Bread & Wine Backstory, Part 2

In about six weeks, Bread & Wine will be winging its way through the postal system and arriving on your doorsteps. I kind of can’t believe it. This week I’ll post a little bit every day about the story behind the book—how the initial idea came about, and what I learned about life and about writing along the way. 

Continued from Part 1...

As I began to write early essays for Bread & Wine all those years ago, I pushed away the little voice inside me that suggested this book about food and faith and family would be a neat escape for me, a trap door out of the difficult season I was living into a make-believe world of parties and herbs and exuberance. 

After Cold Tangerines was published, I entered into the most difficult season I had yet known. On every front, it seemed, things were breaking and cracking apart. Miscarriages and health scares, financial losses, loneliness, uncertainty, fear and faithlessness. 

I believed then and still believe now that both as a writer and as a Christian, I have a responsibility to tell the truth about my life. I felt that I had essentially made a contract with the people who read Cold Tangerines. I had promised them that I would tell the truth in an unvarnished way, and that I would allow God’s motion and beauty to shine through the dust and mess of my own life and story as forthrightly as I could. 

Writing Bread & Wine at that time would have been a slight of hand, a shell game—pay no attention to the blood or the tears or the fear in my eyes…let’s have a dinner party! It would have indulged one of the most broken parts of me, the part that would rather tap dance and pretend things are fine than stop the music and tell you, in plain and deafening silence, that things are not all right. 

I pushed the idea forward as far as I could, like rolling a boulder up an icy hill. I pushed and pushed. I wrote the proposal. I flew to Boston for a writing retreat with a dear friend. We sat across the table from one another and ate the dried fruit she’d set between us in little bowls, and we wrote and wrote. I shaped and sketched and sorted through the vernacular I was creating for this new book, this lovely distraction from the crumbling feeling I felt about my own life. 

If I could offer up this beautiful book, this lovely and bright coin, it would hide the fact that my real life, and more honestly, the person I was becoming, were not what I had written about in Cold Tangerines. I felt the impulse and the necessity to distract my readers away from the fact that I was no longer the courageous, passionate, honest person they met in that first book.

I had become less prayerful, and very angry. I wasn’t celebrating everyday life. I wasn’t the first one on the dance floor or the first one to laugh or the first one to invite people widely and unselfconsciously into her life, perfect or not. I was hanging on by my fingernails, waiting for impact. 

At a certain point, I finally said out loud, first to my husband and then to my agent, that there was a book I needed to write before Bread & Wine, both for me and for the readers I cared so much about. I owed them a story of honesty and growth, not a diversionary tactic. Much of writing life and especially publishing life felt and still feels opaque to me, but this is what I knew about writing a second book: the writing has to be better, and the writer has to be better, too.  

You owe it to your readers—I owe it to my readers--to become a more skilled writer with each book: better phrasing, more precise language, richer imagery. But I also owe it to you to become a deeper, more grounded, more able-hearted person. I have to. That’s part of the contract, in my view. It’s my responsibility to become a voice worth listening to in increasing measure with every page, and certainly with every book. 

It was becoming clear that there was a book that I had to write in order to earn the right to write Bread & Wine.  Before we found the title, we called it simply “the blue book.” I didn’t know much about it, but I knew it would be blue—opposite of Cold Tangerines: orange, exuberant, cheery. It would be blue, in every way--deeper, darker. It would be my confession, my chance to make sense of this smashed up season, my way of sifting through all the things that fell apart in me and around me. 

It was not a book I wanted to write, any more than you’d like to stand alone on a stage and tell a group of people you love and respect all about your deepest failings. But again, we had a contract. I promised to tell the truth and to find meaning in that truth.  I promised that God’s fingerprints were all around us, and I had to find them in my own life. So I began to write Bittersweet.

More tomorrow...