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I once visited a bookclub whose claim to fame was that they created an appropriate martini for whichever book they were reading. (I was at that bookclub to discuss my Christmas-themed book, S, and the martini made with cranberry juice and rimmed with crushed candy cane was so delicious that I only took two sips because I was afraid I would guzzle the whole thing and be that writer if the alcoholic content was as high as I thought it might be.) By contrast, I have heard of bookclubs that involve spreadsheets and rating systems and Robert’s Rules of Order.

There are bookclubs where the book is the point and bookclubs where the club is the point. Every bookclub is unique.

As a writer, I truly love engaging with people who are engaging with my book. It’s one of my favourite parts of the whole business of writing. It’s wonderful to sit around a living room or a Zoom room with people who are discussing something I’ve written �� someone once said a book is not fully published until it’s been read, and there’s something very satisfying in experiencing that my ideas turned words have turned back into ideas in someone else’s mind. It’s magical, really.

What I have found, however, is that hosting a bookclub can be challenging, especially when the author is present but also just generally. A couple of years ago I came across the work of someone who can really help with this: in many ways Priya Parker and her book, , changed my life. It certainly changed how I lead groups �� because she taught me how to take hosting seriously, how to find the sweet spot between being bossy and controlling and being laissez faire and expecting an event just to unfold because people are there together. She’s the reason my play groups begin with people holding their hands together to make the “curtains�� rise and end with people drawing the curtains to a close.

Here are a couple of fantastic quotes from Priya:

“Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try.��

“Why is this night different from all other nights?�� Before you gather, ask yourself: Why is this gathering different from all my other gatherings? Why is it different from other people’s gatherings of the same general type? What is this that other gatherings aren’t?��

“Reverse-engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome.��

So what does this mean if you’re hosting a bookclub, and what does it mean if you’re inviting an author to your bookclub?

First, people are busy so we want to value their time. This is true for every member of the bookclub. When you’re inviting people to a bookclub—reader or author �� spend time thinking about what is expected of them and what they can expect, and then let them know. My local bookstore hosts a men’s only bookclub and here is part of its delicious description: “The lads meet at a local watering hole for discussion, libation and an occasional fist-fight over selected crime-fiction titles.�� Long-standing grudges are expected and encouraged.�� Not everyone will want to be part of such a bookclub but those for whom this is a fit will instantly know that these are their people and their books. And that’s what you want.

Will there be snacks? What should you do if you haven’t finished the book? What time will it end? Is this more of a drinking club than a reading group? How snobby is it? Is leadership shared? How much participation is expected?

These are important elements to communicate when you’re setting up or inviting people to join your bookclub.��(Speaking of which, if you don’t have a bookclub, local bookstores and libraries are great sources of connection, but you also have the opportunity to create your own, inviting friends and neighbours to discover and talk about books.

If you already have a bookclub, you might want to think about how to jumpstart your bookclub beyond discussion of who liked/disliked what. Oprah has a of unexpected people you could invite to your bookclub. I’m not suggesting you need to follow this list but it might spark your imagination for what your bookclub could be.

If you are inviting an author, as I said above, let them know what your bookclub is usually like, both philosophically and practically. At the same time, a bookclub where the author is present ought to be different from your usual bookclub meeting �� simply because the author is there. One puts it like this:

“An author visit is a rare experience to gain more insight into the book you’ve read, learn about various inspirations, and hear about what an author may be working on next.�� It may seem obvious, but it’s important to make it clear to members that the author is a guest to be respected. This isn’t an occasion for members to list what they didn’t like about the book or to complain about how a character was written or the way a plot point was resolved…[instead] view the author’s visit as an exciting interview where they get to learn more about the book.��

Plan a list of questions ahead of time. You might want to discuss the book ahead of time online or at one bookclub meeting, generating questions you would like to ask the author when they meet with you. You can also make use of resources �� connected with their books.

This one might seem obvious but encourage members to buy a copy of the book and to read it if the author will be attending. It’s not a requirement but it is a kind courtesy. I know I can speak on behalf of all authors when I say that authors are delighted to sign copies if the bookclub is in person or bookplates to send if the bookclub is a virtual one.

Finally, know that it is a pleasure for an author to attend a bookclub. Don’t hesitate to invite them. Some writers I know schedule one bookclub a month while others would be happy to attend multiple bookclubs a week.

