What We're Reading!

 LUCY BURDETTE: To launch the beginning of the summer season, we thought it would be only fair to talk about books! I’ve veered out of the mystery lane lately and tried some new things. OUTRUN by Amy Liptrot was an Ann Cleeves recommendation from several years ago. This is a memoir that takes place primarily on the Orkney islands. The opening chapters about the author struggling with her addiction are difficult to read, but it pays off beautifully and now I’m desperate to go back to Scotland. 

 I also read YESTERYEAR, which Hank mentioned a while back. The main character is a tradwife influencer with a gaggle of children she doesn’t enjoy and a staggering following. I did not like her but I was compelled to find out how the author could possibly wind this story up. I never could have come up with this plot in a million years! 

Now I’m reading Anna Quindlen’s MORE THAN ENOUGH about a woman struggling with infertility and a challenging mother and dementing father. Quindlen writes about families so well! I also read two romances that I won’t recommend. Looking forward to THEO OF GOLDEN, plus Rhys’s new standalone, and Jenn’s as well. Oh, in June, I’m going to hear Ann Patchett talk about her new book, Whistler. Can’t wait for that one!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I just finished Tana’s French’s THE KEEPER and  I am in awe. IN AWE! She is such an incredible writer that it's downright intimidating. It;s part 3 of a series, but such a terrific standalone that you can easily read it first.  I am also tearing through Gillian McAllister's CALLER UNKNOWN–she is one of my all time favorite authors, and speaking of in awe, I’m not sure how she manages to make her book all have that McAllister voice, but be so incredibly different. I’ve got Anthony Horowitz’s new one up next, which I know will be such a treat! (I am also a judge for a contest, and all I can say is

I sat next to a man on an airplane next to a blue-suited  businessman-type who  was reading Theo of Golden, and he was crying. SO–nope nope nope, you know me, I am not getting anywhere near that.

HALLIE EPHRON: I’m a wimp when it comes to tear jerkers, too. Anthony Horowitz is always safe in that respect. And so clever and funny, bonus points. And of course I finished reading my sister Amy Ephron’s new book, UNSEASONABLY COLD (late summer, 1939, and a New York heiress goes missing.)

I just started THE CALAMITY CLUB by Kathryn Stockett (author of THE HELP) and I’m enjoying it very much. The opening chapters are flagrantly Dickensian with a little girl getting abandoned in the so called “care” at an orphanage run by heartless/misguided women. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next. It’s got MOVIE written all over it, and I’m having fun imagining who’d play the lead.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I have not been reading anything–not unusual for me towards the end of writing a book. I just don’t have the focus to sit down with the printed page. But I have been listening to audio books and Hank, your comment was very timely. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I had never read anything by Tana French. I know, right? Maybe I was intimidated. 

But I picked up the audio version of THE SEARCHER, the first of her three Cal Hooper books, and I was hooked. Now I am partway through the second book, THE HUNTER. Interestingly, the protagonist is an American, a retired Chicago cop who has resettled in an Irish village. These are not fast paced but I’m loving the language and the characters. 

Before that, the new Martha Wells Murderbot book, PLATFORM DECAY, which I loved so much I listened to it twice in a row. And before that, I listened to all but the last full cast audio versions of the Harry Potter books. These are unabridged and the casting is fabulous–I highly recommend!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I'm so glad there's another Murderbot fan here, Debs! 

JENN McKINLAY: I am reading nothing. Shocking, I know, but my every second has been taken up with a new writing venture (more on that at a later date) that is so far out of my comfort zone, I have no time for anything else. Hopefully, I will get back to reading soon as I have a towering TBR to get through.

JULIA: Right now, I'm hurrying to finish Jessica Everett's LAST SUMMER AT MAINE CHANCE because I'm passing it on to Celia when I next visit her. My non-fiction read is the highly recommended TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY: How to Reverse and Authoritarian Turn and Forge a Democracy for All by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Well-written and extremely thought-provoking. 

I just got hold of PLATFORM DECAY and I can't believe Debs beat me to the punch. Though she's now known for SF, I can also highly recommend Well's fantasy novels. Next up: I'm super excited to read the ARC of Rhys's upcoming THE CASTLE IN THE GLEN. 

