Saturday, April 13, 2013

What is Jessica Soffer reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Jessica Soffer, author of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.

Her entry begins:
Someone just gave me Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary and I can’t take it. I just can’t take it. Every word is gold. Every phrase I want tattooed on myself. Even her minutiae is brilliant. Especially her minutiae. And there are these moments in which you can tell, she tells you, that she is deeply, truly, “divinely” happy, as she puts it, and you forget how it ends. And then you remember and it’s...[read on]
About Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, from the publisher:
This is a story about accepting the people we love—the people we have to love and the people we choose to love, the families we’re given and the families we make. It’s the story of two women adrift in New York, a widow and an almost-orphan, each searching for someone she’s lost. It’s the story of how, even in moments of grief and darkness, there are joys waiting nearby.

Lorca spends her life poring over cookbooks, making croissants and chocolat chaud, seeking out rare ingredients, all to earn the love of her distracted chef of a mother, who is now packing her off to boarding school. In one last effort to prove herself indispensable, Lorca resolves to track down the recipe for her mother’s ideal meal, an obscure Middle Eastern dish called masgouf.

Victoria, grappling with her husband’s death, has been dreaming of the daughter they gave up forty years ago. An Iraqi Jewish immigrant who used to run a restaurant, she starts teaching cooking lessons; Lorca signs up.

Together, they make cardamom pistachio cookies, baklava, kubba with squash. They also begin to suspect they are connected by more than their love of food. Soon, though, they must reckon with the past, the future, and the truth—whatever it might be. Bukra fil mish mish, the Arabic saying goes. Tomorrow, apricots may bloom.
Learn more about the book and author at Jessica Soffer's website.

Writers Read: Jessica Soffer.

--Marshal Zeringue