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My daughter gave me Arlene Gottfried's Sometimes Overwhelming for Christmas. I am absolutely gobsmacked in love with this book of photos. Tafv said she was, too; that she found it, used, and sat on the floor of the bookstore for an hour and looked through the whole thing, and then, and only because of her dear love and generosity, was able to send it to her mama. Seriously, go find a copy.
Three for today:
A Detailed Man, David Swinson's crime novel about a DC detective with a half-frozen face and a few too many people he knows dying brutally. Download it for free through midnight tomorrow.
"The Autumn of Joan Didion," Caitlin Flanagan's (to me) spot-on essay about what Didion does best, and worst. Essay at Atlantic.com. Eager to read Flanagan's new book, Girl Land.
Come hear me read from The Bad Mother, this Sunday, when the incomprable Pascal Sauton will throw a Dinner with the Author event, at his really smashingly gorgeous new spot. Food, wine, a little reading, my handsome husband. Come! Details here, and yes, so reserve.
And speaking of downloads: The Queens of Montague Street, 99-cents kids. Digital only... for now.
reading at Sunny's Bar in Brooklyn last summer
From 4 - 7? Want to hang out with Din and me? Eat a three-course French meal? Drink some wine? Get a little culture? Then do it: Pascal Sauton, the well-loved chef and owner of Milwaukie Kitchen and Wine, and very graciously offered to host a Dinner with the Author event, pour moi. I will read from my novel The Bad Mother (which, ahem, moved 2500 copies last week. Well, yes, the publisher was giving the digital copies away for free for two days, but still!), and sell copies, the proceeds of which Pascal will donate to the charity of his choice. It's $35 a head, info and directions are here:
Please come. I would love to see you in the new year xx Nancy
Last night, we had our all-staff-and-friends Ristretto holiday party. Usually, we do this at a dive bar, keep an open tab, get some food and karaoke. This year, it was not an option, for financial reasons; because we were busy opening a third location; because I was flying back and forth across the country, and because the week between Christmas and New Year's, Din and I were both hacking our brains out. The staff was fine with no bash, except they kept saying, "We can just do it at your house, it will be better, we will bring everything." And we thought, yes, great, but not this week, we are just so sick...
About a week ago, I got a text from Rachel Goldstein, our first-ever employee, now manager and art curator at the Williams cafe. She wanted to set a date for the party -- how about the 7th? I thought it was a little funny, not really Rachel's style to text, but I was grateful: it was on. The staff, again, kept saying, you guys don't have to do anything; we're going to bring everything. Well, okay!
Din and I really laid in very little. I made two spanokopita and some cookies. He bought three bottles of booze and some ice. And we had a case of cheap wine. And the music turned on. At 6:45, our crew started to arrive: Stephen with homemade salsa, Steve with wine; a few bottles of bourbon appeared. Alyssa carried in the best cake ever made in the history of cakedom. They were homemade salted truffles from Natalie and Rachel; there were homemade empanadas from Josh and his girlfriend Anna. Homemade bread, homemade gin, bourbon; a killer mac & cheese; beer. Wine. More wine. Champagne. Friends. The house was glowing. It was full, twenty of us crammed in the kitchen...
"Rommelmann! Come spend some time in the fucking living room." This, from Josh Gibby. Okay! We started talking about marriage; we were in Josh and Heather's wedding, about how...
Ting ting ting ting ting!
Someone was tapping a glass. It was Natalie, standing in front of the stereo, calling for quiet. Forty people quieted down. I noticed they were all already gathered around, and behind her, Dave Allen was shooting video with his phone.
I can't remember her exact words, so here is a paraphrase:
"We are here tonight at Nancy and Din's and we want to say thank you to them for having this party, and for having such an awesome company, and for treating us so well. We love Ristretto, and we love you guys, and so we got you something from all of us."
And then, from stage right, Rachel and someone (and forgive me, I don't remember who because I was so startled) walked in carrying this huge... something, covered in a blue sheet, and they take off the sheet, and it is what you see above, a beetle carved from wood that was part of an art show at Williams that Rachel curated several months ago. Din and I, at the time, had loved this piece, but it cost something like $1200, and there was no way, not with building out the new shop...
"We knew you guys loved it," Natalie continued, "and so we all chipped in, and some of the customers, too, Keith and Justin and Andre, and Tafv, too, when she was here, and we got it for you."
I don't know what Din and I looked like, seeing this, listening to this, but I can tell you what it felt like: I was floored, and flooded. And so Din and I took a moment to tell them what is absolutely true: yes, Din has a good idea, and he works hard, but we are nothing, Ristretto does not exist without these people, and that we love them, and consider ourselves beyond fortunate.
Cheers. We toasted some more. Jennifer told me, I'd lost her ten bucks because she'd bet I would cry and I didn't, and what up with that? We drank more wine, and ate more cake. The room was happiness qua happiness. It was a wonderful party, they made it all so.
Every morning, I do what Din and I call the loop, driving to the cafes to pick up the previous day's banks. With the opening of Nicolai, the loop got a little longer, taking me down N. Vancouver to get onto the Fremont Bridge. Yesterday, I noticed a girl on the NE corner of Vancouver and Fremont. She was wearing rain gear over a purple tutu and waving at the cars. In front of her was a sign that read, "Free Art. No, Really." I would have stopped but I was in the far right lane.
She was there again this morning, and I did stop. I rolled down my window. She handed me a small pen-and-ink drawing of a sunrise, about the size of a large postage stamp. I thanked her.
"I made this commute for 13 years," she said. "I'm just trying to make people happy."
The light was still red, time enough for me to hand her a Ristretto Roasters business card.
"Tell them Nancy sent you and to give you coffee," I said. "It's right up the street."
She smiled and said she knew where it was; she lives in the 'hood, and though she did not look old enough to me to have been working 13 years, she obviously did know something about the way art and commerce can work.
Dymaxicon is doing this too, with my novel "The Bad Mother," which is downloadable for free through the end of the day. It's at #17 on the Literary Fiction Bestsellers right now, and you, you, YOU can make that number move. If you grab "The Queens of Montague Street" while you are there, you will make me both happy and gratefully shy xx
The Queens of Montague Street is available on Amazon. A clip from Longreads, below.
Memories of a truant teenager's life in 1970s Brooklyn Heights—fights, school and family trouble, and a brief cameo (at a Baskin-Robbins) by Spike Lee:
"Still, things weren’t exactly cozy at home. There had always been new boys coming into the Heights, and that was cool, but the latest crews weren’t really boys, more on the verge of being men. Unlike the kids we’d been hanging with for a year, we didn’t have history with these guys; we didn’t really trust them, didn’t want to be rude but didn’t really want them in our houses. This became hard to keep under control, as members of the home crew vouched for the new guys, and all of a sudden, there are people you’ve never seen in the living-room, rummaging through the liquor cabinets, some big, stoned, zombie-looking dude is in the kitchen, and the next day, you can’t find the paring knife. There was Chavo, a scrawny cat with pointy teeth who was reputed to do heroin; the first time I saw a gun, it was sitting on the cardboard box he used for a table in the room he rented half a block from my mom’s house. Dave borrowed my bicycle one afternoon, and later told me that Chavo had been riding it and had been hit by a bus; that the bike was totaled. I was 15, and didn’t want to think a guy I still pined for had let a junkie sell my bike. I started seeing E., who fell into days-long silent funks and flew into rages and who, one sunny afternoon, kicked me in the face and gave me two black eyes."
Download the whole thing - it's 99-cents!
