I’m writing this from a writers’ retreat in France that also doubles-up as a superb cookery school, and while I was looking for something else, I came across Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. An American chef telling Americans how to do it, but on a French bookshelf. Before she became a beloved tv-chef (as played by Meryl Streep), Julia Child was a secret agent of sorts, and ‘invented’ – by doshing various potions into pots – a liquid that repelled sharks from submarines (still in use today!). But also, Child was a frustrated writer (by her own admission) who wanted stories published in The New Yorker, but instead remained a lifelong reader. She fronted a series of radio shows on fiction and food, and it is here I first heard Edna O’Brien’s ‘Violets’, as read by the author herself. There’s not much going on plot-wise (‘well, fuck the plot!’, as Edna once said) – a woman is cooking and preparing her house to receive a “male visitor” – but by god, how exquisite this is. It becomes a Proustian meditation on love.
First published in The New Yorker, 5 November 1979, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories, 1984; the radio show with Julia Child and Edna as guest can be listened to here
A Personal Anthology 