If you’ve ever wondered what working in a restaurant is really like, Michael’s memoir, Your Table is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’  give you a very good idea.  His book is the front of  house equivalent to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential…. Your Table is Ready describes the heady 1980’s, think of Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko, Greed is Good Days, before social media, before the Me Too movement when money, booze, cocaine, and sex flowed like tap water, Michael, a natural storyteller,  had a front row seat at both the good and the bad times in the city. He lost a lot of friends during the AIDS crisis, and 20 years later he lost beloved clients in 9-11. This is not a book for the faint of heart. A paragraph from his excellent introduction below:

A well-run dining room is an art, a ballet, a confluence of pieces that come together to bring a guest a meal. Our guests come not just for sustenance, but to celebrate. Birthdays, anniversaries, a wedding, a death, a date. Friends getting together, the pursuit of sex, love. It’s all happening on any given night.

And on any given night, most of my working life has been spent in this environment. I am just a piece in the show. For many years, restaurants enabled me artistically, socially, and sexually. I’ve met the loves of my life in restaurants, my greatest friends have worked alongside me, and many are still my friends, even though the name above the door has changed numerous times for us. I’ve had trysts, got naked, fucked, laughed, drank, drugged, puked, and shared the gamut of our human existence in restaurants. It’s now time to share these experiences, the people, the food, the insanity of the places so many of us take for granted.

While Michael’s book gives a no holds barred look at what really went on in top NYC restaurants, his memoir is also a coming-of-age story from a New York City native who grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn where the jobs available were in sanitation, the police force or the mob. Michael fled those chosen career paths for the glittering lights of Manhattan.

 I met Michael recently at his own chic and delicious restaurant, Cecchi’s, in the West Village, which I highly recommend. In fact, I went back a second time, and hope to visit many more times. He knows exactly what makes a restaurant successful.  Below are a few highlights from our conversation. You can listen – and subscribe-  to the entire episode here on Elena Meets the Author or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Elena: Michael, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here.

Thank you, Elena. It’s great to be here.

Elena: You have so many choice stories in your book and the Brooklyn mobster accents that you do on the Audible version are impressive. It makes sense that you also had a career in acting. Let’s start off by talking about the genesis of your book. What made you decide to write it?

 I had an acting career for many years. In fact, restaurants supported my theater habit. As an actor, you’re a storyteller. And when I was at restaurants and working, I told stories. I told stories about life. The wacky things that happened to me, to restaurants, to other guests.

People have come in and people always said, well, you should write this down. So, 30 odd years later, I decided to write it down.  I was the maître d’ and manager  at Le Coucou. So, once the last table is seated, and there are a couple of nights a week I had to close the restaurant, I really had nothing to do.

So, I’m standing there, and I figured, let me start writing. And I did. I went in the back and started typing away. And I got about 70 pages in and one of my guests, a known food writer, was walking out one day and I said, you know, I think I’m writing a book. Can I send it to you? And, let me know what you think.

And he said, yeah, sure, of course. So, I did, and he sent it back a few days later with notes. And he said, you need to do this, this, and this. So I responded to the notes, and we had a back and forth for about three or four weeks.

I probably wrote another hundred pages. Then he said, okay, that’s it. Stop bothering me. You’re a writer. Go finish your book. At that time, my young daughter was born. And I was working full time, I had a newborn, and I stopped writing.

And about a year and a half later, COVID happens.  I lost my job. My wife, our daughter and I, and some family members went up to a farm in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. And we’re up there, and while I’m up there, a former host of mine sends me an email from someone out in L.A. whose offering writing scholarships to any restaurant worker that’s a writer and happens to be unemployed. How’s that for a niche? So, I applied, for this writing scholarship, I got it, and it was a ten-week workshop where you had to commit to two hours in the morning and two hours at night.

We met remotely two or three nights a week, we’d have these talks with other writers who were in the program. Probably about eight of us were doing it. I finish the ten-week program, and at the end of it, you get an evaluation. And I’m now at this farm in the middle of nowhere, the only, reception I got on my phone was in the middle of a cow field.

So, I take a chair, and I trudge out to the middle of a cow field, I sit down. Phone rings, I get the evaluation, and it was very good. So, I hang up the phone, and I’m thinking, now what? The cows are looking at me, we’re in the middle of COVID, and my phone rings. And it’s a former customer of mine, calling to check in.

