Shaved Meats, Piled High: January 2018
A Good Day for Banana Cakes
About two years ago, I came home from a trip and was informed by my daughter that our babysitter knew how to make an exotic dish known as "banana cakes." Combine one beaten egg with one smashed banana and you have an eggy round of sweetness, especially appealing to a child's palate, but nutritious enough to make any parent proud. Sounds easy, right?
But they're tricky little devils to flip because they don't hold together as well as real pancakes. And when I tried to make them for my daughter, I endured many, many failures. And then something interesting happened: My banana cakes became consistently good, or at least good enough. This was in part because I a) kept the heat very low b) used bananas that weren't overly ripe c) stopped trying to double the recipe, which always seemed to trip me up.
In short, I made a lot of banana cakes and I got better at it. Duh.
Recently, I read a piece in which two groups of people were given a task to make something. Group one was told the objective was to make the BEST item they could. One perfect outcome was the goal. The second group was told to make as many of the thing as possible. Yet it was the latter group that made the best iteration of the desired object. Sorry I'm fuzzy on the details, but I think you see the point.
Twenty-plus books in, I often meet people who tell me, "I hope you don't mind if I say" -- uh oh -- "that you've gotten much better since your first book." I think there's probably a slightly more tactful way to express this idea, but I don't mind it. I usually reply: "Well, there are only three possibilities. One gets better, one gets worse or one stays the same." (I suppose there is a fourth, which is being wildly erratic, which does describe some writers I read.)
Next month, SUNBURN, my 21st or 22nd novel -- it depends on how one categorizes The Girl in the Green Raincoat -- will be published. Some people say it's my best yet. Some people will probably say it's overhyped. The early reviews have been good, but the book is out of my hands now and soon, I hope, will be in yours. Think of it as my 21st -- or 22nd -- banana cake. Fluffy, sinfully sweet, but possibly with some hidden nutrients.
READ/READING: The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer; An American Marriage, Tayari Jones; Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser. And a dozen manuscript excerpts by my students at the Eckerd College Writers in Paradise conference.
REREADING: The oral history of Saturday Night Live, A Mother and Two Daughters, Gail Godwin. One of the Crowd, Rosamond Du Jardin.
ME; ME, ME: Colette Bancroft, whom I have been privileged to meet, reviewed SUNBURN a little early because I will be reading from it on Monday, Jan. 15, at Eckerd College. If you're in St. Petersburg, come see me!
Laura lippman
January 2018