Posts Tagged Melissa Senate
STEELE INTERVIEWS: author Melissa Senate
Posted by Amy Steele in Books, Interview on October 26, 2010
Title: The Love Goddess’ Cooking School
Author: Melissa Senate
ISBN: 978-1439107232
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Gallery; Original edition (October 26, 2010)
Category: contemporary fiction
Rating: B+
This was what Holly did like about cooking. The do-over aspect. There were no do-overs in love, in relationships, unless the It’s Not You, It’s Me was willing. But risotto, overcooking pasta, underseasoned sauce– there were not only second chances but hundreds.
The Love Goddess’ Cooking School details what happens when a few people introduce a melange of dissatisfaction, fear, sadness, despair, wants, dreams and varied experiences in hopes of changing their life course through the art of cooking Italian food. Gifted author Melissa Senate utilizes her deft ability to create both likable and unlikable characters who mix and mingle throughout the novel. The main character, Holly Maguire, has left behind a love in San Francisco and decides to try her hand at taking over her recently deceased grandmother’s homemade pasta and sauces boutique as well as cooking class. While learning how to cook and teach, Holly in turn discovers much about her own strengths and needs. She also watches and guides other members of her class toward new paths which will make them more content. The Love Goddess’ Cooking School takes the reader on a charming, abundant journey.
Here’s my recent interview with Melissa:
Aimee Steele [AS]: I interviewed you almost exactly a year ago for The Secret of Joy. Pretty Cool.
Melissa Senate [MS]: And I appreciate your interest in my work!
AS: How did you come up with the idea for The Love Goddess’ Cooking School?
MS: A combination of my thinking about my late grandmother, who would only talk about her interesting life (Orthodox Jewish upbringing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, her three siblings who never married, her two husbands . . . ) in the kitchen. While cooking beside her, scrubbing potatoes or forming meatballs, I got quite the earful. Also, my young son loves to cook with me, and on his sixth birthday, he made a wish: “Please let mommy say yes to getting me a mouse, rat or hamster for my birthday. Please, please, please with extra please on top” into the eggs he was stirring. The combination of food and cooking bringing people together, of wishing and asking and remembering while cooking, melded together to inspire the book.
AS: A lot of people romanticize Italy and Italian food. What do you think the attraction is and why did you decide to have it be the focus for The Love Goddess’ Cooking School?
MS: I went to Italy on my honeymoon and it’s everything it’s romanticized to be (even though I’m now divorced!). The food is everything from comforting to decadent, from solid to romantic, from plain to magical. Italy is so rich with history and beauty and architecture and religion and wine and, yes, the amazing food.
AS: In general food and romance go together so often. Do you have any theory on that?
MS: I think it has something to do with the age-old dinner date or sweet picnic or mom or grandma (if they’re the sweet kind) making your favorite meal and baking you cookies. Food means comfort and satisfaction.
AS: You told me recently (via twitter) that you like “to examine the perception of feeling alone especially when cut off from family.” Why?
MS: I like to explore some real stuff from my own life, family estrangements, oddities, the usual family dysfunction in my fiction. It’s interesting to me to watch how a character seeks connection, love, family, friendship from others, whether new friends or lovers, when she feels adrift or alone or cut off from her own family. There’s a longing there I love to explore in my work.
AS: What is the importance of including the Grandmother’s diary entries in the book and for Holly?
MS: Originally I gave Holly’s grandmother her own point of view, but her voice seemed too dominant and her story too big, so I decided to encapsulate her world in the diary entries. I wanted to parallel what Holly was doing with what her grandmother was doing—teaching the cooking class for the first time. I loved researching the early 60s culture for Camilla Constantina’s diary.
AS: In The Secret of Joy there was a box of unsent letters and now you have a diary that’s left to be read. What is your fascination with letters, diaries, writing longhand about thoughts etc.?
MS: I do love the discovery of letters, written in longhand with the writer’s imprint and its effect on the finder. A treasure trove of history, explanation—yet that’s all: you can’t ask questions of the writer. You can only interpret. And that interpretation can often lead to discoveries about yourself.