How are you? What’s going on? What are you doing? And I say, you know, I’m well, broke, haven’t worked in a long time, but I  just finished a book. He said, What’s the book? I said, It’s a front of house kitchen confidential. He goes, Oh, that sounds interesting. I say, Well, if you happen to know any literary agents, let me know.

He says, you know, I know a few. let me see what I can do for you. I hang up the phone. The next day I get an email from a literary agent saying I heard I should read your book. I send him the book. He writes back to me two weeks later. I love it. Stand by. Two weeks after that, he signed me. And then about a month later, we got a publishing deal. And the book came out. Well, it takes about a year. About a year later, the book came out.

Elena: What a story. You make it sound so easy.

 Honestly, I don’t tell this to writers, because I’m afraid they’ll kill me, because it’s so hard, but I guess people will hear this now. But it was (easy).

Elena: Let’s discuss your childhood in Bensonhurst  and how serving at your uncle’s poker games and being an altar boy gave you a sense that maybe the restaurant business could be for you.

When I started to write the book, I started thinking, how did I get into this business, how did I get to be a waiter?  I just started thinking, and I kind of always did it. I was an altar boy.  And when you’re an altar boy, you serve Mass. And what’s serving Mass? You assist the priest. You get the wine and the host, and you bring it out. And you get the linens, which are the tablecloths to cover the altar. And you polish the gold. You know? And you set up the cruets with the wine and the water and, you’re there and you’re serving. I thought, well, wow, my restaurant career really started in church.

I come from this very Italian Sicilian background neighbourhood and a lot of poker playing, booze drinking guys. On the weekends,  my mother played poker, and these guys would come over for poker games. They would come sit in the living room, and they’d be smoking cigarettes, and they’d be drinking, and I thought, I’d like to hang out with those guys.

It was kind of cool. I must have been six or seven years old, and I would change the ashtrays. If they needed a drink, I’d run in the kitchen, get them a drink, and there I was serving drinks and cleaning ashtrays, which, until no smoking happened in restaurants, is what you did. And so, I thought, that really was the genesis of it.

And I loved it. It was fun. It got me to be around all these really cool, though, albeit crazy people.

Elena: And in the altar boy job, there was a little bit of skimming money off the plate?

The neighbourhood  I grew up in, you had three paths in life, generally. You were sanitation, police, or mob. And the ethos of the time, whether you were sanitation, police, or the mob, was get what you can. Take what you can get because no one’s going to give it to you.

This is the mentality. It was very tribal, and that’s what I grew up in. And so after mass, we’d sell the Catholic newspaper called The Tablet. it was ten cents a copy, and there we were, these cute altar boys, ten cents a copy, collecting the money, and then the money would come in, and we’d go back in the rectory, and we would take five dollars off the top to buy a nickel bag of pot.

And then we’d go sneak some wine, before the priest coud get it, because the bottle was already open. Actually we’d get six dollars, because five dollars was for the pot, and then we’d go get high behind the church, and then with the last dollar, we’d go to the luncheonette on the corner and get coffee and toast, because we were hungry.

Elena: Jumping ahead now to when you started out as a waiter in NYC, you talk about going to an interview with famed restaurateur Danny Meyer and he asks you what’s more important, the food or the service? At the time you didn’t know. But you learned quickly. Which is more important?

 Service. You go to a restaurant for a meal, right? But you really don’t. You go to a restaurant for an experience. You go to celebrate a birthday, an anniversary, on a date, to find a date. You’re hungry, yes, but you go because you want to be around people.

And that’s the experience. And the most successful restaurants, at least the ones that I know, when you walk in that door, your shoulders drop. And if it’s done right, you’re in a whole other mindset, You sit down, someone brings you a drink and you get your food, and if that goes seamlessly, it’s wonderful.

And if things are great, and you love your server, and they come over and explain things, and your steak comes out, it’s well done, you’ll forgive a well-done steak.

But if your server’s a jerk, or the person at the door ignores you, or the bartender’s not looking at you for ten minutes, things start off on a bad foot. And even if the food’s delicious, will you really want to go back? If they forgot your appetizers, or they forgot your partner’s drink, or it was a birthday, and they forgot the candle. You’re probably not going to go back.

But if you get the service part right, and your food’s pretty good, you’re on your way to something successful.

You write about how the staff prepared for  restaurant critics and food inspectors. Tell us about that.

 Both strike fear into the hearts of mortal men. Are you talking about Pete Wells?

