Conversations with My Father: The Great French Fry Boycott of 2014 Edition

MY FATHER: I’m glad you called. I was going to call you to tell you about my boycott.
ME: Oh dear. What are you boycotting?
MY FATHER: Your favorite restaurant.
ME: What in the world do you think is my favorite restaurant?
MY FATHER: It’s your favorite restaurant. You tell me.
ME: A restaurant that you would visit? Gosh. I don’t know. Is it that Thai restaurant we go to when I visit Richmond?
MY FATHER: No! I like that one.
ME: That barbecue sandwich place we tried that serves Cheerwine?
MY FATHER [with scorn]: No.
ME: My favorite restaurant? I admit, you’ve stumped me. All the restaurants I like are up here.
MY FATHER: Red Robin.
ME: Red Robin?! Red Robin is not my favorite restaurant.
MY FATHER: Don’t you want to know why I’m boycotting it?
ME: I could write down the names of a hundred restaurants and I wouldn’t even place Red Robin remotely close to. . . .
MY FATHER: I said, don’t you want to know why I’m boycotting it?
ME: I mean, we went there once, but I can’t imagine I said anything that could possibly have given you any indication that it was one of my favorite. . . .
MY FATHER: ANYWAY.
ME [sighing]: Go on.
MY FATHER: I went and had dinner there the other day. And do you know how they served the fries?
ME: Vertically.
MY FATHER: They had them in a fancy ring that looked like a fancy napkin holder. . . .
ME: Yes, vertically. Craig and I had lunch there a few months ago at a mall and that’s how they served them.
MY FATHER [outraged]: . . . and they were stood up on their ENDS.
ME: Vertically.
MY FATHER: Vertically! Did you say that?
ME: Several times. So you’re boycotting Red Robin because they served their French fries vertically?
MY FATHER: They used to serve them lying down, like normal fries.
ME: I’m . . . sorry? You know, you are allowed to take off the ring and allow them to lie down flat.
MY FATHER: But then they go in different directions.
ME: In a recent ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court decided unanimously that it was constitutional for Red Robin patrons to align their fries in any direction they want.
MY FATHER: But the real problem. . . .
ME: Oh good, there’s more.
MY FATHER: . . . the real problem is that there aren’t as many as there used to be. The portions are smaller.
ME: But Red Robin is the place where you can have as many servings of fries as you want. Bottomless fries. It’s in all their ads.
MY FATHER: Yes, but.
ME: Yes, but, as in yes, but all you have to do is ask the wait person for more?
MY FATHER: No. Yes, but as in yes, but then I have to hurry and eat them all before I can ask for more, and then I have to wait for them.
ME: Why is that a problem? You don’t have to wait. Grab the waiter when you’re down to the last two or three and they’ll have them out to you by the time you’re done. It’s not a big deal.
MY FATHER: It is a big deal! If you ask for more before you’re finished, the waiter thinks you’re trying to be greedy and take the second portion home.
ME: But . . . but they offer you bottomless fries.
MY FATHER: From an economic standpoint it would be ruinous if everyone ordered extra fries just so they could take the second portion home.
ME: If it were that ruinous, they wouldn’t offer their patrons an extra fifteen cents’ worth of fries.
MY FATHER [loftily]: You know nothing of economics.
ME: So if theoretically the waiter brought you more fries, would you immediately ask him to box them up so you could take them home?
MY FATHER [offended]: No! I’d eat what I wanted.
ME: Okay then!
MY FATHER: And then take the rest home.
ME: I . . . I . . . I honestly don’t know what to say. Why do you care what the waiter thinks, anyway?
MY FATHER: The portions used to be bigger.
ME: Okay. When the portions were bigger, did you ever order more fries?
MY FATHER [even more offended]: I don’t need to eat that many fries!
ME: So you should be happy the portions are smaller! Good god, man!
MY FATHER [with affronted dignity]: This is a very serious boycott and you are deliberately belittling my problem.
ME: You are correct.
MY FATHER: I’m correct? That this is a very serious boycott?
ME: No. That I’m deliberately belittling your problem.

The Fourth Great Book Purge

I must take a moment and murmur a few words about The Fourth Great Book Purge.

The First Great Book Purge took place sometime around the turn of the millennium, when I winnowed by half thousands of volumes from my home library. Its less ruthless sequel took place in 2010, when we learned that we were moving away from Michigan and our real estate agent firmly suggested that I pack up my books and hide them if I expected anyone even to consider buying our house. Apparently the whole ‘learned former academic gone wild’ decor thing doesn’t play well in the Midwest.

The Third Great Book Purge took place two years ago, when all my books were still in storage and didn’t seem ever to be coming out, and I decided to get rid of all the volumes I’d already replaced with electronic editions. Writing about it afforded all my acquaintances the opportunity to assert I was a heathen and that nothing could replace the smell and feel of a real live book with real live pages made from real dead trees. I also had to withstand all manner of haughty statements about how electronic versions of books made literature as disposable and trivial as Wikipedia articles flickering upon the electron tube—which makes about as much sense as saying books are disposable and trivial because, like The National Enquirer or TV Guide, they’re printed on paper, but whatever. All I know is that I have over fifteen hundred books on my iPad and bitches, it doesn’t weigh any more than it did when I bought the damned thing.

I embarked on The Fourth Great Book Purge this month, when finally I got to unpack everything we’d hidden away in boxes four years ago. Of all the purges, it was probably the most ruthless. In the original book purge I was throwing away a lot of junk that I’d accumulated during grad school. It didn’t mean anything to toss a little-browsed volume on images of courtly love in The Canterbury Tales, simply because I hadn’t cracked the spine since ye olde medieval literature classes and I wasn’t likely to need it ever again. I love Robert Browning, but even a dozen years ago I could find his works online if I really had a hankering for them. What I got rid of back then was dross. The stuff that I still had mostly meant something. Getting rid of it was tougher.

But you know, even a lot of that could go. I didn’t mind letting go of the lesser novels of Fay Weldon, much as I love her style of writing; the really good stuff I already had electronically, and what was left didn’t reach her giddiest heights. I’ve always had a sentimental soft spot for the novels of E. H. Young, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell you the plots of any one of her novels, it’s been so long. Practicality won over sentiment, in that case. Ditto for the sunny country novels of Miss Read. When it’s possible to sum up the frantic buzz of activity in one of Miss Read’s slender two-hundred page novels as Gentle spinster schoolteacher bikes to her schoolhouse in a country village, helps a young lad with his sweater, then has tea and cakes with the vicar before going to bed, perhaps it’s just best to concede that the only reason I kept them around is that they were a favorite of my mother’s. And my mother isn’t around to read them.

I used to have a bookcase full of cookery books. I now have a single shelf. I used to have a very large bookcase dedicated solely to paperback novels; I had to lay them in four horizontal stacks across, three stacks deep on all five shelves to accommodate them all. That’d be sixty stacks of paperbacks alone, not counting the ones I crammed along the bookcase’s edges. I now have five little stacks of paperbacks that occupy two-thirds of a single shelf. In fact, every book I own fits in two bookcases, and the shelves are still so sparse that there’s plenty of room for artwork, picture frames, glass work, and baskets.

A casual visitor might inspect my shelves and walk away thinking that the only authors in whom I’m interested are Patrick Dennis and E. F. Benson, with minor flirtations with Ruth McKenney and John Dennis Fitzgerald. Maybe it’s true. The first three of those four are a big influence on my writing style, after all.

I have the books I want, though. If I accumulate a few more, I have space for them—which are words I haven’t always been able to say. If I shed some as they gradually come into public domain or as electronic versions are made . . . well, my iPad still won’t get any heavier.