(Click here for and )

I returned to Italy nine years after my first visit. I was in Europe for the second time in my life, this time accompanying my husband who was teaching at a conference in Switzerland. I was well into writing Renaissance by this time, nearly done my first draft. When we first began planning our trip, I had thought I would explore Geneva while he worked, but there was nothing there I really wanted to do. On a whim, I looked at the cost of flights to Florence: $30 each way convinced me.

So, while my husband was working, I hopped on a regional flight with the smallest of carry-on bags, stayed at a less pleasant convent filled with mosquitos and cranky nuns (the Sisters of Stability and Charity had sold their convent and it had become a resort), and spent twenty-four hours in the city, clocking many kilometres on foot and leaving behind a great deal of sweat as it was July and humid.

The city had changed in the intervening years, a victim of hypertourism especially during peak tourist season.

I was not as brave as my character Liz who went for fifty days on her own �� I went for two days and a night. I had some wild adventures, not a man dying before my eyes in a water fountain as happened to Lucy Honeychurch, but it was a water fountain incident nonetheless, one that left me feeling like death for an hour or so. (I wrote about that adventure .)

But, like my first visit to Florence, this was a joyful trip (hypertourism and fountain incident notwithstanding). I wasn’t there because I needed to escape my life. Instead like Lucy Honeychurch, I was closer to finding my life while there.

Around the time of this second trip and in the intervening years, the grief I had anticipated was coming true: my kids were leaving home. They left and returned (the pandemic gave us an unexpected victory lap) and left again and returned again. I cry when they leave usually but it rarely lasts more than a few minutes.

It makes me think of what Indigenous poet Paula Gunn Allen says about the changing roles of women as we spiral through the phases of life. “We begin our lives…walking the Way of the Daughter. This is the time for learning, for gathering experiences in the shelter of our parents. We move next to self-reliance, when the necessary task of the age is to learn who you are in the world.�� (The A Room with A View stage, you might say). “The path brings us next to the Way of the Mother.�� But then as those children move toward self-reliance, Gunn Allen says “our strengths turn now to a circle wider than our own children, to the well-being of the community�� and eventually move to a wider sphere “beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth.�� (Braiding Sweetgrass, pp. 96-7)

Just yesterday a friend asked me how much of Renaissance was autobiographical. Of all the novels I’ve written, this one feels the closest to me, and yet it certainly still is fiction. It reflects my own emotional journey of sending my kids out into the world, but it doesn’t mirror it let alone actually represent it. I’ve written novels about places I’ve never been, but this isn’t one of them. This is a place I wanted to write about after visiting there. (There are some key locations in the novel, however, where I have never been even though they are real and even though I tried to get there.)

It’s a tricky concept to explain how a writer’s experience becomes fodder for a story. Maybe think of it this way: we’ve all had the experience of having a dream where we’re back in high school, only it isn’t our high school but maybe an ampitheatre with an open roof and then we realize there are stairs that lead to a room we didn’t know was there, and within that room is a couch from childhood and there’s a man sitting on it, a man we saw yesterday in real life on the bus, and in the dream we know he is our high school math teacher and he says something to us and we wake up and think, yes, that’s exactly what we need to hear. That’s what writing fiction is like, a dream-like pastiche of memory and invention, of emotional truth and exploration.

(Continued from Part I: )

My husband and I have three school-aged children and he has an impending sabbatical and we have saved funds to go somewhere. It’s 2009. We consider taking the kids to Africa and no one wants us there. It is a beautiful big world and we are eager to see it but we also struggle to choose where to go �� Paris? Portugal? Kenya? Oxford? I am mowing the front lawn of our suburban home when I think to myself: Florence. It is as though a key turns in a lock. We decide we will take the kids on a Western Canada road trip to see the Pacific and the Rockies, but first we will travel without them for ten days in Italy.

We take eight weeks of Italian classes. Our fellow classmates all have Italian nonnas they want to converse with but I say that we are going to Italy in March and we want to be fluent. Our instructor laughs. I mispronounce gnocchi, which is a word that’s used in English, and I become fairly invested in the family of Signor Bianchi who are the characters of our Italian lessons.