Elena: yes

So Pete Wells, who is now retired, was the food critic for the New York Times. And for many years, the food critic for the New York Times was the most powerful person in the city because he could make or break a restaurant. That’s changed drastically since those days. But you want to get a good review. You want to spot Pete Wells. And Pete would come incognito, or use pseudonyms. One of the things that he would do is there would be a party of four and three guests would show up, asked to be seated, and then he would just come in like 20 minutes later and just sneak in and go find the table. But we really wanted to spot him. We were waiting for people. Look, you wait for the reviewers, right? And Stephen Starr , owner of Le Coucou, is a master restaurateur, but also he’s been doing this for many years.

He hired people who’d be at the door who recognized every critic and food writer that ever walked through that door. We did not miss one person. Because you want to be ready. You don’t want the restaurant critic to come in and suddenly everyone’s having a bad night, and your worst server is at that station, and everything goes downhill. So, you want to be prepared for the best. There was a woman who worked the door, and pretty much knew all the aliases Pete Wells used, and some of the phone numbers, and, we were able to know when he was coming.

Elena: Didn’t you also leave a table empty for the critic?

 The day Le Coucou opened, we left the best table in the restaurant unseated, So, when a food writer or restaurant critic did come in, they got the best table in the restaurant. And that best table in the restaurant was always helmed by the best captain and the best server. And behind the desk there we had a fresh menu with a fresh wine list that was perfect. So, when they went down to the table, everything was perfect.

And this is a very busy restaurant, right? Packed, packed. People waited a year for a reservation. People would be walking in and waiting for a table. Why can’t I sit there? Why can’t I sit at that table? Why is no one sitting at the table?

And I would just say, I’m so sorry, it’s spoken for. And people would scream at you. Why, I’m waiting half an hour for a table. Why is that table open? It’s because it’s spoken for. I’m so sorry.

Elena: You have to be so diplomatic. Food and health inspectors, that was another nightmare…

 Oh my God,  the worst. Look, it’s New York City, most of these spaces are old. We have a health code now that when Bloomberg was mayor, it became a letter grade. You had A, B, C, or D in your window, depending on the state of cleanliness of your restaurant.

No one wants anything but an A. If you see a D on a restaurant window, you’re not walking in unless you’re starving. And there’s nothing else open. So, you really want that A. It’s a point system. You’re allowed 13 points of violations.

And once you go past 13, that’s when the B begins. And then more points to C or D. Getting 13 points in a restaurant is pretty easy. When the restaurant inspector comes in everything stops because generally, in the kitchen especially, nothing is legal. You got a bunch of orders coming in and there’s three pieces of fish sitting waiting to go into a pan and you’ve got three burgers on the side there that you’re going to put on the grill and  that meat and fish is sitting out. They’re not in the refrigerator because you have to temper them. Once you temper them, it becomes an illegal temperature. So, the inspector comes in, puts his thermometer in there, and you fail. And a piece of meat that fails temperature is, I forget how many points, it’s a lot of points. And if there’s two pieces of meat out, you’ve blown your 13 points.

So, when the DOH (Department of Health) comes in, we have a code word. And many restaurants have a word for whatever it is. Tsunami was one of the ones we used in a restaurant. And the host comes in, and the DOH person shows their badge. Thank you very much. And some places have buzzers at the front door that alerts the kitchen.

Some say, okay, give me one second, turn, and the host will run back and tell everyone, tsunami, tsunami, tsunami. And you race through the restaurant to make sure everybody on the floor knows, the bar knows, the kitchen knows, that there’s a health inspector in the restaurant.

Now, some inspectors will stop there at reception and put their paperwork together, and some will just walk straight through and go into the kitchen. So as they’re coming, when you hear Tsunami, the first thing kitchen staff do in the kitchen with those burgers and fish, they throw them out. In the refrigerator, all your dairy products, anything in the refrigerator, the doors are opening and closing, you can’t keep them at the required temperature so all that gets thrown out. Your bar garnishes, those are never at the right temperature. They all get thrown out. You throw everything out. So, all those people waiting for their orders, their food is now in the garbage, and we’re not going to cook a thing until that inspector leaves, because once that fish is up there, if the inspector’s thermometer comes out, we’re in trouble.

And restaurants in New York, there are mice. There are roaches. Every single, brand-new restaurant has mice and roaches. And if there’s one little speck of mouse poop on the floor, no matter how clean you are, how many exterminators you have, that’s a violation. So, when they come through the door, it’s a disaster.