(I should note that at no point did I get rid of any copies of my books. I probably have more author’s copies of my own novels than I have books by other people, at this point. They occupy their own shelves in the bedroom. I have a paranoid suspicion that they multiply like rabbits when I’m sleeping. I’m probably right, too—but let them breed, baby.)

Home

We were going to move. We were all ready to move. We’d actually started moving!

Then we decided not to move.

I know, it’s all very confusing. Let’s go back a little bit.

Ever since we sold our house in Detroit and relocated to Connecticut three years ago, we’ve been in transitional digs. We had the movers pack up everything from our two-story colonial and transport it to our temporary quarters, a one-bedroom flat on the first floor of an old church rectory. For the first week of our residence here, we slept on an inflatable mattress and lived out of suitcases while we waited for our furniture to arrive.

We expected only to have to stay in the flat for four or five months, tops. The church that had hired my husband had made promises about housing; it was the deciding reason I’d consented to let him take the position. We didn’t know what they were going to do, exactly, but we knew it was going to be something. So when the movers arrived the next week with our belongings, we decided to do as little unpacking as possible. We filled up the basement of the old rectory with all our boxes—books, CDs, DVDs, decorations, everything the movers had stuffed into cardboard containers, everything I’d packed, everything that had sat in the garage for a year while the house sold. Anything that couldn’t go into the basement, we put into a hired storage unit.

We let the movers move as much into the flat as we could justify stuffing in there. Mostly we let it sit wherever they decided to dump it. A chest ended up next to the front door. One of our sofas—both were beat up and due to be replaced, but we decided not to do anything until we ended up in our permanent quarters—sat by it self in the dining room. From the basement we dug out a couple of lamps so we could see by night, and some dishes and a few pots and pans to cook with, but the happy assumption we made was that within a few months, we’d be somewhere else. Why unpack everything just to pack it up again?

The thing of it was that we lived this way for all three of our years here. We never made any attempt to fill up shelves or organize anything. We rolled our dice that first week and just let them lay. Every month we learned something new about the housing situation. A committee had been formed. The committee was meeting. The committee had decided to do a study. The study resulted in another committee, which was going to renovate one of the church’s properties for us. The committee had to wait for the tenants to move out, then for the bids to come in, and then for the renovations to begin. We grew older and older, the boxes in the basement grew moldier and more rotten, and my sense of restlessness and of being a vagrant grew uneasily greater.

I’ve written about the house finally nearing completion, in recent months. In anticipation of moving, we ordered new furniture to replace the beat-up stuff, and had it delivered to the house. We moved everything from the storage unit into the new place. We started moving boxes from the basement over, too.

Despite our anticipation, we still had one big question unanswered: how much was the new place going to cost us, every month?

It was already a little unsettling that in this area of the country we were paying more to rent a one-bedroom apartment than we had been paying on our mortgage for a three-bedroom home back in Detroit. Admittedly, that was Detroit. This is tony, much sought-after Greenwich. But we wouldn’t be able to figure out exactly how much more we’d have to be allotting for rent in the house until the renovations had been completed, the house assessed, and its official rental value set. Even at the time we started moving, the final number was a total mystery.

A couple of weeks ago we finally found out what the assessed rental had been. Even at the hefty, more-than-half-off discount the church had decided to give us, it was still several hundred dollars more than what we were paying for the apartment. We knew all along we’d have to pay taxes on the difference between the rent we were going to pay and the rent anyone else would have paid; it’s calculated by the government as a taxable benefit. Not until we had those numbers, though, were we able to figure out exactly how much tax that benefit would cost us.

When we toted up the rent, the amount of extra tax we’d have to be paying, and the utilities we don’t pay now but would have to assume there—water, gas, and heat—we came to the sober realization that while we certainly could move to the house and afford it, kind of, we wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Like, ever. And isn’t the big benefit of living in the metropolitan New York City area supposed to be the abundance of things to do?

After a weekend of soul-searching, we decided not to move at all. We’d stay in our flat, at the same percentage discount we’d be getting off the house. Neither one of us wanted to trade experiences for space.

I tell you. I’ve never been so happy about a decision in my life. I didn’t really care one way or the other what we chose. I was just ecstatic that after four long years of waiting, we finally knew where it was going to be.

I guess I’m a nester. I like a comfortable home filled with objects that mean something to me. Home is where I work; it’s where I relax, where I bring my friends when I can. Growing up, I was never able to think or do my homework or play unless my room was in order. I haven’t changed much as an adult. I’ve been the last four years in disarray and I’ve felt every moment of it, personally and professionally. We might have been living here, but I never felt at home.

That’s changed, though. We’ve spent the last two weeks moving into the apartment in a way we should’ve, long back. Instead of storing pots and pans on a metal rack that used to house chemicals and panes of glass from my old studio, that the movers dumped into the kitchen the first day, they’re in new spots in actual reorganized cabinets. The rack has been banished to the basement again and one of our old bookshelves sits in its place, modestly housing the small kitchen appliances. Our old sofas are gone for good, replaced by the new furniture that sat for a month in the house where we might have moved. The dining room now houses bookshelves for the small library I’ve left myself, our piano, a comfortable armchair, a small bar, and the dining room table. It feels more like a space for actual living than it did when it was That Room Where We Kicked Off Our Shoes And Left Our Coats.

Everything’s put away—music, books, DVDs, tablecloths, bed linens, crystal, the good China. Everything has a place, or soon will. The basement is nearly clear. I’ve hung framed photographs and our ceramic art tiles in every room. My glass work has a showcase in the built-in cabinets in our dining room. Even my old board games from my youth found a space in the coat closet—just in case I ever make any acquaintances who want to come over and play Probe or Smess or King Oil or Clue. (But I get to be Miss Scarlet.) I’m very proud of the work we’ve managed to do over the last couple of weeks. The flat has gone from feeling like someplace we slept nights while we sojourned somewhere new—a hotel room in Las Vegas for a week—and more like a real, actual place that I’m proud to call home.

The weeks were not without their casualties, however. The basement is not completely water-tight. While it did weather both Hurricanes Irene and Katrina with only mild puddling, it’s still a hundred-and-fifty-year-old basement that’s barely a step above a glorified fruit cellar. Some stuff did suffer. I lost a large box of shoes to rot and mildew—not really a big loss, since I actually had thought I’d given them away to Goodwill already. One box of Dover clip art books, and collections of Bloom County happened to fall from a stack into a puddle at some point, and the whole thing was so irretrievably ruined that I had to wrap it in plastic so I could pick it up safely to chuck it in the dumpster. I lost a few other paperbacks that had been crushed beyond recognition. I’m afraid to touch my old French horn case, which looks as if it’s been overgrown by a mutant fungus from The X-Files.

Small things, though. They’re sacrifices I gladly make in exchange for feeling like I’m home again.

In the Kitchen with My Mother

My mom had already gotten a fairly good start at being an only child by the time my grandmother decided, as one of her many vague and apologetic afterthoughts, to produce three more boys. Between my mom and the oldest of her siblings lay almost a decade of difference in age; her youngest brother was only in second grade by the time she’d married and given birth to me.

The Second World War forced my grandfather into service; my grandmother picked up a welding gun and worked as a Rosie the Riveter until he returned. In peacetime he kept the family afloat—barely—as a carpenter. He built the family’s home himself in the hills of what was then backwoods Georgia. My grandmother took a number of low-paying jobs to keep the ever-increasing number of mouths fed. Still, it wasn’t until my mom was in high school that the family graduated from an outhouse to indoor plumbing.

