During the three years since the publication of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, more than six million readers around the world have found resonance in her chronicle of personal discovery. This intensely driven writer learned to live in the moment in Italy (Eat), explored her spiritual self in India (Pray) and found her soul mate in Felipe, a Brazilian living in Bali (Love). The two planned to spend the rest of their lives together, but previous bad marriages made them determined to skip actual matrimony. Fate is capricious, however, and it intervened in 2006; because Felipe’s visits to the U.S. had been too frequent, he was banned from entering the country. If Felipe was ever to return, it could only be as Gilbert’s husband. This unexpected turn of events was the impetus for Gilbert’s new memoir, Committed.

“I was working on a novel about the Amazons,” says Gilbert, who was shocked by the sudden urgency of marriage. “I was well into its research and didn’t have any intention of writing another memoir. But when this came up, my spirits were so viral. I did not want to enter this union feeling about [marriage] the way I felt about it. I loved this guy way too much to enter into something so serious with such a profound sense of dread. Really, the most efficient way that I know to work through something is to write about it. And then, pretty quickly, as soon as the idea came to me, I realized this is a very interesting topic.”

“I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival.”

Which is why Committed is not only a memoir, it’s also a history of marriage through the ages and a social commentary on the institution. Gilbert even harks back to Plato’s Symposium and its discussion of soul mates: “Once upon a time . . . we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms—a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. . . . Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy.”

But in our happiness we neglected the gods, so Zeus punished mankind by tearing us apart, forcing us to spend the rest of our lives looking for the vanished half, our other soul. “This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one,” Gilbert writes.

Speaking from the home she and Felipe now share in Frenchtown, New Jersey (dishes clattering in the sink and her dog barking occasionally), Gilbert elaborates on Plato’s concept.

“It is the most beautifully put metaphor. That along with Schopenhauer’s porcupine tells you pretty much all you need to know about intimacy. You just put those two things together, the urge to merge combined with the reality of how prickly it almost always is, negotiating your space versus somebody else’s space.”

Gilbert muses on the reasons people marry, many of which in this country, she believes, have nothing to do with true commitment.

It’s important that “we know the difference between the desire to get married and the desire to have a really great party,” she says with a laugh. “Especially when we are young, those two things can blur and you spend a great deal more time planning the party than you do planning the marriage.”

She contrasts this with a couple she knew growing up, the Websters, who married because he, as a farmer, needed a wife and she, as a woman, needed a provider. Love, passionate or otherwise, had nothing to do with the decision. For years they worked their farm, raised their family, shared good times and bad. When her health declined, Mr. Webster took over care of his wife, bathing her, feeding her, seeing to her needs until her death—not the actions of a person devoid of love for his spouse.

“We, having elevated the idea of romance and infatuation to such a high state, feel like the happiest day of your life should be the day you get married. That in itself should be the pinnacle. What the Websters probably knew, even to such an extent that they certainly never defined it, never even had to say it, because they just knew it, was that where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as where it ends up. You can begin from a place of great pragmatism and then over the years grow into a very deep, wordless affection and loyalty, which I found very moving to remember.”

Thinking about the Websters, Gilbert adds, “Felipe has this very specific word called bate pape that means ‘chit chat.’ It’s his favorite word for what the whole purpose of intimacy is. He said when he was a kid, his favorite memories of childhood were lying in bed, listening to his parents chit chat, make bate pape. And that’s where their intimacy was based. It wasn’t necessarily in high-flung sexual passion, although it might have been at one time. It was just about having someone to sit with at the breakfast table and have a cup of coffee with and talk about nothing and everything. And that’s a stubborn, consistent human need.”

Gilbert’s venture into the historical and social implications of marriage in Committed, especially as it pertains to women, ranges far and wide, from the 11th century, when ideas about marriage were more liberal than today, to modern Europe, where there is far less emphasis on matrimony than in America. It all makes for interesting and informative reading.

Readers who are hoping for more memoir, less research, might be disappointed in this new book. But it accomplishes what Gilbert set out to do—to bring peace to her decision to marry Felipe.

“I certainly went in with a great deal of aversion and hostility to this institution and I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival—the fact that this thing endures. Anything that lasts that long, including cockroaches and crocodiles, you have to admire. There’s something kind of remarkable about that. What could be called a kind of fusty, decrepit old institution continues to reinvent itself and re-evolve with every century, every generation,” Gilbert says.

“So instead of feeling like I’m being stamped into this form that doesn’t suit me, I can feel like I’m part of a very long story that’s always being rewritten. And now I have the rewriting of that tale.”

Rebecca Bain is a freelance writer and editor in Nashville.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Review of The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert
Review of Stern Men by Elizabeth Gilbert

Elena Gorokhova’s transformative moment as a writer came in 2004 when she enrolled in Frank McCourt’s memoir class at the Southampton Writers Conference. For the previous 10 or 15 years she had occasionally written—and published—fictionalized bits and pieces about her childhood and youth in Leningrad during the Brezhnev era. Writing was a pleasure, even a necessity, but more tangible concerns—her teaching responsibilities, raising a child, cooking dinner—kept her from taking it seriously.

Then came Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes. “He was a brilliant storyteller, but also just as brilliant a teacher,” Gorokhova remembers during a call to her home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where she lives with her second husband, their daughter and her 95-year-old mother, a figure who looms large in Gorokhova’s enthralling memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs.

McCourt’s classroom included 11 other students and two celebrities who were auditing the class—actors Alan Alda and Anne Bancroft. “The synergy of these three enormously talented people provided this incredible, electric atmosphere. Magic happened every day in that classroom!” Gorokhova says. “From that moment, from that seminar, A Mountain of Crumbs all came together.”

One thing Gorokhova learned from McCourt was to focus on the “hot spots,” those defining moments in life when something significant changes. “He compared it to walking on the beach. ‘You can just look at the surface of things,’ he said, ‘or you can go with a metal detector and go for the gold that’s deep inside.’ ”

Gorokhova has clearly gone for the gold. The 20 episodes in A Mountain of Crumbs are extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail and offer an engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Beginning with Gorokhova’s mother’s brutal experiences after the Russian Revolution and in World War II as a doctor, the narrative follows Gorokhova through interactions with her friends and family members, her early education—in school and in the Soviet system—her intellectual and sexual awakenings and her growing disillusionment with the Communist government, until in 1980, at age 24, she meets and marries a brilliant American physics student and leaves Russia for good. Along the way, the wryly ironic Gorokhova illuminates the ludicrous tensions that existed between public and private life in the Soviet Union and tweaks the noses of authorities, including her mother.

