Author Bio
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in the 1970s and attended Catholic schools until grade 12. My father, a physician from Italy, was an avid reader who impressed on his five children (I’m the youngest) that reading was the only way to learn. Alexander Solzhenitzyn was his favorite author. He was a political conservative and a great admirer of William F. Buckley, Jr., he read his fiction and his nonfiction and even his books about sailing. My mother, who has lived her whole life in Brooklyn, is an infinitely curious person and a voracious reader, of mysteries, biographies, and British comedies, especially those by P.G. Wodehouse. First and foremost, my mother is a cook. She is utterly fascinated by food, both creating it, and chasing after the best examples of delicacies that might be found within a reasonable driving distance (up to three hours). She is particularly fond of desserts, for her it’s not a meal unless it ends with a sweet (though she might consider dessert alone a complete meal). I wouldn’t say that I learned to cook at my mother’s knee, I just carried around her example and her DNA, which was enough to make me competent in the kitchen; the downside of her legacy is that it includes an abundance of insecurity that, at least in the context of relationships, no amount of great cooking can undo.
I started reading long before I got to cooking. At age ten I realized that reading could actually be more fun than watching prime time television. I began to forgo “The Captain and Tennille” and “Happy Days” in the family room in favor of holing up in my room with Judy Blume. After devouring every one of her books (including the ones written for boys and those I was too young for) I moved on to Jane Austen and the Brontes, I also read a lot Erma Bombeck in those days (usually poolside). In high school I started to keep a journal and write poetry, I mostly wrote about the older boy I was infatuated with, though I crafted my musings with a great deal of vagueness so that they could be construed to be about more important subjects like existential yearnings or the Cold War. I dabbled in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College but mainly I studied Italian literature and art. At Sarah Lawrence I encountered an incredibly diverse group of people, many of them more sophisticated than I. I loved college where I found that running with the very rich jetsetters was an education in itself—not that I didn’t learn plenty within the traditional disciplines too. Most of all Sarah Lawrence College instilled me with a sense of limitless possibility I wish I hadn’t waited so long to exploit.
Shortly after college I began a career in book publishing. I worked on the publicity end and enjoyed a modicum of glamour promoting (and getting to know) such authors as Edna O’Brien and Harold Bloom. I dated writers too. There were writers everywhere in my life, but I didn’t write, I cooked. Cooking, to me, was a safe way to be creative and a natural way to show love.
My favorite authors are, F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby and his short stories in particular) William Tolstoy (Anna Karenina) Dostoyevsky (The Brother’s Karamazov) I love William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. I love the poetry of W.B. Yeats, William Blake and, on the more contemporary end Philip Larkin and Billy Collins. I adore the magical short stories of Haruki Murakami. I admire Samuel Beckett’s plays, especially Happy Days (I wrote a paper on that one in high school that I’m still very proud of though I have no idea where I put it). I adore every word Oscar Wilde has ever written : his DeProfundis is a magnificent verbal annihilation of a lover who has wronged you greatly and is excellent breakup reading (though, no matter how you’re suffering you’ll never be in as much pain as Oscar Wilde, who wrote the book from a prison cell—still in those moments one tends to feels chained by her obsessions).
I loveAdriana Trigiani’s Lucia, Lucia and Very Valentine, and Lucinda Rosenfeld’s What She Saw In . . . as well as her forthcoming novel I’m So Happy For You, which I was lucky enough to get to read in galleys). Ilene Beckerman’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore, which pairs the author’s illustrations of the clothes she wore through many happy and sad moments of her life, was an inspiration for I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti. I read that book years earlier but when I started writing about my relationships and saw the role food played in them I first thought of her book as a model for the book I would write.
Epicurious is my go-to site for recipes. It’s the first food site I found in the early days of the web and it’s the one I’ve stuck with. I will type in whatever ingredient I have lying around and it will give me some wonderful recipe for what to do with it. I use it more than any other source. The 1997 revision of The Joy of Cooking(which was published by Scribner when I was working there) is a desert island cookbook—it will offer you a better way to make anything even if you’re making something you would never imagine you needed a cookbook for, like mashed potatoes or scrambled eggs. I also regularly cook from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s The Italian Country Table, and Mario Batali’s Simple Italian Food.