AS: Fortunes play in here but how much do you think is just being lucky and how much is destiny and how much is willing one’s life to go a certain way? [I wish I could do that.]
MS: I’m slightly superstitious and I do love to believe in all that. A $5.00 palm reader on a New Orleans street corner told me 15 years ago that whatever I was doing, I was on the wrong side, ie if I were an actress, I should be a director. If I were a teacher, I should be a student. I said: “I’m a book editor, but I can’t be a writer, so forget that.” A few years later, I wrote my first novel. I think it’s luck, being in the right place at the right time, both literally and figuratively, and trying. Trying is everything.
AS: What do you appreciate most about Maine and what do you want people to take away about the state from this novel?
MS: I moved here six years ago from a city of 8 million to a town of 8,000. I appreciate the quiet more than anything. It’s SO quiet. There are trees and water everywhere you look. I like to set books here now because Maine is such a comfort in itself; there’s no pressure here. Seriously you’ll never even hear a car horn honk. It’s everything it’s said to be. I also like the rugged beauty of Maine; there are some tourist spots and fancy hubs, but for the most part, Maine is all rugged coastline and moose and fleece and land.
AS: Often grandchildren never get to really know their grandparents that intimately. You really created a lovely relationship between Holly and Camilla. What drew you to focus on that relationship?
MS: I wanted to pay homage to my late grandmother, who I mentioned above. There’s so much to learn from your grandmother—about the history of family, the stretch of generations, the way the past affects the present. Plus, my grandmother made me feel very special at a time when I was very confused as a kid over family angst. I wanted to give Holly a special grandmother, especially because Holly couldn’t connect with her mother while growing up and as an adult.
AS: Why did Holly’s mother steer clear of Maine and her mother’s cooking ventures?
MS: Holly’s mother had been there, beside Camilla Constantina, the first time Camilla had been branded a “witch” and thrown out of the snooty, influential islander’s house. Holly’s mother grew up hating Camilla’s fortune telling, her exotic looks, her “magical” cooking. And so she moved away the moment she could, settled with a conventional man, and never could connect with Holly, who loved the lore surrounding her grandmother, loved the island and loved cooking beside her grandmother.
AS: I did like that Luciana told Holly that she believed that no one should be talked into a life. Can you explain that concept a bit more?
MS: I think people get talked into a life all the time, whether by someone else or themselves. It’s so easy to be steamrolled by someone else, be pulled by someone’s else’s vision, and it’s easy to rationalize. At some point, you know when you’ve made a wrong move or when something doesn’t feel right simply because it doesn’t. You can honor that or try to fix it and make it right. I’ve done both. Sometimes, though, where you’re kicking and screaming is where you need to be, and the problem is inside you, not where you are.
AS: Tamara is the single woman who wants the successful career and love as many women do but doesn’t have much luck with advancing past a few dates with guys. You really got so many things right with her. I liked some of the phrases you used. [If only I could get a list of clients as long as ex-boyfriends and third-date guys who blew me off. I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t even expect a guy to fall in love with me and that I should just settle for Mr. Okay.]
MS: She was in a tough spot with her overbearing mother and moving-on sisters and feeling like she had to do, do, do just to find what anyone wants: partnership, love, connection, your person.
AS: Tamara, Juliet, Simon and Mia all join the cooking class for different yet similar reasons. What made you put this group together? How did you create these characters?
MS: Mia came full blown into my mind, just one of those wonderful, magical writer moments. When I imagined a group of five standing around a kitchen island, making pasta, I only knew they were all seeking. And the group came to me one by one with their backstories, asking for help. As I thought them up, their stories filled themselves in.
AS: What was the most challenging part of writing The Love Goddess’ Cooking School?
MS: The cooking. I spent months in the kitchen researching the recipes I wanted to use, making dishes over and over until I got them right and changed this and that enough to make them mine—Camilla Constantina’s. I started out a terrible cook and ended up pretty good at classic Italian cooking.
AS: What do you like best about your character Holly?
MS: Her seeking soul, I think. She tries hard. And she’s kind. I like kind.
