I also did not expect Motherland to be mentioned yesterday in the same sentence as Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, but there we are, and I’m grateful. Thank you Melissa Clark and NYTimes Cooking.

Chapter 2 of Weird Publishing Stories (see below): I talked about the history of Motherland (2019- ) to a group of new writers the other day—everything from wild advances and amazing reviews and reasonable expectations and completely hilarious/heartbreaking mishaps and crazy threats and agents (fired long ago) playing Angry Birds during marketing meetings (“Wheee!”)—so to see this made me smile. Again. And on it goes.