Laurie Colwin
I’ve only read two of Laurie Colwin’s books, the novel Happy All The Time and the short story cycle Another Marvelous Thing, but I’ve read them so often that my yellowing copies are falling apart. Colwin, who died in 1992, wrote about marital love and domesticity in a manner that might be construed as chick lit if it weren’t so tough-minded. Every time her writing teeters on the brink of sentimentality she lays on the irony. Happy, not sappy, as Jonathan Yardley notes in this piece.
Like most of her fans I keep hoping that some unpublished manuscript of hers will turn up. In the meantime I’ll have to content myself with copying out her stories by hand. Here’s a favorite: My Mistress, from Another Marvelous Thing. (Warning: I’ve only finished writing one-sixth of the story.)
Click on a photo to continue reading Laurie Colwin in cursive. More pages to come.
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February 13th, 2010 at 01:04
I hadn’t intended to read all the index cards but I did. Maybe because I had just seen Where the Wild Things Are, I thought Catherine Keener would be perfect for the role of the mistress. I can see her in the ratty corduroy trousers, writing for a highbrow journal, and constantly pushing her hair away from her face.
February 13th, 2010 at 12:52
While I haven’t read any of Colwin’s work in full, I’m actually more familiar with her food writing; she was a columnist for Gourmet magazine before her death, and her columns have been compiled into two best-selling books, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking.
Here’s a review for Home Cooking: http://chocolateandzucchini.com/archives/2006/05/laurie_colwins_home_cooking.php