“The United States is a different country and has different tensions and different kinds of stresses,” says Gorokhova, a linguist who has taught English as a second language since 1981. “What it doesn’t have is the kind of schizophrenic slicing of your soul in half that we had in the Soviet Union. There were things that I could say and that I could show to my family and friends. Then I would go outside, like everyone else, and I knew I couldn’t say or show that to people I went to school with or worked with, and especially not to any officials. It was the post-Stalin era, so they were not going to throw us into Siberia for a joke [during Stalin’s rule, Gorokhova’s uncle had disappeared in the Gulag after telling a joke to a foreigner]. But we had to be careful, we had to pretend everything was all right. The essence was that the government lied to us and we knew they were lying. They knew we knew they were lying. But they kept lying anyway. And we kept pretending to believe them. It was this duality, this divide, that ruled life there.”

For much of the narrative, Gorokhova associates that duality with her overprotective mother and an equally overprotective motherland. A somewhat more forgiving Gorokhova now says, “My mother was born three years before the Revolution. She went through famine and through two wars. She was a surgeon in World War II at the front. Her first two husbands didn’t last long and my father died when I was 10. She was very strong, obviously, and very controlling. Of course she loved us and was very protective of us but she didn’t show the warm side. She stifled. It occurred to me she was just like the country. What was the intention of the Soviet state? To have a just and equal society, to take care of the people. In the Soviet Union no one starved. No one was out of work. We all got our miserable wages for sitting at a desk for eight hours and doing crossword puzzles. The money was little, the food was scarce, but we were all in the same situation. There was this control and smothering on one side and this protective quality on the other.”

Gorokhova’s path away from the stifling system toward independence opened when a grade school friend played a recording of a basic English lesson. “It was so mesmerizing,” Gorokhova says, “an English male voice speaking English. It was captivating.”  Gorokhova begged her mother to pay for English lessons, and her mother finally agreed. Her knowledge of English afforded Gorokhova the opportunity to encounter Western visitors in Leningrad and to catch glimpses of a different sort of life in English-language books and movies. “It was putting these little bits and pieces together that told me that all this about capitalism rotting and crumbling and socialism succeeding and thriving was nonsense,” she says.

“And when I came here, I started writing in English,” Gorokhova continues. “I never tried to write anything in Russian when I lived in Russia. But when I came to this country, I felt the necessity and I allowed myself to write—in English. It took me a few years to learn the English rhetoric. Then in 2004 I saw that the legendary Frank McCourt was teaching his memoir class. I thought, this is ridiculous. Who is going to accept me into Frank McCourt’s class? But then I thought, why not? I submitted an application, and I got accepted. I was stunned. I was stunned.”

And from this beginning, an American writer was born.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

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A few weeks ago, author Dani Shapiro, her atheist husband and their young son went to hear a children’s choir perform on a village green near their New England home. They listened to hymns and Christmas carols interspersed with readings by Persian poet Rumi and Catholic author Thomas Merton. Then the family went home and lit Hanukkah candles.

“I thought, this is my idea of what it should be like,” Shapiro laughs during a call to her home in Connecticut. “If I hadn’t done the journey, though, all these contradictions would have felt wrong. I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

“I was looking not so much for religion . . . but a way of life that would allow for greater meaning.”

“The journey,” as Shapiro calls it, is her search to discover a deeper truth about life, which she details in her lovely mosaic of a memoir, Devotion. Courageous, authentic and funny, Devotion is Shapiro’s exploration of her own relationship with faith.

In her mid-40s, Shapiro found herself unsettled and out of balance. What did she truly believe? What kinds of values did she want to instill in her young son? Raised in a deeply religious family with strict rituals, Shapiro was drawn more to the spirituality of yoga and meditation, yet also attended monthly Torah studies. In Devotion, she asks: Is it all right to take a hodge-podge approach to spirituality, or does dabbling in different faiths signal a wishy-washiness, an unwillingness to choose a doctrine and stick with it? And how did her family history feed into her confusion about faith?

“I had reached the middle of my life and knew less than I ever had before,” she writes. “Michael, Jacob and I lived on top of a hill, surrounded by old trees, a vegetable garden, stone walls. From the outside things looked pretty good. But deep inside myself, I had begun to quietly fall apart. Nights, I quivered in the darkness like a wounded animal. Something was very wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.”

Shapiro got serious about meditating (“It’s a struggle for my kinetic, type-A, busy-minded self,” she admits). She went on silent retreats and practiced yoga. She read about spirituality. She talked with friends and relatives, devout and not. She pieced together fragments of her life, both harrowing and beautiful, that shaped who she is.

Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household with a father prone to panic attacks and a supremely difficult mother, Shapiro found her childhood fraught with confusion. By her 30s, she was a recovering drinker, had lost her father to a car accident (which she wrote about in her gritty first memoir, Slow Motion) and had a newborn with a potentially life-threatening seizure disorder. After hearing the planes hit the World Trade Center, Shapiro and her husband, screenwriter Michael Maren, sold their Brooklyn brownstone and headed for Connecticut.

But even in that bucolic setting, even when her son was no longer sick, her anxiety grew and she knew she needed more. “I was looking not so much for a religion—I had one and had mixed feelings about it—but a way of life that would allow for greater meaning, greater depth, greater awareness,” Shapiro says. “I desperately did not want to be 80 years and saying, ‘But I was just getting my life together.’ ”

Those are the words her mother uttered on her deathbed. In Devotion, Shapiro revisits their beyond-rocky relationship.
“I grew up hearing, ‘You made this happen,’ or ‘You poisoned this person against me,’ ” she says. “With my mother, I had to ask myself, is it ever OK to give up on a person?”

The answer, at least for Shapiro, was yes. After attending several therapy sessions with her mother, Shapiro talked with the psychiatrist, who told her something he’d never said to a client in 30 years of practice: She and her mother had no hope of forging a healthy relationship.

“It was such an incredibly intense moment,” Shapiro recalls. “It will remain one of the definitive moments of my life. The feeling of somebody totally unbiased corroborating that or saying, ‘Yeah, this really is impossible.’ It was in equal and opposing measures relief and incredibly painful.”

The relationship she had with her mother hasn’t tainted her own parenting. “I’m very glad I had a boy,” she admits. “During the sonogram, I heard it was a boy and was instantly and profoundly relieved. I think it would have been very complicated for me to have a daughter, and I think I would have been a very self-conscious mother of a daughter.”

Jacob, now a healthy grade-schooler, has adapted to the slower pace of life away from the city—although it took awhile. “When we first moved, there was a sidewalk out here bisecting a huge meadow and Jacob would not step off that sidewalk,” she laughs. “He went from this urban two-and-a-half-year-old to being this total country boy.”

Someday, that boy may read one or both of her incredibly honest memoirs, which yields mixed feelings in Shapiro. “Slow Motion is a book I’m really proud of,” she says. “I’ve often wondered whether I would have written it had I already had a family myself. I dread the day Jacob picks up that book. As a mother, I wouldn’t have written it; as a writer, I’m glad I did.”
Still, she’s learned to live with that, and with other quirky aspects of being a best-selling memoirist. “Nobody ever asks me anything about myself,” Shapiro says. “People say, ‘You must feel like I know everything about you.’ Actually, I don’t! That’s a strange phenomenon. I don’t feel I’ve exposed myself. I’ve written about the part of my life I wanted to write about.”