 What was my thinking? I was in quarantine. I wrote a book, the book got published and I was done. I wasn’t going to come back and work for anybody. I tried to open something before, but everything was too expensive. It just didn’t make any sense. The rents were too high, and you couldn’t make ends meet.

My older daughter said, what are you going to do now, Dad? And I said, nothing. And she says, no, you have to open Cecchi’s. And I said, oh, Jesus Christ. And so, I thought about it and slept on it.

And a lot of restaurants had gone out of business during Covid, and no one knew what was going to happen. So, there were a lot of deals to be had. I thought, okay, I’m going to do it. And I found a spot that I fell in love with at a very good price because of the pandemic.

I saw that in covid when people sat outside in 20-degree (Fahrenheit) weather because they wanted to support restaurants, they wanted to see other people, I saw that people will come back to restaurants. I didn’t know to what extent. I knew the fact that I’ve done this for a long time, I’m not an unknown entity that people would probably come to the restaurant. So, I felt pretty good about it. I didn’t know we would do as well as we’re doing now. And that’s a whole other story. But we’re doing very well.

But it’s a risk. It’s an absolute risk. It’s hard.  And a lot of people go into the business, not knowing what they’re doing. I’m here every day. I was here every day for 7 months, 7 days a week. You’re talking 15, 18-hour days. Because I wanted this to be right.

You’ve definitely cracked it. It was bold to open, but I’m so glad you did because your restaurant is great. The design, the lighting, the food, my martini- everything was great. It’s like theatre.

It is theatre. You open the door and the show’s on.

January, 2025

The post Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’ – Q&A with Author Michael Cecchi-Azzolina appeared first on Elena Bowes.

 So, imagine my delight when I passed my local bookstore and saw a book in the window called Building Material: The Memoir of a Park Avenue Doorman. My doorman knows a lot more about me than I know about him. I loved this coming-of-age story from an academically gifted Latino 22-year-old who lands a much-desired job as a doorman at a high-end Park Avenue building.

Debut author Stephen Bruno recounts all the do’s and don’ts of the job while also observing the escapades that go on behind the scenes, both upstairs and downstairs. Bruno, who is of Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican decent, got a profile in  The New York Times and The New Yorker . The New Yorker title, What Does Your Doorman Say About You got me thinking. Hopefully, only nice things. I strive to be like Mrs. Bloom in Bruno’s novel, but know I have a long way to go before I’d be that good a person.  Below is our edited and abbreviated Q&A. You can listen to the full Q&A here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Elena: Hi Stephen, I loved your book, Building Material. You’re a talented writer with a knack for metaphors and an ear for dialogue. It’s a real hero’s journey told with a great sense of humor.

Stephen: Thank you so much.

You were twenty-two when you got the job. Can you tell us initially about where you grew up, your family, and why getting this job was a particularly lucky break for you?

 I was raised in the Bronx. I guess you might call us poor. My father worked very hard to put food on the table, but it wasn’t like steak every night. I was the oldest and went to private school until the sixth grade. And then when my family got bigger (Stephan has 6 younger siblings), my parents pulled us out of private and put us all into public school. My brother Johnny and I were put in a program for gifted students, a magnet school. I was nerdy but I also played a lot of sports and went to church three days a week. We were raised ultra-Orthodox Christian. My father had a shelf full of classics, like Of Mice and Men, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn so we always had something to read. I am super grateful for that life because I had sports, academics and literature. I had it all.

But when I got to high school I became a hit with the girls. I hadn’t been a hit before. My parents went crazy, and I rebelled. It cost me my academics. I then went to a Christian college to appease my parents, but I treated college like it was a resort. I was no longer in the Bronx, or under the supervision of my parents. I stopped going to church. I was like an animal unleashed. I became the head of an underground fraternity. I got on the radar of the school officials, and they expelled me on a technicality. I couldn’t face myself or my parents. I moved to Minnesota and worked in a Buffalo Wild Wings. I constantly smelled of teriyaki sauce and ballooned up to 265 pounds.

My mother just wanted to get me back to the Bronx. She thought he’ll get a job, be able to pay rent. She thought the trajectory of my life will start going up, even if it’s not skyrocketing like before.

My younger brother Jason worked as a doorman. My mother begged him to put in a good word for me. I knew nothing about this.

