Confessions of an Amateur Believer: An Interview with Patty Kirk (Part Two)

Continued from Part One of my interview with Patty Kirk, author of Confessions of an Amateur Believer.

Your two daughters are main characters in Confessions of an Amateur Believer. Charlotte consistently makes me laugh. Like when your husband found a prayer she wrote in the third grade asking God for help with her boyfriend. How do Charlotte and Lulu feel about being featured so prominently in your book?

One of the first things my line editor, who is responsible for releases from people, asked me was whether it was okay that this stuff was in there about my daughters. And, I said, “Well, let me read them the passages.” The girls knew that they were in my book. In fact, a long time ago Lulu told me that she didn’t want to be in my writing. She is very private person (and this is long before I had any idea I was going to publish these essays). But she told me, categorically, that I was not allowed to write about her anymore. Or read anything I’d written that had her in it. I told her then that it was just tough luck that she had a writer for a mom, and I couldn’t help it: she was my life and I write about my life. She was mad about that.

When it came time to publish these essays I sat down with the girls and read them all the problematic passages. Their only objection was that I had to make it absolutely clear that these potentially embarrassing things happened when they were younger. I had to specify their age…and then the writing was okay with them.

I didn’t know when I received an advanced copy of the book from your publisher that we had a mutual friend who is actually mentioned in the acknowledgments in your book. When I told this friend that I was going to be speaking with you, she told me that you are an accomplished chef and that I have to ask you about cooking. She said she had some great meals at your house when she was at John Brown University.

She and her best friend came over practically every Sunday. And I love to cook.

Actually, my next book is a food memoir. There are a lot of these lately - books like Tender to the Bone and others. But I have a lot of food stories from my life and so this will be a collection of food-related essays.

For example, I have an essay in there about how the first time I voted, I voted communist. I had this idea that what we have should be shared, and I had a simplistic notion of what communism was. I came from this Orange County Republican family, and I couldn’t reconcile wealth and rightness in any way. And it was this thing that burdened me for a long time. That’s how I ended up in China. I was living in Germany at the time, and I tried very hard to get a job in East Germany because I wanted to live in a communist country. I never did succeed at that but I accidentally came upon an advertisement looking for teachers in China. I applied with the foreign ministry and I immediately got a job, I learned eventually that Chinese communism was very different than what I had envisioned.

When I was in China all I had in my apartment was this little one-burner stove. I didn’t have an oven and the whole year I was in Beijing I just so missed baking. Finally, I decided I was going to build my own oven. So I went down to the free market and got some people to look at this design I had made for a doghouse-shaped box to put over my stove. I got a friend to help me and another guy to build it. When I brought it home I started baking cookies that were really, really from scratch. I devised some recipes for peanut butter cookies, actually, but none of the ingredients I needed were available. So I mashed the peanuts myself. And I had to assemble all the ingredients that were only sort of like the ingredients that I needed. But when I started making these peanut butter cookies, people from all over the university where I taught would smell these cookies baking. They showed up at my door wanting some. And so there was this great sharing of cultures and food and that was really exciting for me…

There is another essay about the time I went camping with friends in junior high school with the idea that we would cook frog legs. We cut off the legs, assumed the frogs were dead, and went off to wash the frog legs. But when we came back the frogs were trying to jump around with no legs.

That’s terrible.

It turned into this horror story for us. We couldn’t bear to stab and kill the frogs after everything we had done to them. And we didn’t know how to deal with them. So we buried the frogs alive.

But then we went ahead and ate the frog legs.

That was the least you could do.

All of these food essays will fit together to form a narrative. And each chapter includes recipes, maybe two recipes per essay.

That sounds great. When is that book slated to come out?

January 2008.

I have one more question and it takes us back to where we started. We said that the stand-alone essays in Confessions actually fit together, like the mosaic quilt you once saw. We back up a little and a larger image emerges. Stepping back to see the big picture, what do you think is the larger “revealed image?”

Posted on April 9, 2007 12:00 AM