In one chapter of Devotion, a magazine editor offers to send Shapiro to India to report on yoga and meditation. A dream assignment! But Shapiro turns her down, saying, “My life is here.” And that is the beautiful simplicity of Shapiro’s journey: She doesn’t want to go to exotic, far-flung destinations, Eat, Pray, Love-style. She just wants to look inward. Ultimately, Devotion is the best kind of memoir—although it’s about someone else’s life, it makes you shine a flashlight on your own.

Attitudes toward assisted suicide for the terminally ill are seldom lukewarm—people either believe strongly that this course of action should be sanctioned or, just as strongly, that no one has the right to end another’s life, even for medical reasons and at that person’s request. Zoe FitzGerald Carter firmly believed in an individual’s right to take this difficult step until her own mother decided it was time to die. The anguish Carter felt, her conflicting emotions and the upheaval it caused in her family are painstakingly chronicled in her first book, a memoir titled Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Life and Death.

“It really was an incredibly difficult year,” says Carter, speaking from the home in Berkeley, California, that she shares with her husband and their two daughters. “I felt like my life had been derailed, and it was death and dying 24 hours a day. I started feeling very isolated from my husband and children because I felt like the predominant emotional event in my life was not with them. It was with this maddening, endless, difficult discussion with my mother which at some point I realized was only going to end when she died.”

There was never any doubt about whether Carter’s mother was terminally ill. Twenty years earlier, she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and she was already dependent on around-the-clock assistance for the smallest of tasks. It was obvious that she would soon be unable to get out of bed at all. Her pain was increasingly resistant to drugs. So why did Carter refuse to go along with her mother’s decision?

“I live in Berkeley, and there are people who’ve read this book and they say, what was your problem? Why didn’t you just help her kill herself? You should have helped her go, it was what she wanted. And I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t experienced anything like this or it’s all about politics and assisted suicide should be legal, end of story. I think it’s probably because people have this idea—oh yeah, if I get sick, take me out back and shoot me. But I think when they get down to it, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

It certainly proved complicated for Carter and her two sisters. While none of them wanted their mother to cease to be a living, breathing part of their lives, their responses to her decision to end her life were quite different. Her sister Hannah became Carter’s lifeline, the only person who shared her conflicting emotions. Katherine, the oldest sister, basically checked out of the whole scenario, saying their mother’s decision to die, her constant shifting of her “death date,” her demands that her daughters be by her side when she died, were all a shameless bid for attention—which Katherine refused to give her. It was important to Carter that this division among the sisters be chronicled in Imperfect Endings.

“I do think when a parent dies that what happens among the siblings, if there are siblings, is a really big part of the story: who shows up, who doesn’t show up, the different ways that they show up. The whole histories that we have in our families oftentimes emerge and intensify, and alliances and animosities and old regrets get reactivated and ratcheted up in these situations.”

Part of the impact of Carter’s book comes from her juxtaposition of chapters; she weaves her past into her memoir, giving the reader a more satisfying context to use as a contrast with the present. It becomes a reminder that an imperfect childhood often becomes irrelevant when a parent is dying. Musing on why this was important for her to bring out in her book, Carter says a relationship with a dying family member differs from any that has preceded it.

“When you’re with somebody who’s dying, you really do love them in this very pure way. You just love them and you’re there for them. It’s very healing. A lot of my anger and pain around my mother’s decision really dropped away at the end.”

Despite the gravity of the subject matter, there are sections of Imperfect Endings that are quite funny. The visit from the “Exit Guide” from the Hemlock Society is one such example: Carter’s snobbish mother cannot bring herself to allow this man to orchestrate her demise, not because she is bothered by “getting gassed,” but because he’s a good ol’ boy from Tulsa named Bud. This is, as Carter writes, a serious social handicap: “My mother is a solid Washington Democrat, a liberal even, but she’s also a cultural and intellectual snob, and this man is definitely not a member of the tribe.”

In the end, Carter’s mother (at the suggestion of her doctor) decides to refuse all food and water until her body ceases to function. It is this action that sways Carter to accept her mother’s choice of death and brings her to her mother’s bedside for the final time.

“I mean she didn’t eat, day after day after day. This was not a ‘dark night of the soul’ kind of moment where she took a bunch of pills and killed herself. This was something she talked about and thought about for a year and then persisted in, day after day at the end. . . . I saw her absolute commitment and unblinking strength during that fasting time.”

One cannot help but wonder, with all Carter went through, whether she would ever put her own family through such an ordeal. She says yes, but only if her daughters agreed that it was the right thing to do and were comfortable with the decision.

“I do believe assisted suicide should be legal, but you have to recognize that nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to be in a place where they feel that is the best option. It’s not easy. And there is a price you pay for it. I do feel like there’s a price my sisters and I paid emotionally and psychologically by participating in my mother’s death. I think it’s a tricky issue.”

But, as Carter says, it was a privilege to be by her mother’s side when she ended her years of pain, although it’s not a topic she brings up at cocktail parties or the school’s PTO.

“People are uncomfortable talking about death. People think it’s all just a big downer, and it’s scary and awful. I don’t think it’s all just scary and awful. I think there’s something very life-affirming about going through a death with somebody. There’s nothing like death to remind you of one of the most profound things about life, which is that it doesn’t go on forever. That sense of gratitude for being alive and awareness of the gift of life is a wonderful thing to experience.”

Rebecca Bain is a writer in Nashville.

In her new memoir, Spent, fashion journalist Avis Cardella shares her struggle with compulsive shopping—and how she eventually beat the habit. We asked her a few questions about why we shop, why she shopped and why we should all be more conscious about our spending.

There have been many compulsive shoppers throughout history, from Mary Todd Lincoln to Princess Di. Which do you most identify with, and why?
I can relate to many compulsive shoppers in different ways, but the shopper I feel I most identify with is Andy Warhol. Warhol was a compulsive shopper and something of a hoarder. Upon his death, his apartment was discovered to be over run with “stuff” including many unopened shopping bags. However, this isn’t why I relate to Warhol. I relate to Warhol because his art is based on desire and therefore on commerce. He understood commerce in this way—and he understood consuming.

This to me is thoroughly modern. Even though there have been reports of compulsive shoppers in the past, I think of this addiction as being modern. The scaffolds of social and economic supports that exist for a shopping addict to thrive are fascinating: easy credit, status chasing, shopping as entertainment, mall culture, are a few examples.