Like Liz, we stay with the Sisters of Stability and Charity at a convent that used to be owned by a friend of Galileo’s and about which there is a story about Mussolini. We arrive terribly jetlagged and discover that Italian fluency would have been an excellent asset �� that the nuns who conversed with us in broken English emails actually farmed out the communication to their once-a-week handyman. We muddle through conversation with smiles and gestures and eight weeks of Italian lessons. They have not one word of English.

My husband takes the stairs but one of the nuns and I climb into a miniscule wood-paneled elevator with our belongings. On the second floor of the convent we are shown into a room with twin beds and shuttered windows. There are no pictures on the wall. When we throw open the shutters, a la Lucy Honeychurch, it is indeed a room with a view. Our view is that of a hillside of olive trees and a tunnel of tall cypresses. Somewhere on the property is a glycine �� a wisteria bush that is a thousand years old, we are told, although we are not there to see it bloom. I sit in the garden one day and watch tiny lizards scurry across the gravel.

We take the bus into town �� we are in the hills on the Oltrarno on the edge of the city. We walk into Santa Croce and to the fountain where Lucy saw the Italian stabbed, and across the Arno where she threw her blood-stained postcards. We travel outside the city with a woman who offers pasta-making classes and who offers us red wine so fresh it makes our teeth squeak. We trade �� as arranged ahead of time �� a litre of maple syrup for a litre of olive oil, and all of us are satisfied with the arrangement.

We rent a car and drive to Parma for the simple reason that it is the home of Parmesan cheese, a substance that likely composes about 18% of my body. There we see North African prostitutes along the side of a rural road, a truck bypass. I feel sick at this. We drive about past a range of castles built as a line of defense by a true Renaissance woman of the medieval period. We drink potent alcohol in Modena with a colleague of my husband’s who lives there. Later we take the train to Rome which refuses to welcome me. It is smelly and there is a McDonalds, and while I know my art history, I don’t know my Roman history, other than to know that Christians were killed for sport and suppression in the Colosseum. What we see at the Colosseum is a costumed interpreter in full Roman regalia, texting on his phone.

Several years later, as I’m beginning the anticipatory grief of our kids leaving home �� as an aside, after our eldest was born, the subject of my hormonal sobbing was the fact that “someday he will grow up and leave us�� �� I began to noodle around the idea of a novel set in Florence. I had just finished writing another novel. That novel involved a woman who was suddenly widowed and who became an environmental activist. Readers of that novel would often assume I had myself been widowed or that I was also such an activist; neither is true. But the emotions? Ah, the emotions were all very familiar to me. At the time I wrote that novel, my beloved grandmother was in her last months and I was learning my first experience of grief. That novel helped me through that experience, but it also went in all sorts of directions my life never had.

I began imagining a novel that was basically about Lucy Honeychurch at 50, deciding to approach the experience as a chance to do something she’d always wanted to do, to visit Florence on her own. I wrote a number of scenes, and some of them are in Renaissance now, but to be honest it was a bit mopey and indulgent, closer to therapy than fiction. At the same time, I embarked on a non-fiction project, reading and interviewing people about the process of children leaving home.

And then we had a series of family events that involved layers of trauma. The trauma we faced was not in the same ballpark at all as those in Renaissance, but just as with my widow novel where I drew on all the feelings of my own experience, so I began to imagine a character who was not going to Italy because it was pleasant and indulgent but because she had to get out, because she had been deeply wounded and was in need of healing.

This was no longer Lucy Honeychurch at midlife. Neither was it me. But she was someone who needed a rebirth. Her last name, Fane, is one I’ve encountered in Waterloo Region where both Liz and I live, but it’s also an archaic word taken from the Latin fanum, meaning temple or place dedicated to a deity. I meant that to be an oblique homage to Honeychurch. Her first name, Elizabeth, ties in with the character of Elizabeth in the Bible, the older woman who mothers the newly pregnant Mary, the woman who carries unexpected new life in her at an advanced age.

To be continued in part III

A good friend struggled at her wedding because, as she said, it was still just me in a bridal dress. She had hoped to be transformed for the day into someone else, into The Bride. I thought of that on Sunday at my book launch �� when it poured buckets and buckets of rain on our outdoor event but also beforehand when I wanted to be the Author but I was still just me with a published book.

How do you make sense of that wild weather? asks a friend who was at the event.

I am not sure.

I could have yelled Plot Twist if I had been in a different state of mind.

