Almost Famous Writer Loses, Yet Again, to The New Yorker
For Immediate Release
Hapless writer Frances Lefkowitz announces another near-miss in a career that seems to be full of them. A recent finalist for a prestigious James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in food writing, she had the misfortune to be nominated in the same category—magazine feature writing without recipes—as Bill Buford of The New Yorker and Lou Schuler of Men’s Health. It was hardly the first time she’d been denied by The New Yorker, whose slush pile has seen many of her short stories over the years. “You didn’t really think I had a chance against that racy profile of NYC celebrity-chef Mario Batali?” asks Lefkowitz, whose own article on the regional food and wine of Sonoma County, California, could be described as an anti-celebrity-chef story. “But like everything I write these days, this story is essentially about me,” says Lefkowitz, who appears completely unashamed of her self-absorption. “It is about returning to the landscape I call home—a region where vineyards and Hummers are replacing farms and pick-up trucks—and wondering if I still belong there.” (See “Savoring the Landscape,” from the September/October 2002 issue of Body+Soul .)
Just back from a week of James Beard Foundation events in New York City, Lefkowitz maintains that “chefs and their crews party as hard as the rock stars that they—and their groupies—believe themselves to be.” The journalism awards banquet featured a civilized sit-down meal of salmon Tartar, oven-roasted asparagus, and Snake River American Kobe beef tenderloin. Then came the general awards gala, the black-tie “Oscars” of the food industry, honoring the country’s top chefs, restaurants, and television cooks. That gala, along with all the before and after parties, rivaled the Bacchanalia of Ancient Rome—without the courtesy of the vomitoria. “There is such a thing as too much Hudson Valley foie gras,” insists Lefkowitz, who is happy to be back at her temporary living quarters in Northern California subsisting on broth and brown rice, rising (rather than sleeping) with the sun, and wearing clothes in colors other than black.
In other news, Lefkowitz has left her position as Senior Editor of Body+Soul magazine in Boston in order to write freelance and, of course, work on a book. The so-called book is a true story of growing up poor, white, and female in San Francisco in the ‘60s and ‘70s. A close relative of the writer calls her work-in-progress nonfiction exaggerat but marketers would probably characterize it as memoir. Still, claims Lefkowitz, “The book is not about me. It’s about the world, according to me.” Though her sensibility—part hippie, part home girl—is certainly unique, readers of all backgrounds recognize themselves in her stinging tales of struggling to make peace with money, sex, melancholy, and other facts of life. In January 2003, The Sun magazine published “The Gifted Classes” from How to Have Not , her book-in-progress, generating incoming calls from book publishers (mostly small) and literary agents (mainly unknown). And, despite her 0 and 6 record with The New Yorker, Lefkowitz has not completely given up on writing fiction; her short story “Fighting With Fire” was recently published in Glimmer Train Stories (Spring 2004).
The wandering writer, who holds library cards in at least seven U.S. cities, recently returned from Mexico, where she spent a month surfing, speaking Spanish, and chasing after the thieves who stole her portable computer. Currently stationed in her brother’s guest room in Petaluma, California, where she serves as live-in babysitter to two cute yet contagious young nieces, she is now planning her next move. Inside sources believe she will spend at least part of the summer back in the little cottage in Kennebunk, Maine that she bought and painted turquoise last year. And cold weather will likely inspire a return to Costa Rica, Mexico or some other warm Spanish-speaking country with decent waves. Naturally, love or bestsellerdom, could intervene at any moment and alter her course. But for now the small, sturdy figure travels on, carrying her longboard and laptop, in search of a ride, a bed, and a desk.
Perpetually Almost Famous Writer Announces Latest Dubious Coup
For Immediate Release
The enterprising Frances Lefkowitz has won yet another literary award guaranteed to increase her name recognition among small numbers of eccentric readers who borrow their books from the library or wait for them to show up in paperback at the used bookstore. The award is from the National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org), an organization dedicated to the absurd and ambitious goal of writing a novel in one month—the month of November, to be exact. Since 2001, thousands of writers of all ages and abilities (though weighted heavily toward computer nerds writing sci-fi and fantasy) have pledged to write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days, guided by the principle of quantity over quality. This year, Lefkowitz, who had been thinking about making the leap from essays and short stories to novels—“they’re more marketable,” says the high-minded literary snob—joined the fray and completed SORRY, her 50, 710-word novel, in just 25 days. On November 28, a sophisticated judging panel of word-counting automatons at the “Nano” cyberspace headquarters counted all her words but read none of them, and declared Lefkowitz “a winner.” Though she has accumulated numerous literary honors—including state arts fellowships and nominations for a Pushcart Prize and a James Beard Award—this one, she says, is “special.”
SORRY is a story of love and murder involving an aimless, wealthy young man with culinary ambitions and a woman of indeterminate nationality who is a refugee from a child-sex-slave ring. After they kill her master—or “Daddy,” as she calls him—the woman, known as Sorrel, blossoms, finding work as a cake decorator and surrounding herself with her delicate, pastel creations. Her lover, Tim, however, is bereft without a murder and body-disposal project to occupy him. He turns anxious and abusive, but has the sense to abandon her before the violence escalates. Eight years later, the city tax collector uncovers inconsistencies in the records of the house Sorrel “inherited” from her Daddy, and soon the police are investigating. Tim, now the owner of several restaurants and married to an interior designer, gets a chance to save Sorrel again by confessing his guilt. Will he or won’t he step up and take the fall? Will the fact that she has a son—probably his—sway him? Oh, you’ll just have to read the book to find out.
“The plot came to me in its entirety in a dream,” explains Lefkowitz, who, as the books columnist for Body+Soul magazine felt it was finally time to write novels rather than just write about them. “All I had to do was flesh it out, so to speak.” After spending the last few years penning a memoir of growing up poor, white, and female in San Francisco, writing fiction came as a welcome respite. Her memoir, HOW TO HAVE NOT—a kind of Dorothy Allison meets Barbara Ehrenreich and then runs into Mary Karr at the corner store—is currently in rewrites. As for her novel, the magazine editor and writer admits, “It’s the epitome of what you’d call a messy first draft.” SORRY is riddled with inconsistencies at every level, including plot, voice, location, character names, weather, seasons, and hair color. It starts out, for instance, in a gloomy Eastern city reminiscent of Worcester, Massachusetts, and then inexplicably the main character goes out for a walk and finds herself in the bright white fog of San Francisco. Then there is the narrator, who can’t decide whether to refer to himself as “I” or “he.” “But these are minor problems,” says Lefkowitz, dismissing them with a wave of her bruised and calloused hand. “As they say in Hollywood, ‘we’ll fix it in post.’” In other words, it’s on to editing. Speaking of editing, that process will begin—and end?—in the month of March.