You mention the buying habits of celebrities, who conspicuously consume items like purses and shoes. Is this compulsive shopping, or someone who has the means simply indulging in collecting luxury items? Where do you draw the line between collection and compulsion?
Certainly, anyone who enjoys to shop and does so without any negative impact to his or her life is not a compulsive shopper. I do mention some celebrities in Spent, and their shopping habits, because I think we often look to celebrities for setting a standard. We want to see what they are buying and how much they are spending in order to emulate or approximate their style.

In terms of drawing a line, the thing mental health professionals say to look out for is when the shopping impinges on normal aspects of your life. If you obsess about shopping, if you are shopping when you should be working or taking care of other responsibilities, if you continually use shopping to avoid life and certainly if you are going into unmanageable debt, there is a problem.

Many Americans struggle to pay bills and afford basic necessities—were you worried that a shopping addiction might come across as frivolous to readers, or do you think the need to consume will resonate with everyone?
I wrote Spent because I wanted to understand why I had been consumed by the desire to consume. Why are we all consumed by desires to consume? I think many people today, not just shopping addicts, are questioning their relationship to spending and what fuels their desire to buy.

I was very conscious of the fact that shopping addiction has been depicted as being silly and frivolous in the media, and I wrote my story with honesty and seriousness because I know that it wasn’t frivolous at all. I believe this will resonate with a large part of the population.

How big a role do fashion and women’s magazines play in the growing number of women with a shopping addiction? In your own story?
There is very interesting research and theory on this subject and I’ve only read a fraction of it. I think there’s so much to question and observe on this subject. For the sake of brevity, here I’ll just respond to my own situation. There was a point when I was shopping compulsively and my self-esteem was low, and I may have placed too much emphasis on the pursuit of the perfected images I saw in fashion magazines. I know from my own experience how easy it was to fall into this pattern. I realize that we are bombarded with perfected images today and mostly from advertising that relates obtaining a product to obtaining the perfected self.

Lately, magazines seem to be trying to address concerns about unrealistic images and their impact. One thing I’ve learned though, is that it is possible to simply read fashion magazines to instruct and inform about new things or something that may be relevant to your life and understand that those perfected images are not real.

Do you still write freelance articles for fashion magazines, or is researching and writing about the industry a “trigger”?
I do still work as a freelance writer but write about fashion infrequently. But writing about fashion is not a trigger for any compulsive shopping today. When I’ve analyzed my own shopping addiction I realized that the event that precipitated excessive shopping was my mother’s death. I couldn’t cope with that tragedy and shopping came to the rescue. It was an activity in which I could hide. Part of my hiding meant hiding behind a mask of perfection. Therefore, clothing, accessories, and cosmetics became the tools of creating that perfect me.

Today, I no longer feel that need to hide or desire to escape and this leaves me to relate to fashion in a healthier way. I love clothing and dressing up but not in order to avoid my feelings or my self. Sometimes I’m in a store and do worry if one purchase will set off an avalanche and I’ll want to buy the entire place. However, that has never happened. I think it’s just a residual feeling. I do wonder, at times, if an emotional trauma, could trigger shopping again. But I’m guessing that I’ve traveled far from where I was 20 years ago and it probably wouldn’t be the case.

Of the 1990s, you say "fashion had replaced drugs as the defining cultural pulse point of the decade." How do you think that changed (or did it) in the 2000s? What do you see fashion’s role in society being during the 2010s?
There seem to be more ways to shop than ever! Online, on television, on your smart phone! 2010 looks like the year of exploding shopping opportunities. I think fashion and shopping is still a big cultural pulse point. I’ve noticed many things that indicate this is not going away anytime soon: hauling videos, reality shows about the fashion industry, websites such as polyvore.com where you can log on and be your own fashion editor.

That said, I do find more people talking about reevaluating their shopping. A consciousness about what acquiring all this “stuff” means, to us as a culture is creeping into more conversations. I’m hoping to open a dialogue on this: What is the difference between wanting and needing? When do we have enough? What are we searching for? I do still enjoy fashion and shopping and have found a healthier relationship to both. So, I know it is possible to rethink our relationship to consuming.

Describe the moment when you realized the depth of your problem with shopping.
I think the moment in the beginning of my book when I’m buying all that lingerie was when I realized I was in trouble. I wanted to believe that shopping was normal and that the way I related to it was perfectly normal. But that day, as I walked out of Barneys with my 20 pairs of underwear, and various other items, in my black glossy bag, it struck me that that kind of shopping was anything but normal.

At the end of Spent, you write about your shopping habits now—you allow yourself to “truly desire” something before making a purchase. Are there any items you currently have your heart set on? What designers or types of clothing/accessories are you drawn to today?
I’ve been so immersed in my book promotion and tour that I really have not had too much time to think about wanting anything! Regarding what I’m drawn to, I find myself drawn to things that have longevity. For example, a classic handbag that I’ll wear for years as opposed to the latest “it.” item. So my mandate now is craftsmanship, good materials and good design. I’m not as interested in a particular label as I am in things being well designed and well made.

You often talk about the way you used clothes to try on different personas and figure out who you were. What do you think your clothes say about you now?
I wear more color now and I think that’s a reflection of my being a happier person.

Somehow it seems fitting that a conversation with Gail Caldwell would be punctuated by the jubilant barks of a dog—fitting because her exquisite new memoir, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, is a celebration of friendship, both canine and human.

Critic and author Caldwell wrote the book as a moving tribute to her best friend, writer Caroline Knapp, who died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 42.

From her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, Caldwell explains that the source of said barking is her fluffy Samoyed, Tula, whom she lovingly describes as “a devil in a white suit.” Apparently, Tula protests when Gail is on the phone and at present is loudly voicing her disapproval and demanding a game of fetch. “She has me very well trained,” Caldwell (halfway) jokes.

Knapp would probably have appreciated this interruption because it was while walking their dogs that she and Caldwell forged their enduring, life-altering friendship. Though their time together was cut short by Knapp’s death, that was not, as Caldwell tells us in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, the end of their story. She opens her book with this poignant pronouncement, “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”

When they met in the early ’90s, Knapp and Caldwell, both single and living in Cambridge, instantly bonded over their shared love of books, dogs and being outdoors. Caldwell was a book critic for the Boston Globe—her work there earned her a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2001—while Knapp was the author of the acclaimed 1996 memoir Drinking: A Love Story [read our review of Knapp's Appetites].

As their friendship grew, they learned that, despite different upbringings and a nine-year age difference, they had much in common, including their past struggles with alcohol. Caldwell writes eloquently about alcoholism and sobriety but doesn’t linger on the subject. When she does offer insights, they are profound and spot-on, but, she says, “Once you’ve been sober 25 years, the story distills itself. . . . It was a baseline, but I didn’t need to tell that whole story.”

Instead, in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell concentrates on the intimacies and intricacies of their extraordinary friendship. “About halfway through our friendship, I think I realized that it was, in fact, unique,” she says.