It’s not easy to get a doorman job. There’s no application. There’s no ad in the paper. You’ve got to know somebody. And my mother knew my brother. She was essentially my agent.

Can you tell us nondoorman people about the job.

Don’t get too close and don’t do too much. Sometimes residents when they’re coming home, they don’t need to have a conversation with you. They don’t want to talk about the Yankees. Just say hello, grab the bag and help them upstairs because they just want to get to their front door.

I live in a four-story walk-up. All I’m doing when I get out of the train station and am walking the four blocks to my home is thinking about the front entrance of my building. I don’t want to be stopped by a doorman who wants to talk about the Yankees.

You have to pick up your cues from the resident. Let them initiate conversation.

It’s a service job. Whatever is going on in your life, you leave at the front door. You have to say hello with a smile. It’s not in the union handbook, but you work where others live.

How did the idea of the memoir come about? And were you taking notes while you were a doorman. You have such good stories.

 I had already worked as a doorman for eleven years when I decided to write the memoir in 2015. I had taken no notes.

I had wanted to go back to college to finish my degree. While I was at John Jay College, one of my professors told me I was a terrific writer and should get a masters. I had missed every deadline for the Writing MFA, and I didn’t want to leave NYC. But Hunter College was still open. I applied and got in.

You did both degrees while working as a doorman and wrote your book during the quiet night shift. How was the MFA program at Hunter?

The first year was the worst year I’ve ever experienced in my academic life. I didn’t want to go back. Everything in our culture is racist so no one takes it seriously when it actually is racist. My classmates, all women didn’t talk to me. They treated me like an ape. One girl just stared at me unblinking when I spoke like I was a monster, and she couldn’t believe I could speak. I was just being myself. I’m an authentic human being. The way I’m speaking to you is the way I speak to the person down the street. I was the only man, the only Hispanic, the only New Yorker in the class. When we’d workshop our work, the women would write beautiful all over the margins of the other women’s work in my class. But never on my work.

When I told my teacher, she said Fuck Beauty. Just write, just do what you do. She taught me a core lesson in writing. Write the way you speak. I think one of the reasons my classmates didn’t like me was because I sounded different. I sounded like a New Yorker.

That’s when I realized I have a singular voice. You have a lot of writers living in New York City, but rarely are they actually from the city. And rarer still is the Latin native New Yorker. So when I realized I had that market cornered, I relaxed. Just do what you do on the page, Stephan. Have fun. And that’s what I decided to do my second year.

Well, you really do have a strong voice on the page and on Audible. You mention that part of your job is to leave your personal life out of it. But things were so bleak for you that first year at Hunter, that you had a hard time being happy at work. Can you tell us how a resident saved you?

Yeah, that year was an absolute struggle. Everyday kind of melted into the next one.  Mrs. Bloom (not the resident’s real name) noticed it. We had been having a dialogue for years when I was at John Jay and everything was going well. I was a rockstar, bringing great news to her everyday. Like, Mrs. Bloom, you won’t believe this, the professor is putting me up for an award. I won the contest, Mrs. Bloom, I beat all those law students. But at Hunter, I wasn’t saying any of those things. It was crushing me not to be able to deliver good news to her. She was like a surrogate mother to me. I was really dark and morose.

Then one day, Mrs. Bloom asked me to come over for dinner the following week. Mr. and Mrs. Bloom set me up with sandwiches and Amstel Lights and turned on the TV to a documentary about the American writer August Wilson. He was a light-skinned black man. I saw myself in him. He’s walking around smoking cigarettes talking about life in Pittsburgh. He’s an artist but he doesn’t treat himself like anything more than a Pittsburgh working class guy. There was something about seeing him smoking that made me think he was very comfortable in his own skin. He didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about him. It inspired me. That documentary made me think, just be yourself, who gives a shit what others think.

And it was wonderful and beautiful on (the Bloom’s part). It just changed the trajectory of my MFA.

They sound like fantastic people, just the kind of people you needed in your life. You tell us in the book that the three topics of conversation for all doormen are women, baseball and Puerto Rico.  Were you able to weave into those conversations that you were working on a memoir?

I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone in the building until the 11^th hour. I didn’t tell people in my neighborhood or even my life that I was working on a book or had a book deal. I feel like everybody’s working on a book. At the job we’re just doormen.

 What has been the residents’ response?

They all read the New York Times so ninety percent of them heard about the book from that article. They’re all really proud of me. They say, ‘great article. I’m going to buy your book’

What has been your parent’s reaction?

