I probably put too much food in my novels, but food is what people do, at least my people. They think about it, and they talk while they’re eating it; it’s in their errands and the shape of a life’s story. Writing about it can be a dodge on a hard day; for a previous novel, set in 1905, I felt I had to spend days on the New York Public Library’s website staring at the Buttolph menu collection. Parts of a new novel, The Center of Everything, are set in the 1960s and in the 80s, and I wanted to be careful of anachronisms; it’s not easy, remembering what you cooked, when, what brands were in the store. The huge changes in food in the last fifty or sixty years—embodied, to a degree, by stores like the one that hired me in 1982, Dean & DeLuca, have blurred together. Haven’t we always had Stilton and lemongrass, frozen pot stickers and fresh mandarins?
Working on children’s books in the midst of a pandemic and hurricanes Eta and Iota, which devastated Central America in November, hasn’t been easy. Internet service has been sporadic. She has also taken time away from the books to help hurricane victims.
But Siu is determined to complete her mission as an author: to “undo a lot of the fairy tales that make up the history and narratives of what the United States is.”
She got into her car with Dillon and set off for home. As she pulled out of the parking lot, she called her sister. “Hey Ronda, can you look up on the computer what you do when you get struck by lightning?” There was a pause followed by some swearing. “You go to the hospital!” Ronda shot back. Shana had been to the local hospital before, but her mind felt hazy. “Ronda,” she said, as her chest tightened and the ringing in her ears grew louder. “I don’t know how to get there.”
In my first year of school, we grew trees. We were taken into the playground and taught how to press our seedlings into the soil, to pat the new plants in their plastic containers, very gently, against the ground. We watered them, stuck masking tape along the sides and scribbled our names in black marker. It was the first time I had ever nurtured something, and I wouldn’t do it again until adulthood.
The project of this book is to unravel some of the cultural and medical history of, and explain the complex and varied conditions that affect, what are usually called “speech disorders” – and to argue that their impact on those who have them is substantially worsened by a society that insists on seeing them straightforwardly as disorders in the first place.
Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again.
Lose a good woman on a bad day. Find a better woman,