My mother had learned how to deal with colicky infants and change diapers before she’d mastered her times-tables; she’d been pressed into baking bread from scratch several times a week before she’d donned her first training bra. Every night, week in and week out of her youth, she prepared family dinners from the rawest and most local of ingredients while simultaneously she raised three children who weren’t her own all before her first adolescent date. She was parent to those boys, too—later in life all three of them professed that she had been more mother to them than the woman who gave them birth. When she managed to win a scholarship and become the first person in any branch of her family tree to go off to college, my youngest uncle for months was inconsolable that he’d lost his mommy.

It’s no wonder that when she had a household of her own, my mom wanted almost nothing to do with cooking. She’d already spent a lifetime in front of her mother’s oven. The automated kitchens of the nineteen-sixties would have seemed like space-age technology compared to the primitive conditions in which she’d toiled. However, the only thing she enjoyed about her electric oven with a timer, her dishwasher, and her vast harvest gold refrigerator/freezer was making herself a big pot of coffee, lacing it with cream, and ignoring them all as she curled up at the kitchen table with a Ngaio Marsh novel or a crossword and a cigarette.

In one of her rare moods, I might come home from school to find the house fragrant and yeasty from loaves of fluffy wheat bread she’d baked from scratch on whim. Once or twice I’d find her humming over a bubbling cog au vin she’d improvised. If she were in a good enough mood to roll out a batch of her favorite angel biscuits, they’d be so light they’d practically float to the ceiling. She was a fine cook, when she cared to be. For her, though, any romance the kitchen might have had was long dead.

Most of the time she’d regard the stove like a death row prisoner might the electric chair. From time to time my father would persuade her to make an ancient family recipe known as Briceland Meat Pie, which he and my sister adored and my mother and I loathed. The dish consisted basically of unseasoned chunks of fatty beef and overcooked potato sealed in homemade pie crust, baked until dry as a desert, then served scooped up in a bowl and drowned in a greasy jus made of the drippings. She’d accomplish each step of the recipe with a set mouth and a face as gray and grim as the end result itself. Every mouthful left the same aftertaste as a long-standing grudge.

She denied any responsibility for breakfasts, reasoning that any child who was old enough to no longer require breast feeding was old enough to open his own package of Pop-Tarts. School lunches she left to my father, who had the minimum agility required to capture some peanut butter and jelly between two slices of Wonder Bread. That left an awful lot of dinners, however. My mom was an early member of NOW and an avid and unabashed feminist and crusader for the Equal Rights Amendment who did not feel that enforced kitchen duties comprised any part of her life goals or career. She was also practical enough to recognize that she was the only member of the household who actually had know-how enough to extract ingredients from the pantry and combine them into something vaguely edible.

Convenience cooking was her only lifebuoy. It took only five minutes to stick three random tins—one of Campbell’s soup, say, one of deviled ham, and one of succotash—under the electric can opener, mix them into a casserole dish, and bake at 350° with a crumbling of canned onion rings on top for texture. That was an entire ninety minutes she didn’t have to spend over the stove. That was half a murder mystery. If forced to provide some god-damned cookies, as my mother would say, for a god-damned church youth group meeting or for school, her preferred approach was to dig around in the breadbox for a only slightly-desiccated package of old Fig Newtons to fling my way, but under the threat of shaming from other parents, she was a fan of the boxed cookie mix that required only a cup of water to reconstitute. When Hamburger Helper came out in the early nineteen-seventies, my mom stocked up on the whole line. Having to brown the beef was too much like real cooking, but she applauded the expediency of merely having to rip open a paper package and pour in water to finish the dish.

I think I made it all the way into my teens before it occurred to me that vegetables don’t naturally arrive in cans. The peas and carrots and corn and lima beans that were the staples of my youth, courtesy of Del Monte, went straight from their aluminum enclosure into a pot, then occupied the soggiest portion of my plate. The only fresh vegetable we ever saw was summer corn on the cob and the occasional chopped heads of bland iceberg lettuce. Even the latter arrived at the table drenched in a candy-sweet French dressing.

It was when I joined the Cub Scouts that my mother found a way to offload even more of her kitchen responsibilities. My mom hated all branches of the scouting organizations; she claimed they were fascist fronts that might as well be sharing office space with the Hitler Youth. My father was slightly inclined to agree with her on most political fronts, but he’d been an Eagle Scout as a lad and still had a secret soft spot for scouting. He lured me into the fold by strategically leaving his old scouting handbooks from the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties lying around where I could read them. The world of those handbooks—which depicted Aryan, unabashedly masculine, clean-cut youths with short hair and pressed uniforms learning Indian chants and exploring the pristine forests of an unindustrialized America—was as foreign to me as Narnia. It was also no less alluring because of that fact.

The day I came home wearing my Tiger Cub uniform and brandishing a copy of my new, updated handbook, which had considerably less talk of Indians and forestry, my mother confiscated it for her afternoon read, fully prepared to scorn the regressive patriarchal values brainwashing the youth of America on every page, I suspect. But when she saw there was an unabashedly masculine Cooking badge to be earned, she set aside all scoffing, looked at me speculatively, and came up with a plan.

At the branch library she found a copy of a book—little checked-out, from what I remember—called Cooking For Boys. The volume was bound in a virile brown and heavily illustrated with photos of hearty little boys wearing manly plaid shirts roasting haunches of meat over roaring bonfires with friendly Indians. It was ancient. I could tell that by the mere fact it dated from the vanished era of my dad’s scouting handbooks, in which one could apparently persuade boys into just about anything by throwing an American native into the mix. I don’t recall any of the recipes between those macho covers actually requiring open flames or freshly-butchred elk, for that matter. Most of them were about as complicated as ‘Cheese on Toast,’ which seemed pretty self-explanatory. But my mother pointed out the colorful cooking badge in the Cub Scout manual, showed me the library book, and announced that I was going to learn to cook! That it would be fun! That my future girlfriends would be so impressed by my culinary skills! Especially if said skills extended beyond the chili made from cans and the peanut butter sandwiches that were my father’s exclusive specialty!

So I learned to make scrambled eggs. At the time I thought transforming raw eggs, a little milk, and some butter into something delicious and edible was something of a minor miracle. It was like real-world alchemy, and I was fascinated. I’d grown up on Pop Tarts and Danish-Go-Rounds. I might not have even had scrambled eggs until that point. I instantly became the first grade’s Scrambled Eggs Champion, permitted—if not encouraged by a pair of parents who wanted to spend Saturday mornings in bed—to make the family’s weekend breakfasts.

From there I swiftly graduated to a Cooking for Boys dinner in the form of individual rustic stews prepared in aluminum foil. I seem to recall they consisted of chunks of beef and potatoes and perhaps carrots mixed with some kind of primitive sauce—ketchup, maybe—in a bundle of foil screwed into a taper at the top. Once they’d thoroughly baked in the oven, I’d carefully transfer them onto a plate and we’d all open them at the table. When the built-up steam had dissipated, we’d dig into the deliciously savory contents.

My mother’s canny plan worked. Not only did I earn my cooking badge within mere weeks, but it wasn’t too long before I’d more or less willingly assumed a share of dinner duties on my own. I could whip up a Hamburger Helper meal with only a minimum of supervision from the executive chef, who was taking a permanent cigarette-and-coffee break at the kitchen table. When eventually I could be trusted at the stove by myself, I followed my mother’s example and made up my own casserole dinners from random boxes and cans in the pantry (Rice-a-roni, say, with ground beef and a can of corn). I could even make my own damned cookies for the god-damned church youth group.

What my mother always found strangest, however, as I took over more and more cooking duties the older I grew, is how little I actually minded it. I never did. I still don’t.

