Q&A

Are you as fascinated as I am by the heat, drama and pressure of a professional kitchen? Today I’m delighted to welcome Meredith Mileti, author of the debut novel, Aftertaste. The book tells the story of Mira: wife, mother and passionate chef/owner of a chic New York City trattoria. When Mira’s fiery nature lands her in a tangle of legal and personal predicaments, she falls back on family and friends in Pittsburgh as she battles to save her restaurant. But will she be able to find the right ingredients to create a recipe for happiness? I chatted with Meredith about food and emotions, and the differences between cooking and writing.

As a lover of food and food writing, I enjoyed your book so much! What inspired you to write the story?

I’ve long been interested in how food, and by extension, cooking, represents emotion. What an intense and complicated relationship it is! Writing about a chef seemed an interesting way to explore this relationship further. The idea for the story came to me several years ago when I was writing my doctoral dissertation in Developmental Psychology. It was a heavy statistical analysis and I was totally consumed by it. I’d accepted an academic position that was dependent upon my finishing it, so I had a major, looming deadline. We had three young kids at home at the time and my husband, champ that he is, told me I could have the summer off from cooking—he would handle feeding the family so I could finish. I was grouchy and miserable and not just because I was subsisting on a diet of take-out food and hamburger helper. I was missing the only creative outlet I had at the time—cooking. Mira interrupted me one day and wouldn’t leave me alone, so I wrote the first chapter of her story. Then I stuck it in a drawer and it sat there for a couple of years while I was busy doing other things, but I never stopped thinking about her. Eventually, I picked it back up and Aftertaste is the result!

You really capture the intense pace and long hours of working as a professional chef in a restaurant. How did you research the book?

I am not a professionally trained chef—just an incredibly enthusiastic home cook and all-around good eater. By interviewing several professional chefs and reading several non-fiction books—including Heat by Bill Buford and Michael Rhulman’s wonderful series of books The Making of a Chef, The Soul of a Chef, etc.)— I gained some understanding about what kind of person is driven to become a chef, and what kinds of demands—physical, as well as emotional and intellectual–the work entails. And the demands are many.

I took a cooking class with my father in Florence. The teacher, Sharon Oddson, was very helpful in teaching me about what in particular in takes to be a successful woman chef. I also visited some restaurant kitchens and had the good fortune to have some friends who have business experience with restaurants read and comment on the book. And I cooked—even more than usual. In fact, I found that cooking helped get me in the mood to write. It became a very reflective and creative process. My husband jokes that he gained twenty pounds during the writing of this book!

Anger plays a large role in the life of your main character, Mira; passion, too. Do you think emotions can be expressed via food?

Absolutely! Most of us have a complicated and emotional relationship with food. We often act out our internal struggles with food. We celebrate with food; we often eat (or sometimes don’t eat) when we are angry or sad. We use food to soothe or punish ourselves. Similarly, the cook has the power to nurture, or placate, or punish. Cooking is also a way to for me share something of myself with others. I learned this from my dad, to whom I’ve dedicated Aftertaste. He’s a fairly reticent man, but his cooking speaks volumes about love.

I loved reading the descriptions of “cucina poverta,” or Italian peasant cuisine. Why did you choose this cuisine for Mira’s specialty?

It is a cuisine I thoroughly enjoy and am intimately familiar with, but it also seemed a fitting metaphor for telling Mira’s story. One of the hallmarks of cucina poverta is the notion that you make something delicious out of what you have. Take bread for example. Two of Italy’s greatest soups, ribollita and pappa al pomodoro make spectacular use of stale bread. Nothing is wasted in peasant cooking. That is really what Mira has to deal with—not just salvaging what has turned stale or is left over, but turning it into something wonderful.

How does cooking differ from writing?

For me, both cooking and writing are creative processes. Both are big jobs with lots of moving parts and in order to keep things flowing in the kitchen and on the page you have to be organized. That said, I think there can also be a lot of spontaneity in both writing and cooking. Give it a taste and see what it needs. Throw in something unexpected.

Honest, hearty and as deeply satisfying as Italian peasant fare, Aftertaste is about the important things in life: food, family, and love. Curious? Thanks to Meredith’s publisher, Kensington, I’m giving away two signed copies! To win a book, leave a comment by Thursday, September 8, 2011, answering these two questions…

1) Can you find shell beans like the ones pictured above? 2) Where do you live? (I’m trying to write a recipe and need your help!)

UPDATE: Anne and Marie are the winners! Thank you so much for your responses to the bean question — tremendously helpful!

Bonjour, mes amis! I’m so delighted to welcome novelist Sheila Kohler whose books include Becoming Jane Eyre, Cracks, and, most recently, Love Child. A professor of writing at Bennington College and Princeton University, Sheila is a needle-sharp observer, the type of writer whose work creeps under your skin long after you’ve put the book down, a novelist who receives five-star Amazon reviews from Amy Tan (“Stunning! A master of suspense”). I was thrilled to talk to Sheila about the connection between human psychology and great writing, and finding answers through fiction.

What inspired your newest novel, Love Child?

Love Child is a very autobiographical novel in the sense that it is based on my mother’s life. When she died, a wealthy woman, she did not leave her fortune to her only remaining daughter — me! When I told people about this they seemed so surprised and shocked that I thought it would be good material for fiction. Of course, I wanted to find out why, too. I think fiction often comes from a question that one tries to answer on the page. And I think I did. By the time I had finished writing the book I felt I understood my mother much better and had much more sympathy for her — though of course much is imagined. My mother was a very mysterious woman.

You have a Masters degree in psychology. How have your studies helped or hindered you as you develop characters and stories?

Oh, I think any knowledge we can acquire about the human mind helps us with fiction. People read, after all, partly at least, to find out about themselves, to find themselves on the page. The great writers are always amazingly perceptive about human nature, it seems to me. My studies have been very helpful and perhaps particularly when describing pathological states of mind as I did in Crossways for example.

You’ve said that your writing took a new turn 25 years ago when your sister died under violent circumstances in apartheid South Africa. How did these events affect your work?

Again, I often write to try to understand something, to find the answer to a question. In the case of my sister, who was, I believe, murdered, I tried again and again in several books to understand how this could have happened to her, someone who seemed so loving, generous,  and innocent.

You were born in South Africa, which is also the setting for Love Child. How does your birth country inspire you? What are some of your favorite books about South Africa?

South Africa is such a beautiful country but at the same time a strange one. There was such a contrast between the beauty of the land and the underlying violence of the divided society during the apartheid period. I think this is something that inspired my work: both to try and reproduce in words the brilliance of the light and the beauty of the flora and fauna and also to understand the undercurrants of violence in this society. I’m a great admirer of J.M. Coetzee’s work and particularly of his great book, Disgrace.

J.M. Coetzee has said of Sheila’s work “There is a territory — fictional and psychological — that Sheila Kohler has marked as her own. I am full of admiration.” Are you curious to dip into one of her rich and darkly complex novels? Thanks to Sheila’s publisher, Penguin, I’m thrilled to be giving away a copy of Love Child. To enter, leave a comment below. The winner will be chosen at random Friday, August 5, 2011. 

Update: The winner is Nicola! Thanks for playing, tout le monde!

(Bottom images from United Nations Photo and Pinzur.)