This Nora Ephron story is about potatoes but the potatoes are about love, and so the Nora Ephron story is about love and at times it is about sex, and if you have a dirty mind you can imagine things that are not in the story but seem to be on the left side of the writer’s mind as she is writing it, and if you imagine that the writer is clever and aware of what she is doing it adds to the pleasure. Like the idea of “crisp potatoes.”
There is always the problem of structure, linear form, beginning, middle and end. While one way to have an ending is to have somebody die or get married, there is also the straight-out “Beginning, Middle, End” way of making a beginning middle and end. Call the first part the beginning, call the middle part the middle, and put the ending at the end. And Nora Ephron thereby seems a genius.
There are so many things I hate about writing about writing that I will keep to my own way of doing things. My hope is that the things I hate are the things you hate also.
Like, I tend to hate pronouncements and attempted cleverness.
In the end she has mashed potatoes.
p.s. The story is “Potatoes and Love,” by Nora Ephron, and I found it in the Stories from the Kitchen anthology edited by Diana Secker Tesdell, and she says it comes from the book Heartburn, which I haven’t read but maybe will some day.–CT