In the book, Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.” This is not to say, however, that the relationship was without its share of conflict. Both women were deeply private and self-reliant—and both were writers. Rather than ignore problems, they faced them head on. “We loved to dissect and explain and process and wonder. Because we acknowledged the rivalry between us, Caroline and I went toward each other instead of away from each other.”

She says that welcoming their competitive spirit, a “great energy,” allowed them to challenge themselves physically and creatively. Caldwell, for instance, helped Knapp become a stronger swimmer, while Knapp introduced Caldwell to the Zen-like pleasures of rowing on the Charles River.

They learned other things, too, like how to be vulnerable and how to trust in and lean on someone you love—not easy things for such fiercely independent women. 

Caldwell especially appreciated Knapp’s unflinching honesty. “I’m worried you’re sick of me,” Caldwell says she once confided in Knapp, who responded matter-of-factly, “I’m not, but what if I were? Big deal.” She says, “I remember feeling like I could exhale; it was a wonderfully liberating moment.”

She also admired Knapp’s quiet intensity. “We could always match each other in terms of intensity,” she says. “She could outdo me in terms of just staying power, and I didn’t know many people who could. And I don’t just mean on the river, I mean on the phone. That was one of the things we recognized in each other from the beginning.”

She elaborates on this connection in the book. “For both of us, in different ways, the volume of the world had been turned up a notch,” Caldwell writes. “Even on that first afternoon we spent together—a four-hour walk through late-summer woods—I remember being moved by Caroline: It was a different response from simple affection or camaraderie.”

Readers will also find themselves moved by Caroline, and will almost certainly be moved to tears when she is diagnosed with lung cancer that has spread to her liver and brain. The description of her illness and death is spare but wrenching.

Caldwell, however, also laughingly recalls times when they acted more like insecure teenage girls than self-assured grown women, playfully exclaiming, “I think you’re prettier than me!” or “I like your arms better than mine.” She pauses at the memory of her friend’s strong, rower’s physique. “She had these beautiful arms,” she muses, and you sense that she can still see her with searing clarity in her mind’s eye, suntanned and laughing by the river.

When writing about the life and death of a close friend, it would be easy to lapse into sentimentality, but Caldwell avoids this pitfall, instead offering a meditation on grief that is tender but never mawkish. “I always remember her being skeptical about any story that did not tell how difficult human relationships are,” Caldwell says. “Grief itself gives you the great capacity to make everything perfect in the friendship . . . and I could hear Caroline saying, ‘You’ve got to talk about the struggles . . . you’ve got to talk about how hard this was.’ I owe that honesty in many ways to her.”

About the process of writing the Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell reflects, “I was very scared when I started to work on this. There was a point where I thought that I would never write about Caroline and me. And then there became a point after that when I thought I couldn’t not write about it. I really went from one extreme to the other.”

As she grappled with this dilemma, she says, “Caroline was really my compass.” For a time, Caldwell would walk in the evening with Clementine (her beloved, aged Samoyed, a major player in the book), look up at the sky and ask Caroline, “Can I do this?” The answer she received time and again proved as insistent as two-year-old Tula, who throughout this interview continues to nudge Gail with her snout in a dogged plea to play ball.

Caldwell explains that she felt compelled to share this story in part because, “One of the most important things to me is knowing that there are people out there for whom Caroline’s book [Drinking] meant a great deal . . . and now I get to give people the Caroline that I knew.”

Caldwell, who says her book is “a tribute to memory,” adds, “There were passages I wrote with tears streaming down my face . . . but there was something else about it that was restorative. There was some way it captured the love and intensity between us, encapsulated it, which I guess is what writing does.” Especially writing as luminous as this.  

After Waiting for Snow in Havana unexpectedly won a National Book Award in 2003, Carlos Eire began hearing from schools asking him to apply for jobs teaching Cuban history. His evocative memoir of growing up in Cuba when Fidel Castro was coming to power had led many people to assume that his academic specialty was the history of his native country.

“I had to tell them, ‘I’m sorry, you have the wrong man,’ ” Eire says with a characteristic warm, wry laugh during a call to his home in Guilford, Connecticut. “People are often extremely surprised to learn that I teach late medieval and early modern European religious history.”

In fact, in his non-memoirist identity—the one where he spent his early career studying John Calvin and Calvinism, where he writes scholarly, footnoted tomes on such matters as the early Reformation and “the art and craft of dying in 16th-century Spain,” and where he currently teaches a two-semester survey course on “all 2,000 years” of Catholic church history—Carlos M.N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs professor of history and religious studies at Yale University.

But for eight weeks in the summer of 2009, writing mostly at night in his office above the family garage, Eire once again put aside his professorial identity and “got back to footnote-less writing.” The resulting memoir, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy, is just as vivid and compelling as its predecessor. It, too, flashes with Eire’s jubilant humor and inventive wit. But it also tells a story that is shadowed by sadness.

Learning to Die in Miami opens with the 11-year-old Eire’s arrival in Miami in 1962. Along with his older brother, Tony, he was one of 14,000 children who fled Castro’s Cuba in what became known as the Pedro Pan airlift. “When the flights ceased abruptly in October of 1962,” Eire says, “there were still 80,000 on the island waiting to leave.” Among those was the boys’ mother. So for the next three years the brothers bounced miserably from place to place until they were finally reunited with their mother in Chicago, where things changed without getting all that much better.

Up to a point, Eire says, his story is a representative one. “For all of us, there was the pattern of arriving at the camps and being sent somewhere else. Many of us were sent to institutions or to foster families. Many of us bounced from one place to another. And then there was the even more painful part of the pattern—reuniting with your family. . . . [You] had to care for your mom. You had to go apartment hunting and find an apartment rather than the adult, because the adult was totally clueless and helpless and didn’t speak the language.”

But as common as it might be, Eire’s story also had its own unique miseries. Chief among them is the surprisingly long time he and his brother spent at a place Eire calls with withering irony the Palace Ricardo. An unholy mix of a Dickensian orphanage and Lord of the Flies, it was a quasi-institution whose proprietors resented the privileged backgrounds of Eire and his brother and allowed the older, bigger, more criminally inclined boys to prey upon the younger ones.

“It was a kind of crucible,” Eire says. “I had to decide who I was. Was I going to be like these thugs? Was I going to be intimidated by them or not? It taught me a lot about human nature, too. You come to terms with who you are. Most people come to that gradually through adolescence as they become adults. Being in a place like that, you have to come to terms with it very abruptly and definitively.”

And the impact of those experiences carries forward to this very day. “It has made it very difficult for me to be a good parent,” Eire—the father of a son in high school and another son and a daughter in college—says ruefully. “When they’re having problems—I’ve learned not to do this because it backfires—but my [instinct] is to say, ‘After all I went through? You have it so easy. Why don’t you just get up and go?’ That’s not a good thing to do. I have to put myself in their place, and that’s nearly impossible for me to do.”