Which means I don't have a mystery in rotation! I'm working my way through the Poirot series on Hulu, and would love any recs anyone can share for some good old-fashioned whodunnits, bonus points if they're set in the 1920s or '30s. (I almost wrote "the '20s" but realized we're living there right now...) 

Red readers, what are you reading or looking forward to reading?

Amy Ephron's UNSEASONABLY COLD is IN SEASON!

 HALLIE EPHRON: Today it's my great pleasure to welcome my sister Amy Ephron to Jungle Red! She's a lot younger than me and still she beat me, getting started writing years before I took the plunge.

Her brand new book, UNSEASONABLY COLD, is off to a great start.

It's a mystery and a love story. The tag line:
A socialite living in late 1930s New York City, disappears without a trace.

And it just got a fabulous review in AIR MAIL Magazine:

The place is New York; the year is 1939. War is the backdrop of Amy Ephron’s latest novel, a suspenseful noir that travels between the bohemians of Greenwich Village and the aristocrats of uptown. But the society set is far more preoccupied with another matter: the mysterious disappearance of heiress Jane Abbott. None more so than her best friend, Liza, who is haunted by the foreboding last words Jane said to her. Unseasonably Cold’s atmosphere is Wharton and Towles; its page-turning plot is pure Christie. - Air Mail Magazine

Today I'm thrilled to host Amy here on Jungle Red.

Amy, tell us about the crime/event that inspired you to write UNSEASONABLY COLD.

AMY EPHRON: It wasn’t really a crime... unless it was.

When I was in my 20.’s a dear friend had an “accident” on the island of Kauai — toppling from a mountain cliff. His glasses were left on the mountainside.

There was a lot of speculation. Did he fall? Did he jump? Was he pushed? There were rumors someone had been with at the time.

He’d always been so jovial and unconditionly kind. I’d never known about the depression, the heartbreak, or that there might have been drug use. Secrets, illusions, perfectly masked.

His loss was so unexpected….it was an awful and long lasting loss.

HALLIE: I know you started writing UNSEASONABLY COLD years ago... what made you set it aside? And then (lucky for us) what made you pick it up and write to the finish line?

AMY: I wrote three kid’s novels, ‘The Castle in the Mist’ ‘Carnival Magic’ and ‘The Other Side of the Wall’ for Philomel/ Penguin, took a screenplay job, and wrote a silly/fun book (‘The Amazing Baby Name Book')with my daughters Maia Wapnick and Anna Ephron Harari.’

So the manuscript for UNSEASONABLY COLD was just waiting to get finished.

HALLIE: 1930s New York City: What is it about that period that intrigues you.

It was a time a bit like today. The division of wealth and class differences was extreme. So were political and religipus views, discrimination rampant, women’s rights. The war was just beginning, the end of which was so uncertain and unknown, almost a mirror for the story, as no one knows what was happened to Jane.

I think so many people now are experiencing loss that is hard to fathom. 

[Photo by Katrina Dickson]

HALLIE: What kind of research did you do to make the period and the characters come so alive?

AMY: Thank you for saying that. It was a very interesting time for art, what was hanging at the Met, theatre, the world’s fair, beginning Hollywood.

I also researched clothes and food and existing clubs and restaurants which was very fun. But I researched it as it came up. I’ve previously read a lot of fiction and nonfiction about that period.

A bestselling earlier novel of mine “A Cup of Tea” (based on a Katherine Mansfield story - don’t believe in stealing, I bought the rights from her estate.) A story of love, disloyalty, and madness, is set in New York and France at the time of the U.S. entrance to World War I.

HALLIE EPHRON: A wonderful review of the book in AIRMAIL called the book a "historical thriller" -- do you think that feels right?

AMY: Unseasonably Cold is a bit of a hybrid: lit fiction, mystery, love story, historical fiction, noir. I hope it finds many fans! Thanks for having me and being my sister!

HALLIE: It's a terrific book and it will appeal to a broad range of crime fiction readers, and on to straight up Agatha Christie. Hopefully it will also send readers off to find A CUP OF TEA as a chaser.