AS: Read your dream cast for movie version and so agree w/ Kate Winslet, Robert Downey Jr., Ryan Gosling and Vera Farmiga. Adore them all.
MS: I had luck once with a TV movie deal and so the possibility always seems very real now for the small or big screen, even though my chances of it happening again are a zillion to one. You never know is a good motto, though.
Thanks for these great questions. So appreciate the careful read and thoughtful questions!
buy at Amazon: The Love Goddess’ Cooking School
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STEELE INTERVIEWS: author Melissa Senate [The Secret of Joy]
Posted by Amy Steele in Books, Interview on December 6, 2009
See my earlier review of The Secret of Joy by Melissa Senate. Recently Melissa took the time to answer these questions for me.
AMY STEELE [AS]: Why did you decide to have Rebecca live in Manhattan and Joy live in Maine?
MELISSA SENATE [MS]: I moved to Maine from New York City (where I’d lived since 1989) in 2004 and I can clearly see every day that Maine is a beautiful, easy place to live. But five years later, it still doesn’t feel like home. I think I sent my main character to Maine to find what I know is here (the beauty, the quaint, the lack of traffic and honking, the quirky), but haven’t really appreciated on any kind of level (except where it concerns my young son; Maine is made for kids). I think I made Maine and Wiscasset sound dreamy because I know it is and wanted to help myself see it. It did work a little. But for me, a lighthouse will never compare to Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace with its Angel of Waters statue.
AS: How do the differences between and urban and then a more serene, rural setting advance or influence the story?
MS: It’s interesting to me that New York seems like the bad guy in the story. It’s where Rebecca can’t find herself, can’t breathe, gets her worst news, feels trapped by her own . . . rut. And Maine is where everything opens for her.
[writer’s note: I’m an urbanite but I would, if I could afford to, have a country house in The Berkshires, Maine or Vermont]
AS: Many TV shows and films, place the urban woman in the middle-of-nowhere town where hilarity ensues. You definitely took a different approach with Rebecca. Why? Have you had some experience in this with your own move from NY to Maine?
MS: I’m a sucker for those fish out of water movies, even ones starring Renee Zellweger. But being in a very different environment wasn’t at all a driving force in the novel. Granted, the setting created its own world, but at its heart, this story could have been told with basing Joy in the East Village of Manhattan. Would have sounded different, sure, but the “middle of nowhere” aspect for The Secret of Joy was really to send Rebecca off to a place that in itself would be comforting. A comforting, sweet backdrop so that when she felt most alone, her surroundings would be like a hug. One of my favorite blurbs for The Secret of Joy said it was “a warm hug of a book.” I love that.
AS: How realistic do you think it is that Rebecca fits in so quickly in the town?
MS: When I first moved to Maine, to a small town with one (unnecessary) traffic light, I felt like I fit in right away. One neighbor knocked on the door the first day with vegetables from her garden. Another invited me to a book club meeting. Fitting in can often depend on how you feel about where you are. The people Rebecca meets (and the people I met) are not very different than she is, really. More down jackets and fewer pointy high heels, maybe.
AS: How did you come up with the idea of the letters unsent, kept in the box?
MS: Much of The Secret of Joy is based on what I wish I knew about my own biological father, who I haven’t seen or heard from since I was eight. I have always known that, as the result of his own affair, I have a half-sibling who was born when I was seven, a half-sibling I’d never seen or heard from until I was in my thirties when I received an email that said: I think you might be my half sister…. The story isn’t at all autobiographical; just that nugget of half-siblings connecting as adults is based from real life, but there are certain things I wish were true. One is that my biological father wrote a stash of letters explaining himself—and in a way that would bring closure. That’s one of the most wonderful things about writing fiction that you can change whatever you want to fix in your own life.
[writer’s note: I “re-connected” with my father as an adult (I too had not seen him since I was about 10) and he published a magazine in L.A. and I’m a writer. How perfect. Well, he blew it again and again. We agreed I’d write for him. He’d pay me a small amount. The check bounced. Same dead beat dad. And after all that time, what hurt the most was that his daughter he hadn’t seen in 20 years was there and he could have re-established a relationship and he chose not too.]