As he movingly relates in Learning to Die in Miami, Eire found both solace and direction through his interest in school, an interest his brother did not share, and through a book: The Last Temptation of Christ. “It’s a very funny thing, this book,” Eire says. “You were only allowed to take one book with you from Cuba. I very quickly outgrew the three changes of clothing I had brought with me. So the two things that were left to me that were physical contact with my family were the religious medal my dad gave me and this book. Plus my mother and grandmother had given me instructions that if I ever had a problem I should just open the book at random and I would find an answer. I kept doing that but I wasn’t ready. ”

Eire’s memories of the events he describes so vividly in Learning to Die in Miami came flooding back to him during a 2009 trip to Eastern Europe. The minute he set foot in Prague, he says, “I knew immediately that I was back in the Soviet empire, or former empire, and I felt like a double exile. . . . Here I was in the very place my parents had tried to keep me from back then. It made me feel really weird and it just kept escalating as I traveled farther and farther. The high point was being in Berlin and seeing the remnants of the Wall and being able to move freely, so freely, on a bicycle between East and West. It just blew my mind. It reawakened all sorts of feelings and memories. And a lot of it was kind of painful. There was a lot of pain involved in thinking that for 20 years now these people have been free, and my people are not.”

Then Eire tells a humorous anecdote. While in the Czech Republic, he discovered there was a Museum of Communism. It amazed him and it set him to questioning who he was. “I wondered: Am I an item to be exhibited in the Museum of Communism? Or am I supposed to be a visitor to the Museum of Communism? I asked one of our Czech tour guides—she was about my age—‘Hey, have you been to the Museum of Communism?’ She said [here Eire exaggerates a curt, indignant Eastern European accent], ‘I do not need to see it. I lived in it.’ ”

Eire says he returned from that trip feeling exactly the same intense inspiration he felt when he began writing Waiting for Snow in Havana. He worked nights, writing from memory in a kind of white heat. The result is a book that, like its predecessor, is a deeply affecting portrait of a difficult boyhood, an unusual coming-of-age story that combines laughter with an abiding sense of sorrow.

Lisa Scottoline answers her phone. “Hello?” she says. “Hello?” At least, I think that’s what she says. Hard to tell with the multiple dogs barking hoarsely and frantically in the background.

She hangs up. I call back. “Hello?” she says, laughing. “Can you call my cell phone? I can’t hear you well on this phone.” I call her cell phone, joking about how glad I am to have her secret backup number. This sends her into peals of laughter.

“Yes, it’s my secret phone number,” she says drily. “If you know any single men age 55, please pass it along.”

Thus begins a raucous conversation with one of today’s most prolific and popular writers. In addition to her new collection of essays, My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space, in March Scottoline published her 17th suspense novel, Think Twice, which promptly hit the New York Times bestseller list.

For this dog-loving, Diet Coke-swilling single mom, no topic is taboo in conversation or in writing. Her essays—many of which are culled from her Philadelphia Inquirer column “Chick Wit”—explore the minutiae of middle age, from facial hair to watching her daughter move out of the nest and into the big city. That daughter, 24-year-old Francesca Scottoline Serritella, contributes several effervescent essays to the collection.

The new book’s subtitle, “The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman,” is Scottoline’s nod to the unsung women who she believes make the world go around.

“We live in a culture that is obsessed with Batman and Iron Man and superpowers, and that usually morphs into fiction with men with all kinds of abilities,” Scottoline says. “I always thought, where is that voice for women? Where is the ordinary woman who really does have superpowers? Anybody who has more than two dogs and more than two children, you have superpowers. Anybody who has a dog and a job has superpowers. Anyone with a successful marriage, you have superpowers. Anyone who makes dinner every night and manages not to make chicken every other night, you have superpowers. These are the stuff of everyday life. Instead of ignoring it, I wanted to highlight it and celebrate it.”

She doesn’t just celebrate everyday life—she jumps in and swims in it. No subject is too big (aging parents) or too small (clogged drains). Scottoline examines everything with a razor wit and a keen eye for how the little stuff can add up to a big life.

In perhaps her bravest essay in this collection (and that’s saying something for a woman with a book titled Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog), Scottoline writes about the horror of finding a gray chin hair.

“The truth is, unless you’re wincing just a little, you’re not writing about something that matters,” Scottoline says. “I want everything original and fresh and real. Cutesy, twee, trite: I don’t want to be any of that. I want it to be real and true.”

It’s this willingness to not just expose but flaunt her flaws that endears Scottoline to her readers. She readily admits that she is quite possibly an animal hoarder (two cats and four dogs—beloved dog Angie died this summer). She has a full toolbox of procrastination tools, including an unhealthy addiction to weather.com. (“It’s not a time waster,” she insists. “It’s an avoidance behavior, which is slightly different.”)

But if there is a central theme to My Nest Isn’t Empty, it’s that there’s value in finding peace with yourself, warts and all. In an essay titled “Unexpected,” Scottoline writes about spending one Christmas without her daughter Francesca:

“You should know that Daughter Francesca and I have spent every Christmas together ever since she was one, when Thing One and I divorced,” Scottoline writes. “She would spend Christmas Eve with him, and the day with me, and we were all happy about that, or at least as happy as anybody can be when their kid has to split herself in two.”

She and her best friend, Franca, headed to the movies to drown their sorrows in Diet Coke, Raisinets and Meryl Streep. Turns out an entire theater of women had the same idea. Scottoline realized in that moment, laughing with a room full of strangers at a chick flick on Christmas, that it was OK to be happy, in a different way.

“I’d love to have a man in my life or a marriage that lasted longer than the average hard-boiled egg, but this is real life,” Scottoline says. “I don’t want people who have that life, too, to feel ‘less than.’ I stand in for them.”

That’s not to say that her two divorces (from Thing One and Thing Two) have left her completely cold to the idea of marrying again. In a recent Inquirer column, she even wrote, “A half-glass of wine, and I’m off and running. A margarita and I might remarry.”

So . . . could a third time be the charm?

“The prerequisite is a date,” she laughs. “It ain’t easy to get a date at 55 when you have gray chin hair and you never leave the house.” (It should be mentioned here that photos of Scottoline sprinkled throughout the book reveal a vibrant,  fit woman with laughing eyes and really good hair.)

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” she concludes coyly. “You never know. Men read BookPage, right?”

Here’s an old-fashioned love story that will make you fan yourself, swoon and maybe even break into a light sweat: how a city girl fell in love with a country boy and changed the course of her life, all because of passion and her weak-kneed reaction to an unexpected relationship.

In the mid-’90s, Ree Drummond was in the process of breaking up with a guy in California when she came home to Oklahoma to regroup. She would apply to law schools in Chicago, find an apartment and take it easy under her parents’ roof before starting the rest of her life. It was a “self-imposed pit stop.”