ABOUT AMY EPHRON: Amy Ephron is a best-selling, award-winning novelist and children’s book author. She is also a journalist, screenwriter and producer. She was a contributing editor to Vogue, The New York Times’ T magazine. She has published in print and online at Airmail Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Harper’s Bazaar and more. Unseasonably Cold is her 10th novel.

Welcome to the World: The Amazing Baby Name Book

HALLIE EPHRON: Naming is a tricky business. I wrote a scene in my first suspense novel, NEVER TELL A LIE, with this back and forth between a married couple (Ivy and David Rose), discussing what they're going to name their about-to-be first born:

“Boogie Rose,” David said as he drove them home in Ivy’s car.  

Traffic on the highway was starting to congeal as the evening rush began in earnest. He glanced over his shoulder and shifted lanes. “What do you think? Works if it’s a boy, works if it’s a girl.” 

“Works if it’s a band,” Ivy said.

“Well, we can’t keep calling her Sprout.”
“Gwyneth Paltrow named her baby Apple.”

It goes on with a few paragraphs of snappy repartee which comprises just about the only bit of dialogue that they used in the Lifetime Movie Network adaptation of the book. 

I am happy to report that name gaming runs in my family. My mother always insisted that a woman's first name was critical in defining her, especially since women got married and (in those days) shed their surnames and with them, a vestige of their originality. (Hence: Nora, Delia, Hallie, Amy. I definitely won the award for most unique but Delia's a close second.)

My husband and I had played that game when I was pregnant, bandying about names like Linoleum and Kapok (fortunately Molly and Naomi won the day.)

I'm trilled to introduce you to my nieces Anna Ephron Harari and Maia Wapnick and my sister Amy Ephron who have written an absolutely irresistible book to help the rest of us come up with the perfect names.

Welcome to the world: THE AMAZING BABY NAME BOOK: A (Possibly Helpful and Slightly amusing Guide from A to Z)!

ANNA EPHRON HARARI and MAIA WAPNICK: It all started from a family dinner table game. Or at least we thought we were playing a nice family game. Our mom Amy, apparently, was writing a book. Always multitasking…

It was about 15 years ago and a handful of celebrities were starting to invent names for their children. And that got us thinking there were many other great words that could be names. So we’d take turns constructing little stories about them, like Banister–a great name for an east coast socialite–or Lucite–definitely an artist–or Sequin–an astrologer or maybe astronaut, Abacus–someone you’d want to cheat off in math class.

At the start of the pandemic, Amy revived the idea. By this time each of us had two children, and we could see from the class rosters that what had started as a celebrity subculture had taken hold of the world.

Parents today are looking for names for their kids that are reflective, unusual, and unique. And with so many encyclopedic tomes of baby name books out there, it’s hard to find the right name. Some parents have even turned to personal consultations with name experts. (We didn’t make that up! Though we sort of wish we had...).

We also maintain that among all these amazing one-of-a-kind names that are popping up, there are still so many great opportunities left unturned. There were also all these unsung heroes whose achievements we wanted to honor and celebrate, such as astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who was snubbed for the Nobel Prize, but whose portrait was recently hung in the Royal Society’s Carlton House in London.

Without realizing it, our fun little game evolved into an actual viable name book. And miraculously, Princeton Architectural Press was interested, and the amazing Lynn Grady was our shepherd!

Once we really got into the writing, we knew the illustrations were going to be crucial to create the right tone and vibe.

We were so lucky to work with the uber-talented artist Jennifer Bricking, who had collaborated with Amy on her children’s series, The Other Side. Her whimsical illustrations perfectly capture the levity, humor, and grace against the backdrop of the messy realities of parenthood.

To fill the pages, we pored over the names of gemstones, stars, mountain trails, mythological figures, we read from random pages in the dictionary, we looked at the census, at names of brands, names of colors. Pretty much all colors make great names, by the way.

We laughed a lot and also disagreed (can someone tell Amy IKEA is an incredible name?). And It was hard writing over Zoom, especially with all the difficulties pandemic life presented. It was hard to hear each other with six feet or more between us. And it was hard to stay on task when we were running down all these glorious rabbit holes of etymology, history, geography, and fantasy.