In the moment I thought of the movie, A Room With A View, which first put me on to Florence, the setting for this book being launched. In that movie, a huge storm brews, and the main characters must take shelter in a carriage and scurry back to the city. The clergyman who is with them tries to provide comfort:

The weather was biblical, I say, thinking of the question my friend Erin asked during the interview at the launch, about the religiosity of the book. My son’s girlfriend, who is Vietnamese, tells me that in her culture being rained on is a sign of good luck, of good fortune.

There is a bit of good fortune in the weather: when I washed the tablecloths after the launch I realized the stain in one of them had come out with the rain. That’s something.

Another couple of friends met at the launch for the first time and talked under the tent as they waited for the weather to lighten up �� one said she was not going to get her new suede shoes wet if she could help it. Their conversation helped her new acquaintance to realize that an experience he always described as sad was not only that, that something could be really good but still sad at the same time. He is about to go to Portugal and has been reading about saudade, the Portuguese word that describes yearning or longing for something, ‘the presence of absence.�� This morning I was reading a book and the same concept was described, there called sehnsucht, the German word for thoughts and feelings about everything that is unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experience.

Right now, my extended family is facing some profound challenges �� someone I love is very unwell and in hospital �� and so something that is really good, the book launch, is also still sad.

I decided not to visit the hospital the day before the launch, because I felt like I needed to gather my forces inside so instead I went for a long bike ride in the countryside, and then sat on a patio for dinner. And then on Sunday I gathered my supplies—the gelato, the bookmarks, the stickers, the extra books, the tablecloths, my notes, a couple of chairs—and headed out.

The launch was lovely until the skies opened up �� even though all the weather apps and the radar said we would be in the clear. The raincloud that came suddenly stayed directly overhead. I went home cold and wet and with way too many forces still in-gathered, not having had an outlet for them.

The next day when I described how the rain had filled in the gutters and curbs so that the rain was overflowing onto the sidewalk in places, I thought of the real-life event that’s described in Renaissance �� ��’A�������ܱ����DzԱ�, the 1966 flood of Florence. One of the characters in the book, a tour guide, explains it to the main character:

����In the fall of 1966, it rained seventeen inches of rain. It was also weirdly warm that fall so the early snows in the mountains all melted. And then, some engineers decided to let out water on purpose to prevent the dam above Florence from breaking, and all that water hit Florence like a tidal wave. Twenty feet of water and mud and oil.��

“Twenty feet?��

��In some places. It was different in different parts of the city. These signs are at the high-water mark to show how deep it was.��

I looked at the marker above us. It was impossible to imagine the jade-green Arno flooding the streets. “That’s crazy,�� I said.

��It was a disaster,�� Elora said and began walking again. I followed her as I had all day, listening. “People died. Tons of art was destroyed and there are crazy stories about art being rescued too—a museum director who swam with an original manuscript in his teeth to save it, international students they called mud angels.��

At another point in the book, a storm hits the convent in the middle of the night, wreaking havoc. The main character recalls how once one of her kids had looked up in disgust during a thunderstorm and said, “What is God doing up there?��

That was the question I was asking Sunday, both at the launch and in thinking about my person.

I was reminded of the moment when my main character sees a �ʾ�è�ٲ�, a statue of Mary holding the lifeless body of Jesus. What she says is what I need to hear: “It wasn’t her fault, this mother, and she hadn’t been able to stop it when the Flood hit. What she could do was pick up his lifeless body and hold him. She could grieve.�� It made me think of what psychologists call emotional flooding, when you feel like you’re up to your neck with emotions and feelings. That was how I felt at the launch. All the feels, as the kids say.

The next morning I was mad at myself for not being able to simply have a grand time at the book launch, for not being The Author, for just being me with a book out in the world. But maybe Sunday’s weather was a kind of pathetic fallacy. Maybe it was fairly appropriate for a book where the main character suddenly faces her own sorrows and joys.

And there were joys too. People celebrated my book and me well. I loved being surrounded by friends, family and strangers. My husband and my kids pulled together to make the event a wonderful success. I received gifts of olive oil and flowers and a book bag and an olivewood pen. People brought friends. My friend Erin interviewed me beautifully. The location was amazing. I brought flowers from my garden and my little olive tree. I had stickers made for the occasion.

