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Stuff I'm Reading

 My old writing teacher Amy Bloom has said, "I have a minor interest in gardening, but really my only interest is people. I study people. If I go to a museum, I look at the portraits; that's all I want to see."


I get it. If someone at a party makes a weird remark about cheese puffs, I do a little inner dance, because I know I can poke and prod that remark for the next ten or twenty years.

One of the great things that happened to novelist Elinor Lipman was the death of her husband, at sixty; it changed her writing, and it gave her new material. While others might retire to a convent, Lipman began dating, and she looked closely at various new forms of awkwardness and insecurity:

Until my post-widowed dating life began at 60, I’d cooked nearly every night for my husband and son. I had dinner parties and folders full of recipes. I owned a fish poacher and a tortilla press. So why didn’t I cook for potential beau Jonathan after we met on Match.com?

For months there was only a fallow period of suboptimal dating that didn’t amount to a relationship. I called it a no-mance and called him my friend without benefits — a status that was his choice, not mine. I tried. I’d once asked him in an empty elevator, “If I kissed you, would you call security?”

He’s British, my friends said. Be patient.

Talent is easy to spot--and here is Lipman, mining a mortifying elevator exchange for material. "If I kissed you, would you call security?"

I have a feeling the shyness of people in their sixties is a fairly common phenomenon.....but, before Lipman, who had thought to use the terms "no-mance" and "friend without benefits"?

From this rocky start, the relationship grows in surprising and plausible ways. There is a light hum of suspense all the way through the provocative ending.

The piece is called "With Whisk in Hand, I Celebrate New Love"; it's funny, probing, and joyful, and it's an inspiration.

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