We had a great amount of fun writing this book together, and we hope you have fun reading it!
THE AMAZING BABY NAME BOOK!

About the Authors: Sisters Anna Ephron Harari and Maia Wapnick are co-authors, along with their mom, Amy Ephron, of The Amazing Baby Name Book: A (Possibly) Helpful and Slightly Amusing Guide from A to Z. Maia is the VP of Strategy at Hypothesis Group, where she spends her days testing names and analyzing consumer behavior and trends for brands like Toyota, Starbucks, Pinterest, and Disney. She has a four-year old (Zachary) and a 2-year old (Chloe). Anna is a writer/producer/director. Her debut short film was honored at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. She has a four-year old (Madeline) and a two-year old (Roman).

HALLIE: Need I say more? I was thrilled to find my name listed in the book, though really I'm happy being one of the very few people who have it. (Thanks, Mom!)

THE AMAZING BABY NAME BOOK has got to be the perfect gift for anyone contemplating adding a newborn to their family, or creating characters for a story. Not to mention all the writers on your gift list.  

In this era of inventive naming, are there any names that have caught your fancy of late?

Mystery meets fantasy for the middle-grade reader in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL

HALLIE EPHRON: Up to now, my favorite children’s story set in a hotel has been ELOISE - all about a cheeky 7-year-old who lives in New York City’s Plaza Hotel. Now there’s another wonderful children’s book set in a hotel - the posh Sanborn House Hotel in London. In it there’s a mysterious fourteen-year old boy who lives on a floor that may or may not exist, and a sister and brother try to figure out what’s going on. 

Sounds intriguing, right? The book is called THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL, and it’s my sister Amy Ephron’s middle-grade fantasy novel (with brilliant covers by Jennifer Bricking and magical interior maps and scary creatures bu Vartan Ter-Avanesyan). It's the third in a fabulous series, but the books can be read in any order. This time Amy’s poaching on my territory: it’s also a mystery.

Looking for a holiday present for a budding mystery reader, a middle-grade boy or girl in your family? This one's a winner. 

Welcome Amy! The hotel. The mysterious fourteen-year old boy. London. A curious glass marble. Shadows that pass outside windows and vectors of the marble that seem to pass through walls. Please, tell us about how you came up with some of the wonderfully original ideas that are in this book, and how it turned into a mystery.

AMY EPHRON:  This is the third in The Other Side series, where Tess, whom I think of as a remarkable heroine (although she does jump in sometimes without thinking about what might happen next) and her brother Max, who’s younger and much more methodical and logical (although even he admits it’s sometimes hard to be logical especially when they go to England...) go to visit their Aunt Evie at a posh hotel in London.  

It’s Christmas and after a freak snow storm in London (which global warming gave me after I wrote it) and a visit to watch the snow fall in Hyde Park, Tess is charmed by a 14-year old boy having tea in the dining...except that no one else can see him....

By itself, almost, the book turned into a puzzle, a mystery.  As Tess unlocks the secrets of The Sanborn House and the story of the mysterious boy named Colin, whose last name is also Sanborn (just like the hotel) and who also, if he exists at all, seems to live there all year round...

The hash tag is #unlockthesecrets and Tess has a funny history of getting herself and Max into situations that are almost impossible to get out of, but if and when they do, they heal the hearts of the people they’ve interacted with, as well as their own.

I call them a modern-day mash-up of an old-fashioned children’s book. They’ve been reviewed as standalones and kindly compared The Secret Garden or an Edgar Eager book.  

Tess is a modern (and old-fashioned) super-hero, from feats of aerial ballet to a real (or imagined) dance with the stars, or a crazy flight down an orange path of vectors on the other side of the wall, not to mention excellent horsemanship!  She comes to the fore to rescue them from seen and unseen dangers in all three of The Other Side novels...but they are mysteries because she has to in all cases figure out how and why!

The Other Side of the Wall is the one that really unfolded as a mystery -- as Tess has to figure out what happened in the Sanborn House so many years ago to understand what’s happening now and what she has to do to fix it or at least to try...  It was lovely to be able to also write in period as well as in contemporary times, in the same novel, as what appears at first to be a 20’s costume party on the 8th floor (the floor Max insists didn’t even exist the day before) may turn out be in fact a step back in time.....but time travel, it turns out, may be a precarious thing.  