Maybe I need to put one of those stickers on myself. The stickers say: good enough mother. The term comes from a pediatrician who determined that children did not need perfect parents �� that good enough parenting was good enough. Maybe that’s what saudade and sehnsucht, remind us of �� that the rain will fall, the floods will come, we won’t be the bride in some ideal glory, we will have our loved ones in the backs of our minds and hearts even as we laugh and sign books, but life is both really good and still sad, that that is good enough, that that is good.

When I was in high school, I lived in Mississauga, a train or a bus and a subway away from downtown Toronto. Mississauga was safe and suburban. Toronto was exciting. As I began to gain more freedom from my protective parents, I found myself prowling the St. Lawrence Market area of Toronto. I ate alone at The Old Spaghetti Factory. I wandered the market and a store called Frida’s that smelled of patchouli and had white cotton nightgowns and weavings from India. I bought a bell pull made of fabric chickens. And I took myself off to the movies alone too �� to see the movie A Room With A View. This movie is the story of the awakening of a sheltered proper girl with masses of dark brown hair and a waspish waist, who felt peevish after playing Beethoven. The girl’s name was Lucy Honeychurch but she might as well have been me in so many ways, unchaperoned at last in the big city, feeling my newfound freedom. Lucy begins as a sheltered young girl visiting Florence with her peevish maiden cousin. And then Italy and George Emerson work their magic on her, and she loosens up, and she sees a man die in front of her, and she is seized in a meadow on a hillside and is kissed. I can’t express how much I loved this movie. It was funny �� the subtitles! �� and charming and the awakening happened in the fields around Florence.

I went to the prom that year, not in a satin or silk dress, but in a longish white cotton skirt with layers of seams on it, folds sewn down, and a white cotton blouse, with lace edging. My only concession to it being the mid-80s was that I wore the outfit with Madonna-like white lace tights on my legs and white shoes. But I felt like I was Lucy Honeychurch, or that I was approximating her.

In English class that year we had to do independent studies, and I chose to do the works of E.M. Forster, the author who first wrote Lucy Honeychurch into being. His motto, repeated in his books, tattooed itself into my life: only connect.

It was Forster who introduced me to Florence, to humour, to male nudity in the sacred lake, to Art and Life and Beauty in their capitalized glory. He taught me to be kind and real but also to shun conventionality when it wanted to hold me back, to listen deeply to myself.

In the editor’s introduction to A Room with a View, Oliver Stallybrass writes that of E.M. Forster’s six novels, ��A Room with a View has, if not the longest gestation period (a distinction claimed by A Passage to India), at least the most complicated pre-natal history.�� I’m tickled at the metaphor and also at the parallels to the long gestation of my own book. Forster began making notes in the winter of 1901-2 and published the novel in 1908. (At least mine is not like the novel written by one of Forster’s characters whose life work “was carried away by a landslip�� leading her “tempted into cigarettes.��)

Fast-forward twenty years�� (to be continued)

The day after our final child—our oldest son—moved out last November, we went on a short road trip to IKEA and a cemetery. I hoped to replace an accidentally broken glass canister but then I spotted a green floral William-Morris-like coverlet and I remembered something I’d read that flipped the idea of the empty nest, suggesting when the kids did move out, it was an opportunity for refeathering the nest. So the bedspread came to the checkout with us.

I wanted to visit the cemetery because one of my ancestors was buried there. My mother had long said that when I reached A Certain Age, I too would develop an interest in genealogy. It turned out she was both right and wrong. In me—a novelist—the interest has turned quite specific and it has turned to this ancestor who died prematurely exactly a hundred years ago, and his father whose profound grief shaped generations of my family. I read Carl Jung who said his work was to do the work left undone by his ancestors. That is how it feels as I write a novel based on their lives.

In the book I’m writing, I play with the facts but not with the truth. But the day after our own oldest son moved out, I wanted to visit this cemetery.

Three days post-partum with that son, as my milk came in, I cried and said a line I would later bequeath to a character in another : someday he’s going to grow up and leave us. At the very start, that grief, that homesickness, was baked in. It took more than a quarter-century for the day to come—an unseasonably warm November day with thin sunlight and strong winds—but it had come.,

Those strong winds found us on the top of a hilly cemetery, with a harbor visible on one side of us and a bay on the other. I knew the bay well: when I was a child, my family was evacuated to this city after a dangerous train derailment in our own city, the largest peacetime evacuation in North America before Hurricane Katrina. The anxiety of this evacuation was compounded by the fact that my mother was fully pregnant with my brother, and that a few years before, my healthy sister had been stillborn after complications during delivery. We walked that bay the November we were evacuated, while my mother made regular visits to the hospital to check in. My brother would be safely delivered a day or two after we returned home.

