If you are heartbroken and can't face the world, you need something with a fantastic plot. You won't be able to read anything boring because your attention span when you are heartbroken decreases by three-quarters.
Accounts of eating Christmas sweet potatoes baked in ashes and jackrabbit stewed with white flour dumplings are testaments to pioneer resilience and pleasure - and they help inspire my own best scratch cooking.
After I clean my face, I use combinations of sweet-almond, meadowfoam, grape-seed, coconut, black-currant, and argan oils to hydrate. Argan is probably my favorite for my face.
Anita Shreve is an author I adore. I rip through her meaty books and get off on the robust romance immensely - especially if I am feeling less than robust in my real life.
As moisturizers, oils rapidly penetrate the deeper layers of the skin, protecting against the breakdown of proteins in the cell wall with fatty and linoleic acids, mimicking what our bodies produce naturally. The oils also function as humectants, which help our skin retain moisture.
Growing up, I'll always remember knowing from movies and TV that there was a possibility that you wouldn't fall in love. I always thought, 'Oh my God, I hope I'm not that person.'
I didn't think anything I wrote was going to get published. I'm a dyslexic kid who had tutors through college. But I had a very strong impulse to write.
I had been living in Ohio in my own house with my own life when my marriage abruptly came to an end. I had nowhere to go with my two sons, very little money, and not much to do in Ohio except be someone's ex-wife. My parents instantly and very generously invited my family to move back home to New York, where I could begin again.
I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.
I think even if you haven't been divorced, you can hopefully relate to having to navigate through a really difficult time and see how you can get through to the other side and how you can stay positive, even if there's some really bad stuff happening.
It's not easy to slather your face with oil. It requires a little bit of work to smooth it on and rub it in. You become more familiar with the feel of your own skin and face.
Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series is a national treasure, beloved by generations. But what I love most is the peek it provides into the planting, harvesting, hunting, and preparing of the foods that America's settler families ate in the late 1800s.
My mother worked full-time running a foundation, but she found all the time in the world to have supper ready every night, feed us shirred eggs on the weekends, and produce a leg of lamb for my fourth-grade Bedouin feast at school.
Skeptical of strangers, lobstermen are keepers of secrets, working in the howling wind and hot sun, the icy snows, and bewildering fog. When I was growing up, the lore was that they had the right to shoot anyone who messed with their traps.
There are a lot of great love stories. It's just the best thing. Why wouldn't you write about it? Why wouldn't you want to read about it? But it's hard to write about. It's weird to have such a powerful and universal feeling and hope that you can write that and make it real for people.
When I think of the moment I knew that my marriage to Josiah would end, there were a few moments before I really, really knew. I probably knew, when I saw my ex-husband and his now wife - then colleague - having tea together in his office, that something was amiss.
When you work alone at home, time can become shapeless. There are no eleven o'clock meetings or afternoon coffee breaks. The light outside may clue me in to what part of the day it is, but if all is going well, the hours bleed together.
When your heart is broken, you feel like no freaking book in the world could help you because a book is not the person who you love, who doesn't love you. However, books help, if only because they serve as something you can hold in your hand and throw across the room in agony.
You see, I am friends with a lobsterman. Because we are friends, which feels lucky anyway, I get access to the most amazing fish. It's like having a backstage pass - a culinary jackpot that feels almost undeserved.