AS: Why sisters? What is it about the bond between sisters that usually makes for a compelling story?
MS: What I love about the dynamic between sisters is the potential. You should be best friends, first best friends from the tiniest of tot hood, but oftentimes sisters are not best friends, not friends at all because of what parents do their children, whether meaning to or not, or because the sisters are just very different people. What’s possible, what should be, is what I find so beautiful and love delving into.
AS: What do you think The Secret of Joy can tell people about family dynamics?
MS: What was reinforced for me during the writing of this book is that sometimes (and key word is sometimes) there’s no real bad guy when it comes to family dysfunction, that all involved feel differently about things depending on their point of view and personalities. I’m a happy person because of this way of thinking.
AS: Why did you choose the travel group as a career for Joy and the paralegal at a mediation firm for Rebecca?
MS: I wanted to give Rebecca a career that made endings a good thing, which is a bad thing for her. And I wanted to give Joy a career that made beginnings, and the open road, a necessity. Rebecca’s job is so bad for her that it helps her be in a place where she wants to flee. And Joy is right where she needs to be, with a foot firmly on the brake that slowly lifts up.
[writer’s note: Very clever. I never thought of that in reading it but now I see it and adore that idea–delightful!]
AS: What is your favorite aspect of the novel?
MS: What I love most is the spirit I think is there. There are a lot of stuck people in the novel, and at the end, they’re all on the way to finding the secret of joy for themselves. No one’s found it, of course, but they’re seeking it instead of doing absolutely nothing or remaining status quo or stuck in a rut. The seeking is everything.
AS: What do you find to be the greatest challenge about writing?
MS: Finding my main character’s heart and soul and putting voice to that. It takes me a good one hundred pages until I feel like I know her inside and out and can really tell her story. The fun part of that is then I can go back through those first 100 pages and color what’s black and white.
AS: How did you create the character of Michael—he’s like my ex-boyfriend and usually the type of guy I’m attracted to- successful but controlling?
MS: Yup, know the type! I’m not attracted to controlling, but I’ve had controlling boyfriends and I know how easy it is to lose yourself to their voice, their opinion, especially when you don’t know what you want or where you should be. For Rebecca, leaving controlling Michael, leaving her job, leaving her home would take something very big, something that was all hers and meant nothing to anyone else but her. That something presented itself in the form of a half-sister, a total stranger. And she reaches out for it. Michael calls her constantly in Maine, comes after her, never really listening to her from the beginning. He seems supportive, full of hugs and hot chocolate and wine and “their future,” but what he actually says is rat poison.
AS: What kind of research went into The Secret of Joy? as it is unusual for an adult to find her sister after the death of her parent.
MS: Eight years ago, I received an email that said: I think you might be my half-sister. Can you imagine getting that email out of the blue? The I think itself floored me. I took the nugget of that and created an entirely fictional premise and plot and characters, but the emotional impact, the emotions, period, all very real. That was my research!
AS: Why was Rebecca so desperate for a family that she didn’t even know in Maine. What attracted her so much to Maine?
MS: I don’t think she was desperate for a family; I think she was given this wisp of a huge thing (a secret half-sister) by her dying father and that it felt like a lifeline to her. A connection to herself, when she felt she had none—no family, no sense of herself or where she belonged. What she was desperate for was what was possible.
AS: Why the title The Secret of Joy?
MS: My editor came up with that perfect title, which now seems like such a no-brainer. (I’d originally called it The Love Bus, but the art department had big trouble designing the cover with such an odd title.) The main character’s secret half sister is named Joy, but what the title means for me is that the secret of joy is individual for every character in the book and they’re all finally looking for it. As I said, I think the seeking is everything.
AS: Thank you Melissa. I enjoyed The Secret of Joy and really enjoyed See Jane Date too which I read when it first came out.
MS: Thank you! I loved all your in-depth, insightful, and interesting questions!
[writer’s note: You are one of my new favorite author-friends! If I can be so bold to say that.]