My mother had once visited this grave with her father. She recalled a gravestone of a small lamb and lettering worn down over the years. The Internet told us the section of the cemetery in which he was buried. And so under the strong winds and thin sunlight, my husband and I searched every lamb, looking for the one that had gone astray. We looked again, including parting branches of a bush that had grown around one such grave. I realized I wasn’t leaving until we found it. My husband fortunately broadened his search to grave markers that weren’t lambs, calling me over when he found the grave: a marble cube with an open book on top, and the words beloved son inscribed below his name. My husband slipped away, then, to the car, allowing me time alone. I took pictures and took in the facts of the grave, the location and the views, but it wasn’t like visiting the grave of someone I’ve loved, and my book and my work isn’t about the son but the father. In my book, the son is a kind of cipher. As I’ve written it the story of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of Isaac keeps coming to mind. Because how does a parent let his beloved son go into the will of God? Because it is not a lamb provided instead when Abraham’s hand is stayed, but a ram.

So my son going off into the world, having forgotten to be vaccinated against diseases endemic to the place he would be visiting, not polio but other diseases that shouldn’t but could end up with a grave marker and a grieving parent.

There’s an old proverb that a parent gives a child two things: roots and wings. I read that before I had kids and I believed it to be deeply true. I still believe it. I believe we have given that to our own kids. I also believe it’s what I was instinctively reaching for myself that windy day: the pilgrimage to the cemetery and the visit to IKEA. The walking and bending and feeling the wind provided a knowing in my body of where my people came from and were rooted, and the trip to IKEA, the refeathering the nest, was not as frivolous as it might seem. It was the wings. It was the ram in the thicket. It was the looking forward with hope to a future beyond one where children lived at home, to one where flowers climbed across our bed at night and perhaps even into our dreams of new life blossoming in November.

Many of us have heard the term sea change in business conversations—words used to describe a real transformation—intriguingly the expression doesn’t originally come from sailors or the sea, but from Shakespeare, who wrote in The Tempest, “Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made:/Those are pearls that were his eyes:/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange.��

Last week I visited the ocean on a whirlwind trip to Boston. There was no time for a long visit but I wasn’t going to get that close without putting my feet in the water. The problem was that the beach we visited was littered with broken glass.

I don’t mean the sea glass my family used to collect at the cottage we visited when the kids were small. It sat alongside a beach that was tidal, salt water filled and emptied the beach twice a day. Someone told us that summer residents there would save their wine bottles all summer and dash them against the rocks as they left in the early autumn, knowing that by the time they returned the sharp edges of glass would have been softened. We collected handfuls of that glass that had experienced a sea change (unlike the glass on the Boston shoreline).

A sea-change “into something rich and strange�� certainly describes the real transformation that happens at the start of parenthood. There, a person’s identity is cracked open and at first the edges are often jagged as the nights of unbroken sleep, the bodily changes, and the incessant demands of small people.

When my kids were very young, I grabbed at moments of solitude. I cultivated opportunities to draw inward, to be centred and quiet and still ��because, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh says in her book Gift from the Sea, my life was one of zerrissenheit, a German word which can be translated as torn-to-pieces-hood.

Lindbergh writes: “With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls–woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is �� how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.”��

I lived a lot of years in torn-to-pieceshood and while I loved much of it, I also worked hard to have regular respite from that world.

But there was another sea change ahead. In a later edition of Gift from the Sea, Lindbergh describes it:

“The oyster bed as the tide of life ebbed…was left high and dry. A most uncomfortable stage followed, not sufficiently anticipated and barely hinted at in my book. In bleak honesty, it can only be called ‘the abandoned shell.�� Plenty of solitude and a sudden panic with how to fill it characterized this period. With me, it was not simply a question of filling up the space or the time. I had many activities and even a well-established vocation to pursue. But when a mother is left, the lone hub of a wheel, with no other lives revolving about her,�� she faces a total re-orientation. It takes time to re-find the center of gravity.��

This is precisely the challenge facing many parents this month of the year. It comes into my play in my book, . This stage can feel like the Boston beach with its shards of broken glass, its unexpected stabs of pain.