My mother is very proud. She flew up from Florida for my publishing date and went to a reading.

My father isn’t talking to me at the moment because he read the book jacket. I didn’t write that descriptive text. My editor called him an oppressively religious man wreaking havoc on my life. And I was like, ‘hey, can we cut that down a little bit.’

The book isn’t about my father and me, it’s about me. My father was emotionally absent, and he was verbally abusive when I was growing up, but he worked really hard and provided for all nine of us.

 I hope he starts speaking to you.

 Me too. I love my dad. I want the best for him. I’m his son.

 Towards the end of the book, you write,  “You’re a doorman, a man who opens doors. You’re like a fish meant to stay the size of your tank.” Do you think you stayed the size of your tank?

 No. I have jumped out of my tank. My doorman job is a job and it’s a good one. Until I find a job where I am challenged, where I belong, like maybe being a professor, I’ll continue to do it. I’ll be a big fish in a small tank. I’m not complaining.

 And you’re teaching Salsa too?

 I am. I absolutely love it. It’s part of my culture. But writing is going to be my priority. I’ll do whatever it takes.

 Thank you and good luck Stephen.

December 2024

The post Building Material: The Memoir of a Park Avenue Doorman – Q&A with Author Stephen Bruno appeared first on Elena Bowes.

Dressed in a frilly white Chloe blouse, black Yohji Yamamoto  trousers, an over-sized black blazer that set off her chic white bob and a fabulous lavender overcoat, this vintage hipster was just as inspiring in person as she was when I interviewed her on the phone for my blog. The 72-year-old writer talked about how to view ageing positively and creatively… and realistically.  That sometimes it’s better to let go, not have an agenda, strive less, do what you love more. In Lyn’s case, that’s writing essays on Substack or for her local paper, the Peekskill Herald, being with her longtime ponytailed partner Calvin, daughter and grandchildren and being in nature. She now lives in the Hudson Valley and loves to tend to her wild garden, cycle on car-free converted railroad tracks and go antiquing for her arts and crafts home.

But this wasn’t always the case. During her sixties, Lyn gave up her job as a social worker and professor in New York to become a full-time media influencer known as the Accidental Icon with nearly a million followers. The uber-stylish Lyn rejected age as a variable to be considered in how you dress.

She got noticed, hired, and her face was splashed across billboards and buses around the world. Both Lyn and the late Joan Didion modeled sunglasses, the former for Valentino, the latter Celine. Lyn traveled the world. It was a wild ride.

But in the end Lyn felt she’d lost her way, promoting brands she felt no connection to. So, she gave it all up, and wrote a terrific memoir about her experience.

Here’s my edited Q&A with Lyn:

In your fabulous book, which is so honest, intelligent and relatable, you say that your 60’s was a tough decade. Can you briefly explain why the 60s are harder than previous decades?

Well, I think we have a lot of societal expectations that happen to you during your 60s. You have to sign up for Medicare and 65 is a traditional retirement age. I think for me, the challenge of my 60s was, how am I going to respond to all of these things? Which of them really is sort of an old idea that is no longer relevant. I think this idea that you have to retire away from the world and not work anymore, is a very outdated. Many people are finding very vibrant second careers during their 60s. I had an experience that was such an adventure that I did not have in any of my earlier years.

 I think 60 for me is also when my body really began to change pretty dramatically. I wrote about that recently in an essay called Stranger in the Mirror. All of a sudden one day you look in the mirror and you say, who is that woman? And she’s sort of you, but unrecognizable to you. I think for me, that was a big challenge. How am I going to deal with these changes in my body.

And then I remembered that my body has always changed as a woman. You know, when you’re a child to an adolescent, you’re always losing or gaining weight when you become pregnant, when you have menopause, you know, you’re always having to figure out that question. How do I dress a changing body? So again, the more that I think about age and being older as something that I have done before, that I have, in fact, even more knowledge, skills, and experiences to respond to it, the easier It makes it for me to be more positive about it.

2) When you were the Accidental Icon media influencer you lived a life others can only dream of- travelled the world first class, modeled for Valentino and Dior, appeared in Vogue, and then you pulled back from that heady and ultimately unfulfilling experience. I ask you now, who do you really want to be visible to and why?

I think we have these two, opposite representations of ageing in the media. On one hand, we have this decline narrative where. You’re going to have dementia, you’re going to be disabled, you’re going to have chronic illnesses, you’re going to be a care burden you’re ruining the generations that are coming after you because you’re taking up all their money etc.