These books also have an intentional subset of rules: no guns, no explosions.  The dangers are real but also existential and there will never be any version of a hand-to- hand battle or combat in that way.  Just a curious amount of magic, a back story that has to be revealed and changed, whether it’s in the past or in a different space of time, and a real danger if they don’t get back in time, or even get back at all.    

Real mysteries, which my sister Hallie taught me, are often best as an emotional roller coaster (read her the new book: Careful What You Wish For and you’ll see what 

I mean.)  And the emotional undercurrent in The Other Side of the Wall -- the perceived and unperceived loyalties and flat-out deceptions, were an amazingly rich field to write, imagine, and explore.  

Thanks to all of you at Jungle Reds for welcoming me into your extraordinary mystery corner. 

HALLIE: The book is flat-out terrific, and it's definitely an emotional roller coaster. One thing I especially love about The Other Side Series is that they're adventures with siblings. I've always love books about siblings... Starting with Hansel and Gretel. Anyone remember the Twins books? Or Meg Murry and her little brother Charles Wallace, or Lucy and Edmund Pevensie in the Narnia books. 

Why do siblings make especially good characters for fantasy/adventure books with a touch of mystery?

The Other Side of the Wall
It's Christmas break and Tess and Max are in London, staying at the posh Sanborn House with their Aunt Evie. As they wait for their parents to arrive, there is an unusual snowstorm that makes the city seem as if it's caught in a snow globe. Perfect weather for an adventure in Hyde Park. But when Max, Tess, and Aunt Evie leave to search for a cab, they find a horse and carriage and driver curiously waiting for them at the curb. And that's just the beginning...

Soon Tess is charmed by a mysterious boy named Colin who lives at the hotel all year round--on the 8th floor. But Max is sure the elevator only had 7 floors the day before. And how come everyone at the hotel seems to ignore Colin? Things seem to get stranger and stranger. There's a 1920s costume party in Colin's parents' apartment. A marble that seems to be more than it appears. And a shadow that passes mysteriously by Tess and Max's hotel window.

Tess wants to figure out what's going on, but finds only more questions: Is it just a coincidence that Colin's last name is Sanborn, the same as the hotel? Why does the cat's-eye marble look eerily similar to the crystal at the top of their hotel room key? And, most importantly, what happened in that hotel one Christmas long, long ago?

In this mysterious story sprinkled with holiday enchantment, Amy Ephron transports readers into the magic of London at wintertime, where it's just possible that what seems imaginary is real, and your wishes might come true.

Amy Ephron lives in Los Angeles. Her new book "Carnival Magic" the continued, startling, sometimes magical adventures of Tess and Max is a bestseller and was featured in "Teen Vogue," tagged as a standalone, "Parade," "Story Monsters, inc," "The Jewish Journal," etc. It has been nominated for an American Library Association award, The Grand Canyon Award to be announced in 2020. A companion to "The Castle in the Mist," (the intro to Tess & Max and their Aunt Evie,) was an Amazon Best pick, a B&N pick, and claimed a nom for a SCIBA award.

What We're Writing: @HallieEphron, the sister who didn't

HALLIE EPHRON: It's What We're Writing week again, and (bowing) thank you, thank you, I get to kick off the festivities. I am working on a new book but it's still very much in flux so I'm keeping it under wraps. Instead I'm offering up part of an essay I wrote about having sisters who write. I wrote it to celebrate the publication of my somewhat autobiographical novel Night Night, Sleep Tight in which the protagonist who really is the virtual me has no sisters.  

*** Whenever I get together with my sisters and reminisce about something that happened when we were growing up, one of them will pipe up, “It wasn’t like that.” Another will pile on: “And you weren’t there.”

And maybe I wasn’t. Memory is like that. Photos in family albums morph into memories, while events that weren’t seared into consciousness fade.

For years I sat back and didn’t write while my sisters did, and it’s always illuminating when one of them writes about a time when I was there.

