I tell her that since moving to New York, people at home will sometimes ask me how I can live in the US and that all my native New Yorker friends will reassure me that I have no idea because New York is not the US.
“Oh, you live here?” she says, and I believe I can see her like me a sliver more. “Well, that’s right, New York is not America. America could be more like New York. And in fact New York should now try to be more like New York. A lot of my friends have never been to America. I have friends who have been 50 times to Cambodia, to Vietnam … have you ever been to Kansas?”
I used to scorn fussy eaters until I became one. For years, food was an integral part of my identity. Eating it, cooking it, writing about it. As a suburban child of the Findus Crispy Pancake generation, moving to London in the mid-noughties felt like Dorothy stepping into a technicolour, flavour-laden Oz. I had spent my teens on a miserable series of Ryvita-based diets; it was liberating to rebrand my newfound greediness as “foodieness”. My appetite knew few bounds. Raw or fermented or tentacled – I’d eat it. I prided myself on being gastro-literate. I judged those who asked for a fork or paled at an unfamiliar ingredient. A broad palate was synonymous with being an interesting person, I thought. A sensual person. I once stopped dating someone perfectly nice because his pickiness at dinner was so deeply unsexy.
But that was then.
“Culpability” is not a thriller — it’s in the cracks-in-a-family-emerge genre of “Ordinary People” and “Before and After” — but, with all of the unfolding secrets and ominous hints of something nefarious at the Chesapeake Bay mansion next door, it is a propulsive, difficult-to-put down novel.