And then on the other hand now, we have this new version of ageing. I’ve been watching it emerge. Which is you’re kind of ageless. You’re highly resourced, you’re perfectly fit, you’re running marathons at 90, you’re doing whatever you want to do, and it’s as if you’re still young. And I think what’s dangerous about that is that the vast majority of people ageing are in the middle of those two extremes. One extreme is total dependence. The other is complete independence.

But most of us are in the middle,  probably 90 percent of us are in the middle, and I think what’s dangerous about this notion that we don’t need anything, or that everything has to be about curing our diseases, or trying to intervene in providing medical care, is that policymakers and innovators are either going to think we don’t need anything, or that all the innovation should be about our physical body. And that means that the needs of us in the middle are not going to be getting met in creative ways.

What I would like to see happen is that we’re really showing more of those people in the middle. What I’m finding is that you can be extraordinarily creative and have a very rich life without having to have the perfect body or the perfect bank account. I would really like to be visible to those people in the middle. Maybe that’s part of wearing the denim and having an ordinary life (now), I want all of those women to be seen. So that’s who I want to be visible to.

I’ve done this little experiment with younger women who I know, and who have been saying, Oh, I liked your book. I say, ‘Well, what are you doing now to prepare yourself to be old?  I want you to do me a favour and create mood boards for everything in your life. Make a mood board for who you want to be as an older woman.”

We’re never invited to fantasize about our older self. I think if I had been able to do that, like during those times in my life where I was really pressured, and I didn’t have time for me where I kind of lost myself, like in the midst of raising kids and making my career. If I had known that I was going to publish a book when I was 70, I could have comforted myself. I could have said: All right, take a breath. You’re in this now. You put your little dream up on the shelf, but it’s going to come down and it’s going to come out and you’re going to have it. And so, I’m encouraging all young women to start making mood boards of who they wish to be as an older woman in their life.

 like dreams deferred?

Right. Yes.

3) Imagine that your beloved new/old house is on fire. It’s only a pretend fire. Don’t worry. And you can grab three pieces of clothing. Which three would you grab and why?

I have this very beautiful, long, to the floor silk. Yohji Yamamoto coat. I would take that. I would take my overalls, which I am obsessed with at the moment, and I would take this piece that was especially designed for me by I’m not remembering her name, but it’s a beautiful silver brocade jacket. I would probably take those three.

Is the Yamamoto coat black?

Of course

You can read the rest of my edited written interview here on 26, or listen to the whole interview here on my new podcast Elena Meets the Author, where I get to have real conversations with the people I admire. I hope you enjoy it.

March, 2024

The post Q&A with Lyn Slater, How to Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon appeared first on Elena Bowes.

Here is an excerpt:

IN-67 stretches diagonally across Indiana like a seat belt. All that time I spent thinking it would take us far away, and it turns out it doesn’t even leave the state. It was never an escape route. Years later-I must have been around ten years-old-my mother would tell me she tried to walk in front of a car on that road.

“They wouldn’t hit me,” she told me. They just kept going. It made me so angry.”

What could I say? I pictured her lurching out into the headlights, the sharp swerve, close enough to blow her hair back. Her teeth bared, growling at the receding headlights.

“I’m glad you didn’t get hit,” I said. The necessary thing to say. Heartfelt. Limp as the day-old bouquet of wildflowers I’d once picked for her and left on the dashboard.

Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways is a superbly told memoir about Mean’s harrowing childhood where she spent time living in a car, homeless, with her mother or with various family members including her fervently Pentecostal grandparents. Means’ childhood was traumatic and colourful. This is a story about a mother-daughter relationship, family trauma, breaking cycles, and forgiveness. Below is my Q&A with the Albuquerque-based writer.

I wonder if you have any regrets. Your story was so devastating at times and painful to read, but read I did because you write like an angel. I’m just wondering about regrets because without the complicated life you led, you wouldn’t be you?

What an incredible compliment! Thank you!! There are certainly things in my life I wish I had done differently. I wish I had been more critical of certain beliefs about myself and the world sooner. I wish I’d gone outside and checked on Ben. I wish I had never hurt anyone else in the process of learning how to be better. I wish I’d reached out to Luis and checked on him. I wish I would have used a lunch tray to beat certain bullies about the head in middle school. I wish the watermelon mint Smart water flavor had not been discontinued. But I’m only able to make these wishes in retrospect. I’m only able to regret now that I know better. It doesn’t make sense to get mad at myself anymore because it was a different version of me who did or didn’t do those things, and she couldn’t have done it differently because she doesn’t know what I know, and so it doesn’t make sense to get mad at her either. And Smart water, if you’re reading this, come on.