“I think everyone has a story—I've just found a fun way to tell my story and convey my day-to-day life.”

That was until she saw a Marlboro Man-type character from across the room at a smoky bar, a moment deliciously depicted in her romantic new memoir, The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels—A Love Story.

“He was tall, strong and mysterious, sipping bottled beer and wearing jeans and, I noticed, cowboy boots. And his hair. The stallion’s hair was very short and silvery gray—much too gray for how young his face said he was, but just gray enough to send me through the roof with all sorts of fantasies of Cary Grant in North by Northwest.”

Fast forward 14 years. Drummond married Marlboro Man, became a full-fledged ranch wife in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and had four children. She launched ThePioneerWoman.com in 2006 to share stories with out-of-town friends and family, and nearly five years later the website has inspired a #1 New York Times best-selling cookbook, earned a Bloggie Award for Best Weblog of the Year—twice—and drawn countless fans who look to Drummond for easy-to-follow, cowboy-approved recipes, insights on life in the country and humor. (Ever suffered from armpit stains in the most inconvenient of times? You’ve got a sympathetic sister in PW, as she’s affectionately known on her site.)

During a period of writer’s block in 2007, Drummond decided to entertain her website readers with the story of her courtship with Marlboro Man. That story blossomed into 40-plus online chapters and finally became The Pioneer Woman. The book includes the chapters available on ThePioneerWoman.com, along with an all-new section about the couple’s first year of marriage—what Drummond calls “a dose of reality” that chronicles the period when she was dealing with the divorce of her parents, a rough pregnancy and business troubles on the ranch.

I recently visited Drummond at her family’s ranch in Pawhuska and got a firsthand look at the landscape so present in the book. The feeling of driving down the long, dusty gravel road to Drummond’s property was a bit surreal, since the night before I’d read a scene in which the Pioneer Woman runs her car into a ditch on an early date with Marlboro Man. Luckily, I made it to the ranch in one piece.

Drummond and I got right down to business talking about her “fizzy love story,” as she describes it. It’s officially categorized as a memoir, although PW thinks “memoir has a little bit more of a cerebral, serious meaning—presidents write memoirs.”

Whatever you call it, The Pioneer Woman is perfect reading for Valentine’s Day, whether you’re celebrating a lasting love or still looking for The One. Yes, it is mushy and occasionally sentimental, but I’d venture to say even the most cynical of readers will be charmed by Drummond’s hilarious story of being won over by a cowboy. In just a matter of weeks, she went from having a career and going out on the town in Los Angeles to working cattle and smooching under the stars in rural Oklahoma; from vegetarian to steak lover; from a woman unsatisfied with her romantic relationships to a woman hopelessly in love. It’s a dizzying transition and an adventure, and as PW writes in the introduction, “I hope it reminds you of the reasons you fell in love in the first place. And if you haven’t yet found love, I hope it shows you that love often can come to find you instead . . . probably when you least expect it.”

When I met with Drummond at the ranch’s beautifully restored lodge, it was easy to see how an urbanite could become captivated by such a remote locale. From the sweeping property below the house, to the beauty of the horses in the surrounding pastures and the calm of a still landscape, Drummond’s view made me feel a greater sense of peace and freedom than I’d felt in months of city living.

When I asked if she ever thinks about what life would have been like if she hadn’t moved to the country, Drummond answers without pause: “Yeah, I shudder. I am thoroughly convinced that I am where I was meant to wind up. In the country we really lead an isolated life . . . we’re just together, we’re out here, we’re on the land and in the quiet. It’s not that everyone needs that to maintain some level of peace and contentment, but I needed it. It centered me.” During our conversation, Drummond often comes back to the idea that her choice is not the choice for everybody, but sitting on the couch in the cozy lodge and surrounded by wide-open windows that overlook the ranch, her choice seems to make a lot of sense. That much nature is good for the soul.

In my time on the ranch, PW comes across pretty much exactly as she presents herself on her website—warm and funny with a hint of self-deprecation. She gives me cinnamon rolls for the road (I sampled them before I left Osage County) and frets about the puffiness of her face when she sits for a quick video interview.

After talking with Drummond for an hour, what stands out the most is her insistence that her tale is perfectly normal. “I know this sounds a little funny,” she says, “but I contend that I am not an extraordinary person; there’s nothing extraordinary about me or my story. I think everyone has a story—I’ve just found a fun way to tell my story and convey my day-to-day life.”

In spite of all the heart pounding described in her book, Drummond maintains that she does not live in a romance novel. “I don’t believe that romance conquers all and love conquers all. But the passion—I don’t know—it propels you forward through the tough times.”

There is a tall order of passion in The Pioneer Woman—although as my grandmother would say, the specific bedroom details are “left to the imagination.” (The story is billed as a bodice-ripper, but Drummond quipped to me that “it’s like the first little seam is ripped—that’s about it.”)

“That’s not to say that a 20-year-old marriage or a 40-year-old marriage has to have daily bursts of roses and chocolates and diamonds,” she says, “but I remember through the rough times when we were first married—my parents split, all of the bumps in the road—I really was sustained by this guy. My heart would race when I was around him.” (Surprisingly, Marlboro Man has not read the complete saga of which he is the hero. He read a few installments online, only commenting if his wife got an agricultural fact wrong. “He was like my fact-checker when it came to cattle and horses and that sort of thing,” Drummond says.)

From wardrobe malfunction to prairie fire, from fireworks-worthy kisses to a disaster of a honeymoon, The Pioneer Woman is a fun and sexy romp with a most unexpected setting: a working cattle ranch. This romantic journey is a delight, even though we know from the beginning what the ending will bring (reader, she married him). As you experience the woozy sensation of early love through Drummond’s writing, you’ll wonder why she even thought about packing those bags and heading to Chicago. These days, so does she.

“I was completely in love with him,” the Pioneer Woman recalls. “In retrospect, there was no way that I was going to leave in the throes of what I was feeling.”

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book.

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so cheap. Everybody gets a book? You open a restaurant and you get a book?” recalls Hamilton, whose essays about the intersection of food and life have appeared in the New York Times, Food + Wine and other publications. The flattery would have convinced others, but Hamilton wasn’t so easily persuaded. “I love books. I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.” And so she said no to every offer of a book contract or agent representation, choosing instead to focus on her restaurant business.

But as Hamilton’s skills developed, both with a pen and with a stove, she thought she could make a greater contribution. The result is Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a riveting memoir that explores her sometimes tumultuous family life and years spent in catering kitchens before opening Prune. The book has drawn ecstatic praise from fellow chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali.