She would have found very curious and repellant the modern nostalgia for homes centered around the kitchen, or for cuisine done the old, hard way without boxes or convenience ingredients. That there exist entire popular cable networks around cooking would have baffled her. If she were still around and knew I hadn’t eaten a canned vegetable or brought home a head of iceberg lettuce since I was in college—that I willingly pluck brussels sprouts from the stalk or snap green beans by hand, despite the time involved—she would’ve shrugged and given me one of those it’s-your-life-I-guess looks, as if I’d declared I wanted to join what she declared an oddball religious cult, like the Unitarian-Universalists.

I would never suggest that growing up on canned vegetables, meals made from boxes, cheese from a can, or frosting from a cardboard container is a fantastic diet. It isn’t. I still make things from boxes, on occasion. I appreciate having a few time-saving recipes in my arsenal. Generally these days, however, I tend to prefer taking the longer and less convenient route to preparing meals.

Yet during those idle moments I find myself clipping recipes from the web, ordering cookbooks even before their publication date, or mentally planning out dinners weeks in advance, it pays to remind myself that what some people dream of, others flee as their worst nightmare.

My Life in Boxes

The last time my library of books sat on actual bookshelves was in July of 2010. That’s when I packed them away. I’ve not seen them since. Within a couple more months that year, I’d filled our old garage with cardboard boxes of DVDs and photos, of decorations and glassware. Anything that might distract or annoy a prospective homeowner who might want to purchase our house in Michigan went into boxes and into the ever-increasing stacks where the cars used to sit.

Over the course of 2010 and 2011, while Craig was living in Connecticut and I was living in Michigan and trying to keep our house on the market, those cardboard boxes in the garage multiplied month by month. I packed everything that wasn’t essential. Extra blankets and linens. Winter clothing, which I promptly had to unpack and replace with spring clothing as the weather got colder. Winter clothing again, when I had to dig out the warm weather stuff after the months became almost a year. I packed kitchen goods and cat toys, board games and wrapping paper, old treasures and things we’d just purchased. My weekly routine was to hit Home Depot, buy a crapload of cheap cardboard boxes, and then fill them with vacuum bags and clocks and candles and towels and Silpats and spoons and paper reams and extension cords and CDs and the gifts people had given us for Christmas and anniversaries that we never used but with which couldn’t bear to part.

If I wasn’t throwing away stuff—and I threw away a dumpster’s worth of crap we were well rid of, and another dumpster’s worth of stuff that I kind of wish I hadn’t—I packed it into a box, taped it up, and put it in the garage. When we’d moved to that house a little over a decade before, I’d started off with great enthusiasm creating boxes with very clear labels so thoroughly packed with information that they resembled the nutritional data on supermarket goods. (CHRISTMAS ANNUAL COOKBOOKS 1992-2002: 11 LBS. ALUMINUM FOIL/WAX PAPER/PARCHMENT PAPER/FOIL SQUARES/PLASTIC WRAP: 20% BY WEIGHT.)

My organizational zest dimmed very quickly, however, so that after I’d written the equivalent of a master’s thesis on the first few dozen boxes I packed, I was sick enough of the job that I would simply toss into a single carton an old afghan, a half-used bottle of soap bubbles, two winter hats, a weird plastic thing that had been sitting on the kitchen sill for two years because it had dropped off something and we didn’t know what yet we were afraid to throw it away, a broken umbrella, a waste basket, and a tangled skein of old Christmas tree lights and slap on the outside a label that read SEASONAL MISC.

Mystery Boxes, we ended up calling them when we got to the new house. We still had several of them, intact and as undisturbed as Tutankhamen’s tomb, in the crawl space of the house when we started the move to Connecticut. Ten years after they’d been packed, I threw out most of their contents.

I didn’t want any Mystery Boxes on this move. When I put my thousands of books into storage, I’d labeled them by subject matter if I could. If I couldn’t, I’d at least mark from what bookcase and which room they’d come. We’d digitized all our CDs years ago, but I spent three days alphabetizing them and putting the jewel cases into boxes with legends like VANCE’S CDS: BA-CL—just in case we had to find something specific, at some point. If I had to pack my family’s nineteenth-century linens in with a lampshade and a pack of tarot cards, instead of simply slapping the ASST. MISC label on it, I’d write out the crap that was inside. I was thorough, dammit.

Since we were being professionally moved, however, we let the movers do the bulk of the remaining job, the two days before the van left. What they packed tended to be those things I’d deemed necessary until the last minute. If anything, though, the movers tended to lean to my former organizational method. When we arrived in our new neighborhood, we had a dozen boxes marked KITCHEN, but no idea in which the plates or cutlery might be found. Items that we expected to be found in BASEMENT FRONT appeared in UPSTAIRS HALL CLOSET. There are several containers marked LIVING ROOM, but whether they contain books, or pillows, or area rugs, or all three, is a bit of a mystery. Though we rescued my favorite of the stained glass lampshades from its enclosure, intending to use it in our temporary living room, we never did find the base in any of the boxes marked LAMPSHADES/LAMPSTANDS, nor in any of those LIVING ROOM boxes. (I fully expect to find it eventually in SOFT FURNISHINGS/SPARE BEDROOM.)

The movers were extremely thorough in protecting every object with reams and reams of paper, however. I will give them credit for that. I remember well the entire afternoon and evening it took to excavate my kitchen spices from a strata in the middle of a four-and-a-half-foot-high KITCHEN box. It was such a lengthy task because the movers had mummified each spice in two—two!—sheets of of manila wrapping paper roughly a yard square each. Seriously. At first I’d thought I’d hit on a layer of wadded-up paper, and started to throw it all out. Then I realized that if I unscrewed each ball, rolled it out first lengthwise then widthwise, and dug around in the protective kernel within, I’d find a solitary shaker of adobo seasoning, or a teeny-tiny plastic container of cloves. I’m actually dreading the day—soon—when we finally move into our more permanent home and I dive once more into that Mystery Box and discover an ossified container of honey or an equally-petrified Pop-Tart. In their own individual bulky wrappings, of course.

The home that we were promised as part of the job package is finally (finally!) nearing its renovation, meaning we should be able to start moving those boxes once again to their final destination. Save for what we fished out for the kitchen, and save for the clothing we’ve been wearing the last nearly three years, everything we own is still in those boxes. It was impossible to fit the contents of a three-bedroom Colonial in the eight hundred square feet of the one-floor flat we’ve been calling ‘temporary’ since 2011. I haven’t seen their contents for nearly four years at this point.

And you know, for the longest time I actually was able to keep in my head a catalog of what was there. I knew exactly what we’d deemed essential for day-to-day temporary living (potato masher, perpetual calendar, butane lighter) and what still lurked in those hundreds of cartons in storage (cheese grater, glass vases, old journals). If I’d packed the box myself, I knew exactly what was in them; when Craig needed a particular computer dongle, I’d produce it almost instantly from the correct carton in storage, where I’d wedged it inside a coffee mug, several Post-Its, and a cache of pens and paper clips (which had all sat on my home office desk together, thank you very much). For months and months I could perform that kind of miracle conjuring act.

Then—I don’t know when—all that information and muscle memory suddenly all vanished. Maybe I reached a point at which I no longer needed to remember where I’d possibly packed that box of envelopes. Maybe our computer situation became so streamlined that my brain no longer felt the need to keep a complete catalog of the ethernet cords we’d used at our old house. Maybe my brain was so overloaded that it could no longer keep track of Craig’s bowling ball. Whatever the cause, it just all vanished. Now, every box is a Mystery Box again.