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book review: The Secret of Joy
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on November 22, 2009
Title: The Secret of Joy
Author: Melissa Senate
ISBN: 978-1439107171
Pages: 352
Publisher: Downtown Press (November 17, 2009)
Category: women’s fiction
Review source: publisher
Rating: 4/5
People had been telling her of their tragedies and triumphs since preschool. With pinky promises and crossed hearts and swearing on various boyfriends’ lives not to tell (and Rebecca never did: she was a supreme keeper of secrets), she would hear stories of parents divorcing, of older sisters getting pregnant, of letting a boy unhook a bra. When she’s started working, she’d spent her lunch hours listening to all sorts of family dysfunction, of boyfriends, fiancés, and husbands who wanted this or didn’t want that. But then her mother had died and Rebecca had lost her way and trailed along in her dad’s career as a real-estate attorney—for too long.
The Secret of Joy takes an interesting approach to a topic not often addressed. What happens when a 28-year-old woman finds out from her dying father that she has a younger sister? Rebecca Strand longed for a sister all her life and now gets hit with a double blow: her father is dying but she has a long-lost sister living in Maine. He had an affair when Rebecca was two. She has endless questions about what this woman looks like and what she does and would she like her? Rebecca knows that she must meet her. Her father instructs her about a locked box he has kept in which she finds letters that he wrote to Joy on her birthday but never mailed. The Manhattan paralegal, in a two-year passionless relationship with Michael, takes her bereavement leave to find this sister, box of letters at her side. Rebecca is impulsive and idealistic. Her sister Joy is skeptical and practical. She’s a singles group tour planner. Rebecca throws herself into Joy’s life without giving Joy much of a chance to make any decisions. No matter how many times Joy turns her away, Rebecca determinedly returns. Before too long, Rebecca has new friends in Wicasset, Maine and even a blossoming love affair and she’s renting a house. She also has no desire to return to Manhattan. Maine provides another character for The Secret of Joy, as anyone who has visited knows. The people are genuine and welcoming, in no rush to be anywhere and generally sweet and comforting. At first, I thought, how realistic is it that she is embraced so quickly but then realized it’s small town Maine. Of course they would welcome someone as open and caring as Rebecca.
She glanced back at Rebecca. “Really. He’s nothing to me but biology and DNA. My mother married a very nice man when I was nine. He helped raise me. Why would I be interested in some stranger who couldn’t even face up to the most basic of responsibilities?”
With both her parents dead, she desperately wants a family and in that she wants her sister. Even if her sister doesn’t quite believe in the whole DNA makes us sisters argument. Joy resents their father for abandoning her and her mother completely. Joy says a sperm donor does not make a father. A father has to be present in someone’s life. [And I can understand this as my parents divorced when I was around six and my father disappeared. My mother remarried when I was 12 and I even changed my name when I was 23. My biological father reappeared during my adult years and it turned out that he ran a magazine. You would think this would be the perfect opportunity for his writer daughter to re-connect with her publisher father but he had never changed. He was still a deadbeat. So I would be just like Joy. Very unsure of what to expect.] Rebecca intends to make up for her father’s faults. Through touching moments, realistic situations and real people to which anyone can relate, Melissa Senate has created a book that will provide much debate on the subject of parenthood, siblings, and familial relationships. I’ve never had a sister but writers adore writing about the bond between sisters. In this one, the reader never knows whether Rebecca and Joy will ever find a common bond or a place at which to begin to mend that past that their father tore apart decades ago. The Secret of Joy provides an astute outlook on sisters, a subject that many women’s fiction books adore to cover.
Thank you to Sarah Reidy and Pocket Book Blog Tours.
Buy The Secret of Joy at an Indie Bookseller
–review by Amy Steele
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About Me
covering mostly music and books. focus on alternative/indie and women in music, literature and the arts. feminist. vegan. mostly alternative, a bit bohemian. Masters in journalism from Boston University. BA from Simmons College.
Entertainment Realm by Amy Steele is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at entertainmentrealm.comCopyright © 2009. All writing, unless otherwise noted, by Amy Steele.
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