Christine S. O’Brien - Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing

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To Tim

For his unwavering belief

Id like to thank my writing professors from the Saint Marys College of California MFA in Creative Writing program: Marilyn Abildskov, for her passion and dedication to her students, and for seeing me as a writer, so for the first time I saw myself as a writer, too; and the late Wesley Gibson, who also saw in my writing ability what I was not yet ready to recognize.

I also want to acknowledge my Book Writing World mentor and teacher, Elizabeth Stark, for her razor-sharp insight and for driving home the practical nuts and bolts of story craft. Id like to thank my fellow BWW writers, mainly Susan Sasson, Robert Ward, Vijaya Nagarajan, Jody Brettkelly, Mollie McNeil, and Maureen Fan, for setting the writing bar so high; for their support, positive feedback, and companionship in the trenches. I want to acknowledge editors Sydny Miner and Brooke Warner, who helped with the shaping of my original proposal.

Thank you to my children, Emily and Luke, for your confidence in me and willingness to listen and let me bounce ideas off of you, even when you had better things to do.

I want to acknowledge my brothers, who, despite being characters in Crave, have never offered me anything but encouragement and love.

Thank you to my agent, Carole Bidnick, for her hunch when she read my initial query letter and for her relentless business sense. Thank you to Michael Flamini, my editor at St. Martins Press, for his guidance and his story instinct and for helping to bring Crave to its fullest potential. Id like to acknowledge Gwen Hawkes, for her willingness and generosity of spirit and patience during the editing process, and all the editors whose eyes have been on this book for their attention to detail. Thank you, as well, to Dori Weintraub, Clare Maurer, Jordan Hanley, and Brant Janeway. I so appreciate St. Martins Press for its professionalism and for taking on Crave .

Id like to also thank Susan Pollock, my fathers literary arm while I was growing up, who served as a role model and a source of loving validation.

Thank you to my friends for encouraging me every step of the way. I appreciate all the championing that has come from so many.

With great love.

My mothers bedroom is hot and stuffy and exactly as it was when she died in it a month ago. Every inch of space has been piled high with stuff. I feel my once-familiar claustrophobia as my brother Jay and his wife, Macie, and Tim and I step around folders, piles of linens, stacks of papers and jazz and classical music CDs, and boxes filled with various health devices. In one corner alone there are three boxes of Himalayan salt lamps, another three filled with portable air ionizers, as we vie for somewhere to stand. Though she managed to distill an entire lifetime and eight moves from her farm-girl childhood in Illinois to a glamorous life in New York City, to Beverly Hills, and back to the East Coast, to all that remains here in one bedroom and one hall closet in this two-bedroom apartment in West LA, its impossible to ignore the heaviness of purpose that descended when my mother set her mind to something. Heaviness evidenced by the press surrounding us now.

How do we even start? I say.

The cedar chest from my fathers bachelor apartment on Fifth Avenue, where she lived when they were first married, sits against one wall alongside the queen-size headboard. The bed itself fills the small room. The upright piano my brother Greg bought her last year takes up another wall. A tall, many-drawered dresser and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf each fill a wall; her rolltop desk and exercise machinea treadmill type of thing but really, with all its handles and protrusions and knobs, unexplainable, maybe it vibrated, she had something she used to lie on that vibrated at the house in Queenshave been pushed up against the fourth. Around these larger structures and piled on them, covering every available surface, items have been laid one on top of the next, like strata, each representing a different period of her life. The musty crocheted throws from my fathers study in the Dakota sit folded on top of the braided rug my Midwestern grandmother sewed from my grandfathers socks and ties. Boxes of newspaper articles about Illinois Jacquet, jazz great and my mothers late partner of twenty-three years, are stacked in corners. Boxes and crates filled with who knows what have been jammed under the bed so tightly, there isnt even a sliver of light. There are layers of smells, too, clinging to their objects: another, invisible kind of strata. The minty stink coming from the jars of all-natural ointments and salves sitting on her bedside table and crowding the small sink by the hallway closet, decades-old incense from the ashram tucked out of sight and sweetly cloying with the edge of something sharpsandalwood?the smell reminding me once again of my mothers ramrod allegiance to these adopted spiritual practices, the ever-present sweet spice of ginger and turmeric and cumin and the oregano aroma of Ayurvedic herbs that clung to everything of hers, even in life.

Macie lifts the top off the cedar chest to reveal the silk and wool comforters I remember from our visits to my grandparents farmthe silk worn through, the wool stuffing coming apart nowand the sheet music that sat propped on my mothers Steinway grand during our childhood. Also inside, my grandfathers WWI uniform, each piece of clothing wrapped carefully in gauze: green wool trousers, shirt, jacket, hat, dog tags that bear his name. This isnt a bedroom; its a museum, the reason she could endure this suffocating squeeze. Each day, even, she was living the important purpose of preserving and teaching what she had come to know to all who entered the space and looked upon these items.

Jay has turned to the bookshelf and is fingering a stack of ashram photographs, which will later be burned per instructions from the ashram when none of us claim them. The wall-size bookshelf is filled with book after book on various spiritual philosophies; recently she had been most interested in the Vedantic teachings and the peoples of the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, which she said was the cradle of civilization. Most of these books she had mentioned to me; many she had sent me duplicates of.

Look at this. Jay stoops to pull a thin folder from between two books, how-tos about improving eyesight and the danger of wearing glasses because they weaken eye muscles, and hands it to me. The folder, made of thin cardboard reprinted with photos of Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker, is one of ours from high school. Inside I find pages filled with the unmistakable ink, dotted with bright stars of Wite-Out and covered in the darker typewriter letters that had pressed into the wet, from the typewriter on which my brothers and I used to write our pre-computer high school papers. But I have never seen these particular pages, the date 1981 typed in the top corner, the year her marriage to my father was ending. There are some longer paragraphs, but mostly these are notes, a start to something, about her love of wandering her familys farm as a child, of the majesty of the Mississippi, of her companionship with Topsy, her beloved Saint Bernard: subjects she often liked to share with us, but here are recorded in snippets of notes that in places are poetic and detailed.