The day rapidly approaches when we’ll be moving two doors down and expanding back into a three-bedroom home again. I’m finding myself baffled and a little overwhelmed by the vague memories of belongings that remain. We did used to have a large soup pot, didn’t we? Or is it one of the things we threw out? How about an olive tray? If we had one, why? Did I ever have any rain boots? That stained glass rose lampshade did have a base—didn’t it? What the hell is in those boxes that we haven’t found essential for four years, now?

We keep telling ourselves it’ll be like Christmas when we finally unpack. We toss off that little witticism and laugh lightly about it. But I have a sense of faint unease, even as I joke about it now. Our household is a pared-down version of itself compared to 2010, it’s true—but how it is we’ve managed to do without so many of our things for so long?

I picture us unsheathing each item, one by one, regarding them with puzzlement. They’ll be like quaint museum pieces. Perhaps they’ll have a recognizable function, but no relevance to the mess of debris and gadgets around which we now organize our life than a tin washing board, or a funerary relic. I worry that each object will carry the ache of familiarity, perhaps, but nothing approaching necessity.

Book Review Roundup

One of the things I’ve tended to do, during my adult reading life, is to balance the frivolous and the serious. No matter what I’m reading at the time (and I read a lot of books every year, including a bunch for which I don’t write reviews), I usually try to juggle one Very Serious Nonfiction Tome with the light-hearted fiction to which I am naturally drawn. It makes me feel better if I can look at my queue of books to read and see that there’s a Very Serious Nonfiction Tome to balance out the fact that I’m about to devote the next four weeks of my life re-reading an enormously long fantasy series in which love-crossed scientists on a future planetary settlement have genetically re-engineered giant kittens with wings and titanium claws so they can fight the ecological predators threatening Zeta Colony.

Remember the year I managed to get through thick histories of the Black Plague and biographies of Charles Dickens and the Brontës? Gosh, that was high-class stuff. If that was the apex of my commitment to feeding my brain a well-rounded diet, 2013 was the year in which I went out and bought it a giant tub of Cheez Doodles.

Apparently in 2013, when faced with the task of picking out the next Very Serious Nonfiction Tome, instead of choosing something to expand my horizons and lift my consciousness, I would spy a celebrity biography, snatch it off the shelves, and call it good. That’s why 2013 turned out to be the year in which I read about Tallulah Bankhead and Stephen Sondheim and Bob Fosse and Jennifer Saunders (sorry, Dawn French, but I haven’t been able to get through Dear Fatty at all) and Garry Marshall and Rita Moreno and Bruce Kimmel and the jaw-dropping experience that is Scotty Bowers’ autobiography.

In 2014 I need to make better brain food choices. God knows I’ll have to do something to counterbalance the Enid Blyton I’ve been inspired to re-read.

Bobby Blanchard Lesbian Gym Teacher (Lesbian Career Girl Series, #2)
by Monica Nolan

To carry off a pulp fiction parody requires both a mastery of period detail and a ear for the cadences of previous decades of—let's face it—often indifferently-written genre literature. Mabel Maney managed the feat admirably in her Nancy Clue trio of burlesques, which put a lesbian spin on familiar detective books for girls. In her Lesbian Career Girl series, Monica Nolan attempts the same sort of seemingly effortless feat.

Bobby Blanchard: Lesbian Gym Teacher's Sapphic sexual content is little more than a few knowing smirks among various members of the all-female cast of characters, and longing glances over pre-dinner cocktails and late-night cups of cocoa. It's all about as erotic as reading a vintage Betty Crocker cookbook, but vastly more fun. Nolan's convincingly resurrects the career-girl romances of a vanished era, and even manages to cross-pollinate the genre with that of the boarding school mystery. It's all done with a conspiratorial, wink-wink nudge-nudge sense of humor and double-entendre that's nearly pitch-perfect.

The mystery itself, though, is a bit of a dud. I would've enjoyed the book as much (or even more) without it intruding every few pages on the campy good fun. I had no idea why a slightly dim instructor of peasant dance and rope-climbing, lesbian or otherwise, would have appointed herself amateur detective. Perhaps the girl investigator territory should be ceded to Mabel Maney and her Nancy Clue; Bobby Blanchard is stout-hearted and a dab hand with a field hockey stick, but no intellectual match for a crime-solving professional. The tears and trials of a career girl lesbian gym teacher would have been story enough.

Dark Cities Underground
by Lisa Goldstein

As a conspiracy theory, Lisa Goldstein's attempt to link Egyptian mythology to world subway systems, Victorian archaeology, children's fantasy literature, and thought control is a goldmine of weird tin-foil hat spooky good stuff. As a literary fantasy, however, Dark Cities Underground is a bit of a mess. Despite an engaging premise, her characters never really connect with each other or their audience; they already stuck in the very archetypal ruts they fear from their repeated visits to the underworld.

I've read this book three or four times at this point, lured by the premise, and still I can't really figure out what happens in the book's muddled, confusing second half. Like most conspiracy theories, Goldstein's novel isn't rewarded by too close an examination, or applying even literary logic to its madcap multiple mythologies.

A College of Magics (A College of Magics, #1)
by Caroline Stevermer

The author has packed into a fin-de-siècle fantasy enough scenarios for multiple separate novels, in A College of Magics. There's a magical-teen coming of age story, a lyrical college novel, a grand tour of Europe adventure, and enough Balkan monarchy intrigue to fill out the plots of a couple of operettas. Thankfully the college and coming-of-age material carries the weaker mechanics of the unstable throne subterfuge—which almost seem as if they might have been relegated to separate volumes. Stevermer's conception of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe graced by magic is charming, however, and the novel's conclusion is an unexpected and lovely grace note.

A Scholar of Magics (A College of Magics, #2)
by Caroline Stevermer

It's a pity that I found A Scholar of Magics so slow-moving and unlikable, when I liked its predecessor, A College of Magics, so very much. Stevermer's scenes spark whenever two or more women dominate the action; it's clear that if she'd stuck to the nearly all-female cast of College, this sequel might have been as interesting. The book bogs down whenever the hero and heroine work together—and a more wooden romance couldn't be found in a coed lumberjack camp.

The Knitter's Life List: To Do, To Know, To Explore, To Make
by Gwen Steege

If you, as a knitter, are so completely devoid of imagination, initiative, drive, and the ability to make endlessly long simple craft-related bucket lists that include the following—

"Try knitting on a bus!"
"Try knitting in a car!"
"Knit a scarf!"
"Knit a sweater!"
"Knit a pair of socks!"
"Visit a yarn store!"
"Collect all your needles in one place!"

—then very likely this book could be for you. If you are a knitter who actually has a couple of brain cells in that noggin of yours sparking around somewhere, however, you likely do not need the author's inane suggestions.

If you, as a knitter, are likely to blink, take pause, and wonder what the hell planet Gwen Steege is from when among her bland maxims she drops the following list items—

"Watch the film version of Cabaret!"
"Visit Estonia!"

—then you can join me in tossing this book (which is apparently intended for desperate suckers who need a holiday gift for feeble-minded relatives who enjoy knitting) into the compost heap in which it so richly belongs.

Whores of Lost Atlantis: A Novel
by Charles Busch

It's a shame that Charles Busch, playwright and extraordinary channeler of glamorous Hollywood divas that never were, only wrote a single novel. Whores of Lost Atlantis is not even so much a work of fiction as a thinly-disguised autobiography of how Busch assembled the group of actors and improv artists who came to form Theatre in Limbo in the nineteen-eighties—the troupe that with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom became a wild Off-Off-Broadway success and propelled him into stardom.

On stage, Busch may be larger than life, but within the pages of his sole attempt at fiction, he's self-effacing, modest, and nothing at all like the outlandish divas he writes for himself. Though the (slightly) fictionalized version of the truth employs a (slightly) silly crime caper subplot to add some oomph to the proceedings, it's the least-convincing aspect of Busch's writing. What emerges is a sweet-natured tribute to a vanished era when any female impersonator with drive and moxie could become a downtown cult sensation.

