Dear friends,
It's now August, which means that my book is coming out NEXT MONTH. In fact, at this very moment it's at the printer, so I really and truly can't make any more changes. Somehow the six years I spent with Shirley went by very fast.
My wonderful publicists at Liveright/W.W. Norton have planned a busy book tour, starting with preview events at The Mount -- Edith Wharton's former home -- in Lenox, MA, on August 22 and 23. I'm told early copies of the book will be available then! The first date is sold out, but tickets are still on sale for August 23.
The New York launch will be September 27 -- publication day! -- at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. I'm thrilled that Rivka Galchen, a wonderful novelist and a Shirley Jackson fan, will be interviewing me.
Here's the schedule of events so far:
September 27: NYC Launch
In conversation with Rivka Galchen
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton St., Brooklyn
7:30 p.m.
October 10: Boston
Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge
time TBA
October 13: New York
In conversation with Dorothy Wickenden of The New Yorker
Cullman Center, New York Public Library
Fifth Ave. at 42nd St., New York
time TBA
October 15: Washington, D.C.
5015 Connecticut Ave. NW
6 p.m.
October 21: San Francisco
"A night of readings and conversation"
1231 Ninth Ave., San Francisco
time TBA
October 23: Los Angeles
Vroman's
695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
time TBA
October 28: Northampton, MA
Smith College
location and time TBA
October 29: Manchester, VT
Northshire Books
4869 Main St., Manchester Center
time TBA
October 30: North Bennington, VT
Pangaea (hosted by The Bennington Bookshop)
1 Prospect St., North Bennington
time TBA
I'm especially excited for Halloween weekend in New England! A ghoulish bit of trivia: Pangaea, in North Bennington, is where Stanley Hyman died of a heart attack over dinner. That was in 1970, when the restaurant was known as The Rainbarrel.
Speaking of food, a number of you were curious about Jackson's recipes. Many of her friends and family members spoke about her cooking -- including one friend who remembered her using food coloring to dye mashed potatoes bright green -- but unfortunately she doesn't seem to have recorded her recipes, many of which she made up on the fly. One she did write down is a recipe for potato kugel (this is often translated as pudding, but it's more like a heavier sort of souffle) that she learned from her mother-in-law, who taught her to cook the Jewish comfort food Stanley had grown up with. It became something of a signature dish for Shirley, so much so that she once wrote a story around it. In the story -- still unpublished, but in her archive -- she tries to explain her method to the grocer's wife. First, everything must be grated by hand: "it's not a real potato pudding unless you grate a couple of knuckles into it," as every Jewish grandmother knows. How many potatoes? the grocer's wife asks.
"i always use as many potatoes as i think i can stand to grate, and then add one more ... that would be maybe eight.... i always grate two potatoes and then i make myself grate one onion and then i stop and dry my eyes and light a cigarette and then i count to fifty and then grate one more potato and then another onion and then i light a cigarette and then i count to fifty and then ... i take the bowl -- my yellow mixing bowl, that is -- and i have it about half filled with grated potato and onion and i cover the top of the potato and onion with flour.... i take a glass dish and put a lump of butter in it.... when the butter melts -- by the way, it ought to be chicken fat, but i like butter -- i take the dish out and roll it around so the sides get coated with melted butter and then i pour the rest of the melted butter in with the onions and potatoes and flour and then i take three eggs, and i know it's three because i crack the first two against each other and the third on the side of the bowl, and just drop them in without beating and ... let's see. salt. it always takes more than you think you need. you always think you're putting in more than you did last time but it always needs salt anyway. so then you put it in the oven and leave it there ... till dinner's ready."
Got that? If you show up at one of my readings with a dish of Shirley Jackson's potato kugel for me, I'll buy you a glass of bourbon afterward.
Yours (now craving potato kugel),
Ruth
p.s. By the way, if you're wondering why all that was in lower case, it's because Jackson typed all her first drafts only in lower case. In the book, I chose to preserve this style preference.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
-- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House