My older sister Delia’s first book, the huge bestseller How to Eat Like a Child, has a chapter on “How to torture your sister.” In it she reveals techniques that she and I practiced on our younger sister, Amy. (“I’ve got to tell you something. You’re adopted!”) Delia would go on to write Hanging Up, miraculously finding humor in our screenwriter father’s bouts of alcohol-soaked self-pity. 

My oldest sister Nora, who inspired a generation of women to feel bad about their necks and who wrote and directed some of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks’ best films, gave me a moment on the page as the "good" daughter (“to distinguish her from me,” the protagonist explains) in Heartburn, her painfully funny autobiographical novel about the breakup of her marriage to Carl Bernstein.

Then there’s the time I nearly killed Amy. She immortalized it in her first novel, Cool Shades. She couldn’t pedal her tricycle fast enough to keep up with my two-wheeler, so I tied my bike to her trike. Soon we were flying along. Near the corner, I hit the brakes. But tricycles have no brakes, so Amy kept on going until the rope snapped and she flew off, skidding face-first across the macadam. Reading her book brought back the full horror of that moment when I realized what I’d done.

I've gotten used to being written about, and whenever one of my sisters publishes something (as in just about every other week), I brace for another cringe-worthy episode from my life to get aired. 

For years I couldn't fight back. I didn't write.

Then, one day I got a call from a freelance writer. She wanted to write a magazine piece about me. “You’re the sister who doesn’t write,” she said, like “the fourth Brontë sister.” Which sounded unappealing, not just because the fourth Brontë sister died young of tuberculosis.

Then it struck me: the longer I waited to write, the less material there would be to claim as my own.

I told that freelancer that if anyone was going to write about me not writing it was going to be me.

***
After telling that freelance thanks, but no thanks, I started where most writers start, essays about my own personal experience. I piled page on top of page, thinking maybe I was writing a book. But when I read it, I knew that while the words were fine, and some of the sentences were lovely, the story was circling the drain. I had no idea that characters need arcs, that there had to be stakes, and the story had to go somewhere.

I tucked that unfinished manuscript away. When I pulled it out about three years ago, I was surprised to find that it didn't smell as bad as I thought it would. In fact, pieces of it are in Night Night. (The episode where Deirdre gets nabbed for shoplifting at J. J. Newberry's really happened. Sadly none of my sisters were involved so I missed an opportunity to humiliate one of them.)

Which leads me one of my hard and fast WRITING RULES. Save everything you write because today's garbage is tomorrow's compost. Which is a corollary to my other WRITING RULE: Just hold your nose and write.

Amy Ephron's "Loose Diamonds"

HALLIE EPHRON: Today I'm happy to introduce my sister Amy Ephron to Jungle Red. I played 'good daughter' to her 'troublemaker' -- I crossed at the crosswalk and she danced on the double yellow line. I always wanted to play "school" and she never wanted to be the student.

AMY EPHRON: I'm happy to play school, any time you want to and if you want, I'll even sit in the corner.

HALLIE: Now she tells me.

I love Amy's book of essays, "Loose Diamonds…and other things I’ve lost and found along the way," which is just out in paperback. I was gobsmacked when I read the very first essay, that she and her friend used to play "Secret Garden" (which was my favorite book, too) by conjuring a plan to sneak into our next-door neighbors' garden where they'd dig up weeds and uncover baby crocuses. Of course they found neither.

I would never in a million years have snuck into a neighbor's garden (see "crosswalk" above). And frankly it astonishes me to discover that Amy was going about having a life when I wasn't there to tell her what not to do. And now I get to ask: Where did you get that adventurous spirit, that questioning of the rules that may have driven my parents' nuts but has served you so well as an adult?
AMY: Answer:  Total lack of competent adult supervision.

But more than that, I remember feeling very adventurous and confident as a child, which in retrospect makes no sense as we really lived in a somewhat dangerous environment. But curious and interested was a part of my nature (and somewhat mischievous, although I wasn't really a trouble-maker).

I also think in some ways what attracted you to mysteries is somewhat the same thing:  that on the outside everything looked fine, but really we were all holding onto a secret that no one else knew, which can be the basis of a very good mystery.  AA wasn’t in vogue, therapy wasn’t fashionable, and our both our parents were on a collision course of their own.  Secrets.

