An Archive, A Book, A Job

Recently a few readers had let me know that the Toast had gone down, which I was sorry to hear about. Luckily, friend of the site Eli Dickinson has very kindly mirrored the archives here, so you should still be able to rifle through the old posts at your leisure. How lovely!

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I submitted the manuscript for my third novel yesterday. I’m very pleased and a little tired. The Women’s Hotel sequel will be coming out October 2025, and I believe Meeting New People (unconnected with the Women’s Hotel universe, if universe is not too strong a word) will be released sometime in 2026.

I’ve described Meeting New People before as my Nora Ephron’s Heartburn pastiche. It’s a chatty, slightly resentful first-person story about a woman in her late fifties going through a painful friend breakup, instead of being cheated on by Carl Bernstein, with occasional asides describing very good recipes with a spirit of hostility.

More recently I have described the book as “High Fidelity about a grandmother’s painful history with her closest friends” and “a very small-scale, out-of-season Christmas Carol.” I’ll share two brief excerpts here, to give you a sense of what I’ve been working on.

The first is from the very beginning of the story, when Barbara is dumped by her best friend of eight years, Susan Montgomery, right in the middle of making dinner:

That was not the right thing to say. I think it may have been true, but that doesn’t mean it was the right thing to say. Certainly not at that moment, and probably not in that tone. I knew that, and Susan knew that, but at this point I was getting a little angry myself.

Of course now Susan was much more than a little angry with me. You can always tell, in an argument, when you’ve given someone else the chance to be really indignant, and you are going to have to shut up and take it, and I could tell then.

She looked at me for a long time, mouth all in a line, and very quietly, she leaned over towards me and said, “You know, I just feel really sorry for you.”

Well, that was not the right thing for her to say, either. That is never the right thing to say.

“I feel sorry for you” is what people say when they’re so angry with you that they’ll never admit to being angry ever again. You’ve lost all of your sightseeing privileges to any of their private feelings. They’re going to control themselves and maintain perfect composure in front of you forever. It’s just awful. It’s considerably worse than getting yelled at. The only thing you can say in return, when someone tells you they feel sorry for you, is that you actually feel sorry for them.

Which is an unsatisfying thing to say, because they got it in first, and it makes you sound like a little kid copying her big sister. But it’s still the only thing to say.

So I told her, “Well, Susan, I actually feel really sorry for you,” and we probably ought to have ended the conversation there, because nobody was going to say anything coherent or sensible after that.

And neither of us did. We just kept announcing how sorry we felt for each other, like we were having a competitive pity party. The only interruption came when she finally started putting on her coat to leave, and I remembered about dinner.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me give you a plate. There’s still salad and chutney and dessert that will keep.”

Susan just looked at me like I was crazy and said “I’m not hungry, Barbara.”

“But you’ll be hungry later,” I said. “It won’t take me a second. You don’t have to bring a plate back, I’ll just stick it in a takeout container.”

I wasn’t crazy. I hadn’t forgotten that we were fighting, and that we probably weren’t going to speak again. But it’s one thing to hate someone. It’s another thing to hate them so much, after eight years of talking practically every day, that you wouldn’t even eat something they made for you.

The second excerpt describes Barbara’s circuitous professional route from corporate worker to stay-at-home-mother to deli manager:

By that point I’d been out of food service even longer than I’d been out of the corporate world. Nobody in restaurants trusts anybody who stops working in restaurants. It’s the opposite of working for the Mafia: once you’re out, you’re out for good, and there’s nobody trying to pull you back in. They assume – and they’re probably right to – that you can’t hack it anymore, not the hours, not the standing and the orthopedic footwear, not emptying the grease traps, not the salary reduction. You might think that trying to find a job that pays less than your last one did would make things simpler. In most other circumstances, when you lower your standards you do so in order to make life a little easier, but it’s not like that with work. Nobody trusts you when you say you’ll work for less money than you’re used to. They assume that you’re lying and that in six months you’ll get a new offer at your old rate and leave them in the lurch. But the thing is that, once you’re considering working for a lot less money than you’re used to, it’s because you know that offer is never coming. The old rate is already gone forever. Your new rate is zero dollars, which is why working for minimum wage is not in fact a step down, it’s a step up from the nothing you’ve been making for months or years. But try telling that to a hiring manager. Hiring managers never believe anyone else is really sincere, or really desperate. In their world, new jobs are always opening up, and people are always accepting offers, so they can’t really imagine what it’s like for anyone who experiences the market differently.

The way to break back into the food service after a long absence, incidentally, is to sneak back in very nonchalantly through catering. Catering is a great way for someone who’s sick of it to get out of the restaurant industry, which means it’s also a great way to climb back in and follow the caterer’s footsteps in reverse. As long as you know someone with a catering business (and if you’ve ever had a rich husband or worked in a restaurant you almost certainly do) you can probably get an informal part-time job there, and once you’ve done that for a few months, your resume starts to glow with the power of “recent food service experience,” and you can look for a full-time job again.

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On the subject of jobs —

This won’t mean much change for you, the faithful Chatner subscriber, since it will still leave me plenty of time for my writing, but next month I’ll begin CNA training at a California senior care center. I’m very much looking forward to it.

I started doing part-time caregiving last year in New York and found I like working with seniors very much, although without training I was really only qualified to hang out and be companionable. A CNA assists patients with the basic activities of daily living (eating, bathing, dressing, toileting) and assists medical staff with basic administration, taking vital signs, cleaning, performing inspections, et cetera. I think this kind of work is interesting, worthwhile, meaningful, and am very excited to have a day job on the horizon again, especially one that involves walking around and chatting. I love a chat; I dearly love a pop-in; I love to say “Can I get ya something?”

And if any of you have recommendations on where to get comfortable non-slip shoes (particularly if they are neither clogs nor Crocs, which I cannot abide), please let me know, as I’m all ears.