As my kids began to leave home, I read a book about the empty nest that broke down the percentage of parental reactions. It said something like half of all parents have mixed feelings that mostly get absorbed into daily life pretty quickly, a new normal. Another 35% are elated: they’ve put plans on hold or their kids have cramped their style and now they are ready to get going. And then there were the small percentage that experienced the leaving as loss, as grief.

That was me when my kids started to leave. I was in good company, though.

Lindbergh counsels: “One has to come to terms with oneself not only in a new stage of life but in a new role. Life without children, living for oneself �� the words at first ring with a hollow sound.�� She writes, “We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity…��

Again, this played into my writing of Renaissance. My main character, Liz, is a new empty nester and she didn’t have the same experience of grief that I did, but she still had to figure out what next as we all do after any sea change. That’s why it isn’t just a midlife book but a book for anyone whose life feels jagged and who needs the transformation of a sea change, who needs a re-naissance.

In my next post I’ll tell the story of the very day I became a full-fledged empty nester but for now let me let Lindbergh’s words wash over you like a wave of salt water: “Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”��

Most of the meals Liz eats at the convent in Italy are ones I made up, but her first meal was our first meal, and her experience was mine:

����I wrongly assumed that the third course—the pasta—was the main course but it was followed by platters of pan-fried whitefish and bowls of green beans and potatoes, and then a cheese course and fruit. It was served by a nun with a face like a wizened apple who urged us to “Mangia! Mangia!�� I had been hungry beforehand, but by the time I finished the fish and potatoes, I couldn’t find space for a single bite of cheese, though I looked longingly at the great wedges. I didn’t know what the nun was saying, but I could tell from her tone and face that she was chastising my lack of intestinal fortitude.��

I still feel disappointed that I didn’t have the capacity to eat chunks of fresh Parmigiano Reggiano because never again in our stay were we offered the cheese again. (We had to go to Parma to get samples!)

But one of the dishes I most enjoyed served by our nuns was never served by Liz’s nuns, and yet it’s one I want to share with you now. Because after we came back, I found a recipe that approximated it. Sometimes I wonder whether, if I were to return to the convent (impossible since it got sold to become a luxury hotel), I might prefer my own version of this cake that we always call Nun Cake.

Nun Cake is similar to a pound cake �� so called, apparently, because it contains a pound each of sugar, eggs, flour and butter �� but it’s simpler and has less butter and is hard to mess up.

(I guess if it’s a nun cake, I should say it gives you grace.)

In any event, here’s the recipe:

Mix together by hand (but don’t overmix): ½ c. softened butter, ¾ c sugar (or slightly more), 2 eggs, 1 tsp vanilla,1 tsp salt, ½ c. buttermilk (milk + 1 tsp lemon juice), 1-1/2 c flour, and 2 tsp baking powder.

Put in a buttered cake pan of any size and shape and bake at 375 degrees F for about 40 minutes or until golden. I often make mine in a round 9�� pan but you could make this in a loaf pan too.

It’s a really simple cake, but it is delicious and is lovely served with fresh, unsweetened fruit.

Mangia! Mangia!

The year I turned thirty, I had a delicious plan for my birthday. I was part of a playwriting workshop and the best plays from the bunch would be performed on my actual birthday. I imagined champagne and desserts after the performance.

But my play was awful. It was loosely based on real life �� I imagined what would happen if a group of mothers from the listserv I was on suddenly descended on my town for Oktoberfest. (Remember this was the early days of online life, almost 25 years ago.) Like me, my main character was ambivalent about the prospect, and ambivalence is never a helpful trait in a main character. Main characters have to want something. I wanted and didn’t want–and so did my main character.

My thirtieth birthday was a disappointment, sans champagne, as I watched other, far better plays succeed. That workshop helped me tremendously, though, because it taught me how to write dialogue. That was its gift to me.

But there was also something curious hidden in my terrible play: one amazing supporting character named Caramel. Because she wasn’t the focus of my attention, she was able to live and breathe, be sassy and tattooed. People in the workshop—looking for something nice to say about a play that just was dead in the water �� kept commenting that Caramel was where it was at.