Hamilton’s story begins with idyllic childhood family dinners with her French mother, artist father and four siblings at their rural Pennsylvania home. But when Hamilton’s parents divorce, the children’s lives are flipped on end. During one summer, weeks pass when then-13-year-old Hamilton and her brother Simon are literally left alone. That’s when Hamilton steps into a professional kitchen for the first time, trying to make money to support her prematurely adult life. She wanders into a kitchen in her tourist town and is put to work peeling potatoes. “And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start,” Hamilton writes.

"I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.”

The ensuing journey takes her down a path seasoned with trials, errors and colorful relationships. Hamilton moves to New York, is in and out of college (it takes her three tries to graduate) and kitchens, often scraping by financially while learning about hard living from her fellow kitchen staff. After years of work in restaurants, catering kitchens and even a summer camp, Hamilton decides to pursue her long-held desire to be a writer. And so, with 30 on the horizon, she leaves her final freelance cooking gig and her girlfriend to head for the Midwest and the University of Michigan’s MFA writing program. It’s not long before she finds herself back in a catering kitchen, and upon her return to New York, Hamilton is seduced by the idea of her own restaurant—and later by an Italian man who pulls her into a green-card marriage, all while charming her with family summers in Puglia, Italy, familial joviality and Italian cooking. The result is a beautifully told tale of a colorful and sometimes spicy life. 

The book’s conversation unfolds at an easy pace, like getting to know a new friend, tale by life-defining tale, and Hamilton’s writing becomes almost electric when she sees a restaurant space that could become her own. Her style mimics both the winding life path she’s traveled and her casual, conversational attitude. “Basically, it’s an invitation. So here, I’m going to start the conversation,” she explains, “and hopefully people will reciprocate.”

The time Hamilton spent crafting the memoir mimicked her story’s more exhilarating moments. As she wrote, she juggled two children under the age of three and a bustling restaurant. Sleep wasn’t a priority, and in the process Hamilton gave up on striving for balance.

“If I keep pursuing it, I feel like I’ve failed constantly. So now I’m resigned to the idea that it is not balance. It’s a binge and purge,” Hamilton explains from Prune’s dining room. “I just have to change my mind about whether that sucks or not.”

Sometimes that meant seeing her children only when they were asleep. On other occasions, she left her restaurant staff to run the kitchen while she spent time with her sons. And when it came time to transform the first draft of Blood, Bones & Butter into the finished product, the restaurant’s office became Hamilton’s refuge.

But she wonders, what’s the alternative? “I have this restaurant that was very popular, I have this book deal, I have these incredible children. What was I going to do, say no to all of that? It sucks that it all happened at the same time, but that’s a high-class set of problems right there,” she says, laughing. “I could die now and feel content.” 

Betty White has been on a roll—a tear, really—for decades. Her show business career has only paused a few times since the late 1940s, when she debuted at the dawn of television with the ad-libbed “Hollywood on Television,” then moved to her own pioneering sitcom “Life with Elizabeth,” which she co-created, co-wrote and produced in the 1950s at the ripe old age of 31.

“I didn’t know any better,” says White, who is now 89. “There wasn’t an alternative—the job was there to be done and you did it. I was so lucky to get in television on the ground floor when it was starting out. I was on five and a half hours a day, six days a week, so it was like going to television college.”

"I have been so blessed. If you ever hear me complain about anything, throw me away!"

While attending “television college,” White hosted classic TV game shows and starred in many award-winning sitcoms including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls.” Last fall she hosted “Saturday Night Live” and now she stars in the cable television hit “Hot in Cleveland.” All the while, White was writing books about her time in Hollywood and her love of animals, beginning with Pet-Love: How Pets Take Care of Us in 1985.

“The bottom line is: I’m the luckiest old broad!” White says by phone from her Hollywood home, her beloved Golden Retriever Ponti on her lap. “I have been so blessed. If you ever hear me complain about anything, throw me away!”

Her new book, If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t), has the scoop on her white-hot career and latest projects, including impressions from the sets of SNL and “Hot in Cleveland” and her work on films like The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and The Lost Valentine with Jennifer Love Hewitt.

White also touches on her childhood, her funny parents and her charmed early days in show business, as well as her present popularity, with anecdotes about the perils of typecasting and fascinating stories from her long performing career. Chapters include Body and Mind (“Somewhere along the line there is a breaking point, where you go from not discussing how old you are to bragging about it.”); Love and Friendship (including being a stepmom and dating when most interesting prospects are “much younger men—maybe only 80”); and Animal Kingdom, with touching but unsentimental stories about the animals she has rescued, loved and lost. The final section, Since You Asked, features White’s spirited ruminations on integrity, aging, keeping your head on your shoulders and remaining relevant in a “tough business.”

“Right now I’m doing ‘Hot in Cleveland’ with the greatest gals in show business,” White says. “We all adore each other! From the word go, we fell in love. I’m having the best best time. But that’s a whole different experience from going home and writing.”

White and husband Allen Ludden (who died in 1981) were good friends with John Steinbeck, and she was inspired by the author’s work ethic, right down to his habit of writing with a dog lying on his feet. She writes all of her books in longhand and finds that a fresh pack of paper is her greatest incentive to write. This funny, gregarious lady can think of nothing better than being alone with her animals, writing.

“It’s such a private thing,” White says. “You work it out in your head and you can work anywhere. All of a sudden, if something hits you that you want to put down on paper—it’s just a lovely experience.”

White wanted to be a park ranger or writer when she grew up and jokes that her first book was written at 14. “I wrote it with a pen dipped in ink, in longhand. It was a wonderful original story,” she deadpans. “A girl on a ranch and her brother was sick. I didn’t know quite how to finish it off. It was 106 pages. Finally I had an idea: It turned out to be a dream. She woke up and her brother was well and everything was fine. I just thought it was genius.”

If You Ask Me is White’s sixth book (her recently reissued book, Here We Go Again: My Life in Television, “is the closest to an autobiography”) and she has another one planned for next summer, a photography book with anecdotes about the animals at the Los Angeles Zoo, where she was zoo commissioner for three years and an active board member for 47 years. The little girl who collected blown-glass animal figures rather than dolls has been a lifelong advocate for animals, also spending 48 years on the board of the Morris Animal Foundation. The organization funds studies into specific health problems of dogs, cats, horses and wildlife, including gorillas in Rwanda.

In the book, White tells about her up-close visits with Koko the signing gorilla at the zoo.

“She’s my baby!” White says. “I had the privilege of visiting with Koko three times. She knows me now—she calls me ‘Lipstick.’ When she sees me she runs her fingers across her lips. She’s so magnificent, I can tell you.

“That’s my love—my animal work,” White says. “I have to stay in show business to pay for all my animal work!”

From her 1950s TV appearances to her recent SNL skits, Betty White has been the very definition of a trooper, throwing herself into making people smile. But this feisty octogenarian refuses to take credit for her incredible likability with audiences across generations.

“Have I got you fooled,” she says. “But I’m not going to talk you out of it.”