Austenland
by Shannon Hale

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young lady with an inquisitive mind, a well-discerned taste, and both the means and disposition to follow her creative muse, after seating herself at the feast of fertile thought there is to be found in philosophy, in her histories, and in the great authors of literature throughout the centuries, may one day pen a novel of her own that illuminates where there is darkness, provides guidance where there are no pathways, and brings solace where there is little hope.

Readers, this is not that novel. For it is also a truth universally acknowledged that if the young lady in question confines her diet to multiple lazy viewings of the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice DVDs, she's likely to poop out the stinking, steaming turd that is Austenland.

The Ogre Downstairs
by Diana Wynne Jones

This whimsical tale of a five-child blended family brought together by the mishaps that occur from a pair of mysterious chemistry sets was one of my favorite books when I was in fourth and fifth grade. I'm always relieved, when I revisit it periodically through the years, that it holds up well. Chemistry sets might not be as in vogue as they were in my youth, but the animus between the two families is recognizable to kids of any decade, as ultimately are the tricky negotiations that both adults and children alike need to make when accepting new people into their lives. Purely delightful.

The Family Tree
by Sheri S. Tepper

For those who find Sheri S. Tepper's authorial preoccupation with eco-feminist issues humorless, The Family Tree is likely to be a revelation. The twin stories intertwined here—one a kitchen-sink detective story set in the present day, and the other an exotic tale of multiple tribespeople on an adventure to save the world—both sparkle with a sly jocularity not seen since Tepper's earliest novels. The moment when the two stories converge is simply magical; the first time I read it, I sat up in my bed, dumbfounded at the neatness of it all.

Tepper is writing at the height of her powers in her fable on the connectedness of all living creatures. As an introduction to her themes and her incredible imaginative skills, The Family Tree is a good introduction to the author's novels, and a ripping good read on its own.

Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore
Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods
Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse
by Sheri S. Tepper

As might be intuited by their playful alliterative titles, Sheri S. Tepper's trilogy of Marianne books—Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore, followed by Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods and Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse—are light-hearted caprices. Written early in her career, they're also the shortest of Tepper's output.

Yet they're not slight in imaginative content. Tepper's heroine becomes trapped in a series of alternate, fantasy universes, each with their own oddball and inexorable set of rules from which she must puzzle her way out. Imagination as a wild creative force, and specifically the concept of being trapped in worlds created by the imagination of others, is a conceit that Tepper explores again to deeper and more tragic effect in her later novel, Beauty. But in these short works Marianne's determination to prevail is charming and humorous . . . and sometimes her determination to reshape history in her favor is even a little frightening.

If the third book in the trilogy is a little less compelling than its predecessors, it's simply because the antagonist of the piece never appears until near the book's very end, and it's difficult to take him as much of a threat compared to the terrifying Madame of the first two entries. Still, all three books are among Tepper's most whimsical, and can easily be consumed in an afternoon or two.

Fosse
by Sam Wasson

"How much time do I have?" asks Bob Fosse at the start of Sam Wasson's biography of the director and choreographer. Sixty years, as it turns out, as Wasson's chapter headings turn into a relentless countdown of the years--and later, minutes--left before his last, fatal heart attack. It's an effective device, for who among us is not a ticking timebomb with an uncertain expiration date?

Wasson's narrative--expertly researched, exhaustively documented--is as gritty and sometimes as knowingly vulgar as his subject. Its thoroughness, however, is somewhat undermined by a lack of any kind of post-mortem evaluation of Fosse's legacy. Of all his contemporaries, it's Fosse whose name is a household word, and whose style is inseparable from his name. Wasson, however, is so hellbent on ending his work with Fosse keeling over dead in the streets that his countdown gimmick undermines his subject's deeper significance. Fosse's influence didn't end the moment his heart stopped; for as long as he is emulated, imitated, and honored on stage, is as much time as he and his legacy have.

Bonkers: My Life in Laughs
by Jennifer Saunders

Jennifer Saunders, half of the French and Saunders comedy team and creator of the Absolutely Fabulous TV series, is a deeply private person with a vast English reserve. Yes, it's difficult to believe that the woman who spent most of her Ab Fab screen time outrageously drunk and arse-over-knickers is truly shy to the point she's virtually unable to discuss her personal life in an autobiography—which by its very nature is a deeply personal document. Her reticence and hesitation to delve too deeply into her own personal history create a bit of an odd duck of a book, which while not particularly illuminating, is still a fun read.

Saunders is willing to share safe, talk-show friendly anecdotes about how she met Dawn French, the creation of several (but not all) of her comedy projects, her trips abroad. She's utterly unwilling to talk about her wooing of and subsequent marriage to Adrian Edmondson or to her recent three-year battle with breast cancer, as she's obviously more comfortable with light cocktail chatter in the guise of a memoir.

But that's okay. As she points out after an incident in which she confronts paparazzi who invade her family's privacy deep in the rural solitude where they've made a home, Saunders never chased the spotlight or angled for red-carpet appearances. She merely wished to be left alone to write and act, and create her much-loved comedies. Let's be grateful to those have given her imagination free reign for the last thirty years, even if her characters are infinitely more outrageous than their originator and her not-tell-much biography.

Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars
by Scotty Bowers

I have to confess that at several points during Scotty Bowers' sin-sational Hollywood tell-all, Full Service, I would forget that I was reading something allegedly from the non-fiction shelves. Instead I would flip the pages with wide eyes and think, "This satire on Tinseltown memoirs is hi-LAR-ious!" I can't quite think of another autobiography featuring such purple prose and such an unreliable narrator—or in which I've had to suspend, from front to back cover, such a great amount of disbelief. That is, at least, not since Patrick Dennis' devastating fictional parody on the same territory of the glamorous film world, Little Me.

According to Full Service the studios would all but empty of their big-name talent whenever Scotty Bowers' evening shift began at a little gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. That's where he would pimp out (but not for money!) handsome young men and women to some of the hugest stars of Hollywood's golden age. "Oh, Kate, Spence, Judy, Tyrone, George, Cary, Rita," writes the author, mourning the past. One might think he was done, but no. ". . . Charles, Randolph, Edith, Vivien . . . where are you now?" These are but a few of the powerful for whom Bowers arranged sexual trysts with rent-boys and good-time girls (but for which he never received a nickel!), and for whom the well-endowed Bowers performed his 'swizzle-stick trick' when he would bartend private sex parties (at which, both he and no doubt his legal team are intent upon reminding you every fourth paragraph, he never ever EVER received any compensation. He did it out of the goodness of his heart! Honest! Swear to god!).

There's a certain breathless naiveté in Bowers' revelations. Of the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, for example, he sums up the icon in these riveting words: "She was a sad person who seemed to be on the verge of tears all the time. During sex she would say sing-songy things in French!" (The sex was unpaid, of course.) Of the love of his life, Vivien Leigh, he plumbs into the depths of his soul to fish up this poetic apothegm: "She was a hot, hot lady. She was very sexual!" Second only to his affection for Leigh was Eddy. You know. Eddy. Eddy Windsor. His Royal Highness the Royal Duke of Windsor and former King of England, Edward VIII. Well. the gas station restrooms must've been sanitized to an inch of their lives when Eddy and Wallis Simpson showed up to avail themselves of Bowers' (free! donated!) pimping services. Bowers was so generous to the former monarch that he became Eddy's lover out of the goodness of his heart. For free. ("Eddy was good. Really good. He sucked me off like a pro!")

