of-self-sacrifice about motherhood and the fallacy of self-sacrifice. I don't think it will tell you anything you don't already know, but I still found it a comfort to read.
Melinda writes: "I am calling it the motherhood fallacy of self-sacrifice — the pernicious but pervasive idea 1) that we are only good mothers if we are constantly focused on our kids, and 2) that the moment we prioritize ourselves, we are directly harming our children. It’s a fallacy because this isn’t actually how it works. What’s good for us isn’t, by default, bad for our kids. It’s far more common for the opposite to be true: What’s best for us is often best for our kids."
Every time these observations get written aloud, yours and hers, it feels validating and a relief. So thank you, and good luck, good luck with the this stretch of the book!
Thank you for the Steinmeier-quote. It made me look up and read the whole speech, which moved me very much.