Fast forward a dozen or so years to the writing of my novel Ithaca. There’s a secondary character who is described as short “with a toddler in a sling on her chest, a stud in her nose, and short black hair.�� She’s a hippie apple farmer and activist in Ithaca who says, “My mother named me after a mountain in the Bible. Although when you grow up on an apple farm and your name is Carmel, you get Candy Apple quite a bit.�� Carmel becomes a kind of surrogate daughter for the main character, Daisy.

And now here we are in 2023, and my novel, Renaissance introduces the reader to �� a young woman sitting on top of the counter in the kitchenette. She was all arms and legs in a tank top and jeans, a tattooed vine twining down one arm, blonde hair pulled up on top of her head. She jumped up and shook my hand. Her hand was rough. ‘I’m Honey,�� she said.�� Later we see that Honey had recently spent a year with a traveling carnival��not a circus, she explained—after picking almonds in California

When I wrote Ithaca, people assumed it was about me, which it wasn’t. Renaissance’s main character, Liz, is much closer to me. At the same time, just as people say every character in a dream represents some part of the dreamer, I suspect every character in a book represents some part of the author.

But what’s with these sweetly named young women �� Caramel, Carmel, Honey—all of whom live outside the norm, most of them with tattoos? I also find myself writing older grandmotherly women and unprepossessing men, so psychoanalyze me as you will, but today I’m thinking about la dolce vita �� the sweet life �� and the sweet (and salty) characters in my fiction.

I think you’ll like Honey and the lovely relationship that develops between her and the main character, Liz, as they prune trees together, by day and then watch Italian game shows and read aloud together in the evenings. She’s a free spirit like the other sweetly named secondary characters, but she also experiences a degree of healing along the way.

And that is sweet indeed.

So I have a kid who gets recognized in airports and coffee shops. I think he’s pretty cool myself but let me tell you a bit about why this happens and what it has to do with me and you.

Back when he was in high school, my kid launched a YouTube channel and had a few hundred followers. He was also a runner with good grades and this got him into Harvard where he ran track, and here’s where the story gets interesting. In his freshman year, he made a video entitled �� It turned out that lots of people his age also wanted to be Harvard students or to know what it was like, so a lot of people watched it, made comments on it and liked (or disliked) it. Which got the algorithms paying attention to it.

Now I’m not a computer science student of any sort, but as we all know from using the Internet for any length of time, sites are designed to market to us, whether to sell us what we want or to make us want what they’re selling. Sometimes it seems rather Big Brother-ish but other times it’s a service that points us to something we’re genuinely interested in.

In this case, it meant that when someone of a similar demographic was on YouTube, this video was suggested to them. And the more people watched it, the more often the video was suggested and watched. It meant my kid’s subscribers skyrocketed on the basis of that video alone, which as of today has 13M views. Few people my age recognize him in public places but lots of college-aged people do. Many of them tell him that his subsequent videos on study habits and reading have changed their lives for the better.

This isn’t meant to just be a mom brag. (Although I am proud for sure.)

The reason I tell this story is that the same thing happens when it comes to books. Go on Amazon and click on a book and you’ll see “Customers who viewed this item also viewed…�� On GoodReads, you’ll see “Readers also enjoyed…�� on each book’s page. And those who do understand algorithms better than me explain that the more a book is reviewed and rated on either site, the far more likely it is that it will be recommended to others on the site. This is especially true on and before the day of publication (which in my case is September 12, 2023).

So here I want to ask for a favour (or a favor, if you’re from the US): if you’d be willing to pre-order Renaissance either from or from your local bookstore or from my , let me know and I will send you a FREE digital copy so that you can read and review it in advance on and GoodReads. You’re also most welcome to tell family and friends and readers of your social media. Every bit helps get the book into people’s hands.

I’m hoping this is a win-win-win. You get some summer reading, I get some readers, and those readers get to discover a book that suits them. Think back to what I said about the viewers of my kid’s videos, how his content made a life-changing difference for some people. That’s my hope for readers of this book too. I love the quote from William Nicholson: “We read to know we’re not alone.�� My hope is that this book will resonate with readers so they can know in their own lives that they aren’t alone. You reading and reviewing or rating this book will also do that for me. So thanks in advance. (PS If you don’t like reading digitally and want to wait for the paper copy of the book, pre-orders still help and reviews after the publication date are also most welcome.)

Grazie!