How did you deal with writing about people who hurt you who you love?

My main goal is to hold all of it at the same time without falling into a binary. It can be true that someone harmed you and loves you and failed and did their best. None of these things has to contradict the others. I always want it to come through that I loved them and that they’re complex people with inner lives as rich and meaningful as my own. Even the people I had to walk away from permanently.

 If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

I can’t imagine a life where I’m not a writer or storyteller in some way. If I didn’t write books, I would write for TV or movies or video games or freelance breakup letters or something. If I got hit in the head by a rock in the exact spot that made me incapable of writing though, and if that collision also coincided with the glorious downfall of capitalism, I would love to spend all my time doing things like gardening and playing my violin and cleaning and solving puzzles and learning how to make household repairs. But alas.

Tell us something surprising about yourself.

Most people are very surprised when they learn this, but I’ve actually never officially been named Sexiest Man Alive.

The rest of my Q&A with the witty and supremely talented Means can be found here on UK writers’ site 26. There you’ll learn about the value of writing mentors and chickens.

November, 2023

The post Q&A with Brittany Means- Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways: A Memoir appeared first on Elena Bowes.

William Schwalbe begins this story of a great and improbable friendship by telling us in chapter one “Nerds and Jocks’ that by the time he was a junior in college in the early 1980’s, he’d met everyone he wanted to know- the gays, the lesbians, the theater geeks, everyone in his eccentric major- Latin and Greek- and ‘an assortment of other obsessive quirky characters.”

He also knew exactly who he didn’t want to know, the jocks. He found them obnoxious, loud and smug. He wasn’t sure they thought about him much at all – a gay guy with permed hair and a lot of Matt Dillon posters in his room. Then he met Chris Maxey, better known as ‘Maxey’ to his jock friends. “From the start it was clear that Maxey and I should not be friends.”

But friends they became thanks to a little-known secret society at Yale where 15 rising seniors were chosen each year precisely because they were so different. They had to meet twice a week for a year for dinner and give a full unabridged ‘audit’ of their life to the other members. There’s also a lot of drinking involved, but hey they were young and thirsty.

Here are some of my questions for Schwalbe:

I loved your quotes at the beginning of the book:

All friendships of any length are based on a continued mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.” – David Whyte

When during your 40+ year friendship with Maxey did you really understand that tolerance and mercy are a vital part of the equation?

Maxey and I understood the full truth of this quote only in the last few years, partially because finding the quote itself caused us to talk about tolerance and mercy in a way we hadn’t ever done before.  But in doing so we realized that we had been forgiving each other over and over again, right from the start. At one key point in the story, Maxey utters a fairly common (at the time) homophobic slur that saddens me hugely. But I realized over the course of just a few weeks that I didn’t want to be mad at Maxey. So, I didn’t let it interfere with our growing friendship.

As for Maxey, it rankled him that I had trouble letting go of my first impression of him—obnoxious jock—long after it was clear that he was so much more than that. Still, he never let that interfere. There are so many more examples, almost all of them unconscious. And that’s the one of the great things about tolerance and mercy: you don’t have to be conscious of them for them to work their magic.

I also liked this quote:

The only way to have a friend is to be one.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sounds so simple. What was your biggest challenge in being a friend to Maxey? Beyond the hugging.

Ha! Yes, the hugging is a big challenge. Maxey still insists on hugging me and his whole family does the same. They all give me huge bear hugs. Even though I still hate it, it also always makes me smile.

Beyond that, my biggest challenge has been simply one of energy. Maxey is an extrovert and is like the Eveready bunny. He just keeps going and going. I’m like the other bunnies in those commercials, the one powered by inferior batteries. It’s no longer that much of a challenge because I’ve learned to be honest: I tell Maxey right away when I need to relax and recharge. This has the huge benefit of allowing me to be fully present as a friend whenever we’re together.

You can read the rest of my interview with Schwalbe here in 26’s July newsletter.

Happy summer

July, 2023

The post Q&A with William Schwalbe- We Should Not Be Friends- The Story of a Friendship appeared first on Elena Bowes.