There is a new piece in the paperback edition of “Loose Diaomonds” called “Secrets” but it’s not really about this – although it sort of is. There’s a section in that essay, if Hallie was upset about the sneaking into the Cabelerro’s garden, which will give her shudders. (Luckily, I didn’t get caught.)

HALLIE: In the opening essay "Loose Diamonds" you talk about losing things but cherishing the memories, which I think is so poignant. I confess, I sometimes deliberately "lose" things -- like an amber glass bud vase that I got as a wedding present. Do you?

AMY: Who gave it to you?  Why did you lose it?  Did it have a terrible shape or a terrible history?

HALLIE: Not saying who (my secret!) It was, ahem, not my taste and because of who I am I knew I'd have to put it out...somewhere. So I put it out of its misery.
 
AMY: I think one of the things about “Loose Diamonds…and other things I’ve lost and found along the way” is that it involves questions like that, loss, intentional or unintentional loss, touchstones, tricky relationships, marriage, divorce, post-modern life, the difficulties of being a woman, the difficulties of modern life, and we all have them – and there’s a bound-in readers guide that I spent way too much time on that’s exactly about that.

Confession:  I think I once left my Filofax on the back of my car intentionally because someone I was involved with wasn’t calling me back and he had a really unlisted number and I was scared I’d call him four more times.  By the way, I inadvertently did lose my Filofax again last week when I was unceremoniously dumped out of a cab in Charlotte, North Carolina in a torrential downstorm, the last night of the DNC and everything fell out of my computer case and I was so upset about my moleskins which had notes in it, I missed that the Filofax had dropped.  The convention was amazing.  But since I doubt there’s a lost and found – although you never know, I’m going digital.  

HALLIE: What I love about these essays is that they sound just like you! You run off with an idea like an meandering stream -- you start with the red patent leather shoes that got you thrown out of The Buckley School, wander through musings about Mom and her egg cups and chutney dishes, and wind up in a very sad place that I won't spoil, and a lovely Aha! moment. Can you tell us a little about how your writing and how you get from the red shoes in an essay to the end?

AMY: I don’t know, it’s all a little elliptical, I love the sort of lyrical concept of starting one place and ending up in another.  I hate outlining cause I think it limits where you might end up, what left turn you might take along the way.  I have signposts with my work – but I hate to outline. 

One of the things our parents used to do, despite dysfunction, is family dinner. The big thing was to bring out the old Louis Untermeyer poetry collection and we would pass it around at dessert and all read a piece and through that, I think we all got a sense of (or I did anyway) sort of lyrical minimalist conceptual writing that in some ways is similar to poetry and it was always so interesting to see what each of us picked and how we delivered it. 

HALLIE: Really? I remember mom reciting poetry, but passing around that poetry collection??? Sorry. Go on...

AMY: But I don’t believe in rules, structural or otherwise, I think the ‘you can’t get married after 30' thing is ridiculous and ‘you can’t get a job after 42’ is counter-productive.  We live in very changing times.  In some ways, I think I got this from our mother who never questioned that she could be successful and that she could break a glass ceiling.  Glass ceilings come in all shapes and sizes. 

HALLIE: The one thing that all the Ephron sisters share is being opinionated. Amy, did you ever start an essay thinking you were writing with one opinion, and gotten to the end and changed your mind?

AMY: Nope.

HALLIE: (Laughing.) I think I knew that. And let's end with just a bit about how to reach you and your wonderful web site for foodies, One for the Table. 

AMY: Thanks for having me! Please follow me if you want @amyEphron (twitter & facebook) or at AmyEphron.com, I’d love to hear what you’re doing. And if you have a recipe or a piece you want to post about emo and food or your mother’s favorite recipe, or a political screed, or a fight w/your iphone, pls pls send it to me at ("Editor" at "oneforthetable" dot com) the on-line magazine I publish that specializes in food, politics, and love, and that sometimes has the pleasure of guesting Hallie Ephron. 

HALLIE: So, gentle Reds, did you and your sister inhabit alternate universes? And what "loose diamonds" have you lost?