I started The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake shortly after a phone conversation with a composer named Harold Meltzer.  He had read some of my stories, and called me up to ask if I might be up for collaborating on a piece he was working on.  “Let me tell you my idea,” he said.

He wanted to do a take-off of an concept from a Brecht opera about the seven deadly sins, updating it, he said, to the ’seven abstemious sins’ (which I had to look up).  Basically, he felt the seven deadly sins needed modernizing, and that we were often so indirect in our wants these days– instead of gluttony, how about something on anorexia, about resisting food.  Instead of rage, how about all the passive-aggression?   Instead of greed-well, he figured I could fill in the blanks.  Was I interested?  “Yes!” I said, delighted.  I loved the idea.  And I thought he was truly onto something-it seems the vices of our time are often the covert vices, the ones that don’t quite express what we feel-not lust, but endless watching of hot stars on reality tv; not quite pride, but the inability to say thank you without endless self-deprecation, and on.   

I felt incredibly energized after the call and promptly went and wrote seven short paragraph/monologues.

The food one came easily.  It was about a woman who couldn’t eat the food she made. I didn’t know why.  She just refused to eat it.  But it wasn’t anorexia-I felt that territory had been well covered and there was something different in this woman.  It seemed she wasn’t eating it for a reason I didn’t understand yet.  A few days later, I opened a new file and began the voice that became Rose; I wrote two scenes-one of a food she loved dearly, and another of a food that revealed her own skill and burden to her.  And I could sense that there was something in this dilemma, this power– something I could write about for awhile.  

The piece for Meltzer became its own thing, and when I look at it now, that voice isn’t Rose at all.  He gave me an idea that led to a diving board that led into Rose.   I also have a friend who talks about feelings as something to digest-her own, or other people’s.   Or processed/unprocessed feelings.  Or metabolized/unmetabolized.  All these words for emotion that are the same words we use for food.  The two were matched up in my mind long before Harold’s call, but I do feel so glad and grateful that he called me up out of the blue and told me his idea that led to another idea that freed up this character!

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is out now in Waterstone’s, Amazon, Play, and all good bookshops.