Pity those whom Bowers dislikes—though he really never disliked anyone, he's careful to emphasize, and/or wished to libel any of the hundred and hundreds of celebrities within his pages . . . all of whom are somewhat coincidentally dead and therefore unable to sue. Katharine Hepburn comes in for some of the worst treatment. A frequent consumer of Bowers' (free) services for female prostitutes, Bowers feels compelled, whenever her name is mentioned, to repeat that no one in Hollywood liked working with her, and that she had a bad skin problem. He liked her! Cross his heart! It was everyone else who hated that lousy bull dyke. And yeesh. That crocodile skin!

There are certain chapters in this gloriously naive autobiography that I would be happy never to read or think of again, such as the very long passages devoted to Charles Laughton's disinclination to good sexual hygiene, or to his fondness for a sandwich spread that resembles—yet definitely is not—Nutella. I also did not need to know that the designer of the original Barbie was into surprising young women while fondling himself in a casket. And I am afraid that the phrase 'doo-doo queens' is now permanently etched in my sorry memory.

I'll be honest. I really only believe about twenty percent of Full Service, and that portion consists of verifiable universals such as the notions that cars need gas that can be found at filling stations, or that there is a state named California and Hollywood is a city within its borders. The details of Bowers’ thirty-year career as Hollywood's most notorious (unpaid!) pimp, who cannot even fall asleep on a park bench without a movie star waking him up and employing him (as a volunteer!) for sex . . . well, like any unreliable narrator, I'm not sure I trust a word.

But I certainly had a good time reading about it, with my jaw dropped for the duration.

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts

From its inception, planners and architects intended Grand Central Terminal to become not merely a locus of commerce and industry on 42nd Street, but a testament both to the Beaux Arts ideal and to New York City as an emerging world center. Although Sam Roberts' Grand Central (written for the one hundredth anniversary of the Terminal's debut) is exhaustively researched, it's approachable enough for readers who don't happen to be up on their railroad barons. The book dwells extensively on the history of the New York Central and the New York and Harlem Railroads in the decades before the Terminal's construction, then takes readers through the building's glory days during the first half of the twentieth century. Chapters on its mid-century decline in fortunes, its salvation from destruction, and the renaissance of the the building during the last two decades give the narrative a satisfying arc and conclusion.

Roberts seems more interested in the social history of Grand Central Terminal rather than on its architecture; those searching for a more comprehensive account its builders and artists might be better served elsewhere. But in its chosen focus Grand Central offers up some interesting tidbits about how a single railroad terminal changed a nation—and even a the world—for good. When opened to the public, for example, the Terminal's unique use of sloping walkways led to the adaptation of the word 'ramp' in popular vocabulary—and the railroad system itself transformed the way the population synchronized and time zones.

Grand Central Terminal made a Midtown in Manhattan. This celebration of its glories—and its low points—makes for an engaging read.

The Secret Passage
by Nina Bawden

Considering I was the child who spent hours banging at the basement paneling in my parents' house, hoping to find a hidden spring that would unlock a hitherto-undiscovered chamber, I would have adored Nina Bawden's The Secret Passage. A number of themes in this children's novel are old-fashioned enough that they wouldn't have been amiss in an E. Nesbit classic like The Railway Children—a trio of youths who've lost a parent, a forced relocation to somewhere exotic and strange, the titular secret passage, a number of adults who need the children's intervention to set things right, a lost child, and even a runaway princess of sorts.

Bawden's considerable skill turns all these somewhat hoary tropes on their head. The exotic location is dreary London, while the children's original home is an Africa to which they've become thoroughly acculturated. The secret passage itself isn't much of a secret; it's simply behind a door. The lost child isn't lost—at least not in the way the children think. And the princesse lointaine is one of the most unapologetically disagreeable brats in literature.

It's Bawden's playfulness with these vintage themes, and her willingness to be either humorous or sentimental in equal parts, that makes The Secret Passage a fun read . . . even for an adult like myself, who never quite got over the urge to rap on paneling, hoping to hear a hollow sound beyond.

Five Go Adventuring Again (Famous Five Series, #2)
by Enid Blyton

I have great difficulty making it through an Enid Blyton novel without developing an appetite for great quantities of treacle pudding and lashings of ginger beer.

The Asylum: A Collage of Couture Reminiscences ... and Hysteria
by Simon Doonan

In his books of essays, Simon Doonan has proven he can be both tremendously humorous and touching. His determination to be iconoclastic and outré without being offensive or—heaven forbid—mean renders him into an eccentric little darling, a compact and lovable example of walking drollery free of spite.

Some of his essays in The Asylum are laugh-out-loud funny. But as always with Doonan's books, it's difficult to anticipate what one will be getting from chapter to chapter. He simply tells stories as they occur to him, without chronological organization or overall arcing narrative. The Asylum is nominally focused on the fashion industry, but so loosely that it gives Doonan leeway to ruminate on any of the odd people or experiences he's encountered in his lifetime. One can almost hear his husband in the background between chapters, saying, "Don't forget to tell them about Tom Ford seeing your toenail fungus!" or "Make sure to include about when you auditioned for The Devil Wears Prada!"

Throughout, Doonan manages to be just enough on the outside of the A-List to make the reader feel as if he or she is part of his circle. Although the overall scattershot effect is a little like listening to a garrulous old friend nattering away at a cocktail party, The Asylum—especially taken in small doses—is a rewarding read.

The Man Who Knits

A few weeks ago I was sitting at the church reception desk for which I volunteer, when a woman walked in from the parking lot. Often on my regular shift there’s quite a bit to be done around the office—mailings to be sent out, postcards needing postage, bulletins that have to be folded and collated and placed in cunning bundles in one of the hundreds of wicker baskets that the women of the church have apparently been hoarding since the original Easter. That kind of thing.

On this particular day, though, I’d zipped through my tasks, I’d read a couple of chapters in my book of the moment, tended to my flowers in Animal Crossing, and had finally opened my knitting box and hauled out the piece on which I’d been working for a while. Even rolled up, it was quite a huge creation. Picture, if you will, a hood that stretches up and over the top and back of the head. To either side, add long individual scarves that hang down a yard and a half to the ankles. The entire thing is rendered in garter stitch that makes it resemble chain mail. Whenever I’d work on it at home, Craig would stare at it and say at every opportunity, “We are the Knights Who Say Ni!”

There I was with about five pounds of wool in my lap, patiently knitting away, when the outside doors opened and a woman walked in. She wasn’t a church member. But she had an appointment with the pastor, and after I undertook a short trip on foot to ensure he was in his office, I walked back to the office to show her in. “Oh,” she said, stopping at my desk. “Are you the man who knits?”

Now, often when I’m just talking to people in a casual manner, that is, without planned talking points or in a non-public-speaking kind of way, I have a tendency to take long pauses between words and phrases. I do so not because I’m unskilled with my native tongue or because I’m having a moment of aphasia. It happens because my imagination is always racing ahead. My slower cognitive processes, like moving my lips and producing sounds, are lagging behind. When this stranger asked that question—Are you the man who knits?—I had several simultaneous visions.

One was of Geraldo Rivera, wearing one of his pinstripe suits hewn out of shiny fabric, and weighed down by a massive white calf-length coat made out of artificial Alaskan Husky fur, standing on a mountainside in a blinding snowstorm. “Experts say he’s a legend,” says Rivera into the TV camera lens as flakes accumulate on his thick mustache. “Locals in this remote region, however, tell another story.” Then onto the screen he thrusts a grainy black-and-white photograph, enlarged, featuring a blurry boot half-visible behind a tree. “Has one brave scientist finally found evidence of. . . .” he intones, as the show’s frantic theme music plays, “. . . THE MAN WHO KNITS?”

Another was a cinematic sweep through a cheap seaside carny from the nineteen-thirties. We see a flame-eater. A corseted girl on a unicycle. A guy in striped pants juggling knives. We pass the funhouse, the cotton candy vendor, and zoom into the sideshow. There, on plain display beneath their lurid posters are the outcasts, the freaks, the sad dregs that the curious pay their dimes to see so they can titter and shiver and return home secure in the knowledge that they’re better off than these caged oddities. The Gorilla Woman. The Dog-Faced Boy. A pair of sad Siamese Twins. The Rubber Man. And most frightening of all and rarely seen: THE MAN WHO KNITS.

A third was set at a zoo, where parents are noticing that their children are ignoring the monkeys working so hard to be entertaining, and instead are crowding around a cage where they laugh and point. One girl is even crying. It is THE MAN WHO KNITS, sitting on a stool with one knee crossed over the other, licking his lips so he can moisten the end of a piece of yarn to put it through the eye of a tapestry needles. “Get away!” shout the panicked mothers and fathers. “You’ll get ideas! Come watch the monkeys flinging shit at each other instead!”

As I say, all that passed through my head in the space of a second and a half while I stood there and looked at the woman. What came out of my mouth, eventually, was “Beg pardon?”

“The man who knits,” she repeated. “I heard that The Man Who Knits goes to this church.”

Another cinematic flash: this time of the housewives of Greenwich thronging the aisles of Whole Foods Market, dressed in their lululemon and Talbot’s, blond bobs swinging beneath their velvet headbands as in turn they whisper in each others’ ears. “That’s the place with THE MAN WHO KNITS.”

“I have a reputation, then?” I asked in the mildest of tones. Then I led her into the office.

Men who knit aren’t uncommon, of course. We are legion. But either we aren’t as open about taking our hobby out into public as we could be, or else everyone’s gender priorities are still screwed up. The sight of me with an acre of garter stitched Monty Python hood in my lap doesn’t tend to elicit so much the question of “Oh hey, what’re you making?” as it does barely-veiled variations of queries that essentially boil down to, “You KNIT? How can you?! Doesn’t your PENIS GET IN THE WAY?”

I took up knitting only two years ago, after we moved to the New York suburbs. Suddenly I didn’t have the space to have the glass workshop I kept in Michigan, where I made stained glass panels and lamps and worked glass in my kiln. That was all packed away and in storage, and there was no telling when I’d be able to get back to it again. And I didn’t choose knitting because I’d always wanted to do it, or anything. I’ve learned over the years that I need some kind of constructive hobby to keep my hands busy and my brain calm. In my new circumstances, I needed a hobby that was going to be small and self-contained, and used supplies I could get fairly easily. Coincidentally I also needed winter hats and scarves and gloves, since all of mine were packed away in storage, god knew where.

Also—and this part is most important—I needed to find a hobby that would give me an excuse to watch hours of cheesy television. The theory being, of course, that a creative occupation would cancel out my bad television choices, much as a single brussels sprout redeems a weekend of binging on brownies.

Knitting fit the bill. I could fit most of the components into a box. I could wear the stuff I made. Yarn could be colorful, like glass. So I bought a pair of cheap needles and a skein of cheap yarn to see if I could actually do it. Several hours later, I had a knotty, sweaty little swatch that I could barely cast off the needles, I’d pulled the yarn so tight. I couldn’t purl. It was too difficult and it reduced me to actual tears. But I could knit, dammit. Here I am almost exactly two years later, with a number of scarves, countless hats, several mittens, a couple of sweaters, and one long Knights Who Say Ni hood trailing behind him.

One of the things I’ve done over these last couple of years is to try to learn new techniques and face new challenges with every new project. I graduated from a simple scarf to a scarf that alternated colors, and that used some stitches I hadn’t encountered the first time around. From there I learned how to knit in the round and how to increase and decrease, and then how one could pick up little details like thumbs for mittens. The sweaters were an undergraduate course in themselves, as I dealt with all kinds of concepts that were new to me.

More often than not, the difficulty level of the projects I’d spy and like was way over my head. The pattern instructions would make my eyes cross and glaze. “That’s too hard,” I’d say, as I’d regretfully put the patterns in a queue so I could review them when I had the skill level to understand. The Knights of Ni hood was one of those deferred pattern. I saw it the first month I started, and when I couldn’t make head nor tail out of all the talk of short rows or provisional cast-ons, so I set it aside until a time when I could. It’d come, sooner or later. I just didn’t know when.

This last week, I discovered that the time is apparently now. When I’d chugged through the hood project, I discovered that what was once intimidating and scary was actually a little bit boring for my present skill level; there were times, needling my way down those Rapunzel-like scarves on the sides, the pattern was so easy that I wondered if the simplicity of it might make me give up the project out of tedium. Then right before Christmas I cast on another project on my needles that I’d delayed for a year and a half because it was so incomprehensible. I finished it in two sittings.

After that, I pondered what to do next. Which of the scary, out-of-reach patterns would I attempt? I hadn’t learned cables. You know, cables. The raised patterns on sweaters that can be either intricate or gently sinuous. I knew the theory behind cables. I just didn’t like cables. Cables reminded me of Christmas, 1977, when I was in seventh grade.

That was the Christmas on which I received no less than four sweaters from varying relatives in shades of decaying avocado green, bruise-colored puce, jaundice yellow, and raging venereal disease red, all thickly crusted with cables. The sweaters were warm, I’m sure, but like most of the clothing adults would pick out for me in those days none of them were quite right. The shades were of a identifiable hue that today, if a Project Runway contestant used any one of them, Tim Gunn would look exasperated, put his hands on his hips, and say, “Heavens to Betsy! Are you trying to resurrect nineteen-seventy-seven?!” But though of their era, they still weren’t quite the colors the popular kids wore at school. And cables were so out. I endured a winter and spring beneath those four awful sweaters, and once I grew out of them, I never wore cabled wool again.

It was with a sigh that I got out some scrap yarn and assayed a swatch with cables. It was easy, as I thought they would be. I tried another. Easy again. I also made the felicitous discovery that while cables on store-bought men’s sweaters are still kind of sickening, the cables one makes oneself are awesome.

It was when I went back to look at the patterns I’d queued over the last couple of years that I made a discovery. The night after the cable experiment I was looking through the PDF files I store on my tablet, one by one, trying to figure out which to tackle next. That doesn’t look hard anymore, I’d say about a sweater that previously seemed as mysterious and arcane as an old alchemic formula. Before, I would read a pattern and start to get confused after the initial instructions of Collect your yarn from the closet. I’d see the charts and array of abbreviations think, I could NEVER do that!, and work on something more suitable for my grasp.

In what seemed like a sudden turnaround, though, I was looking at all these patterns—all of them—and I would see how they worked, and think to myself, Yeah, I could do that. Or, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be all that tough. Or, I get how this chart works, now. Or, Maybe I haven’t tried this exact technique yet, but how tough could it be? It was a pretty great moment. It was like learning the building blocks of a foreign language well enough so that when I stepped into the public square of a European city, the people talking around me weren’t making mere noise, or individual occasional words connected by gibberish. It was as if the babble receded, and entire conversations took their place.

It was my Miracle Worker moment, dammit. Let me have it.

I know I haven’t learned everything. There’s no point in a hobby when there’s nothing left to explore. But I’m no longer going to look at a photograph of a knitted object and say to myself, “Oooo, that looks impossible. Maybe some day!”

I’m going to be all, “Girl, hand me my leather needle case. Then stand back for a couple of weeks and watch me knock that sucker right out.”

That’s right. Fear me. For I am The Man Who Knits.