The readers to whom this spoke adored her—and her vision of a harmonious life. But when reporters came to call, she was a little touchy about the assumption that the pretty and privileged existence of some of her characters was in fact her own; "I speak fluent fuckinese," she said in one interview. A profile writer was ordered to meet her at a deli, not at home, because, Laurie complained, "I'm tired of reading about my china teacups and my cozy little house." (Of course, she eventually took pity on the writer and brought her home, throwing open the door to her daughter's bedroom and saying, "Here's the best room in the house.") Within the insular world of book publishing, the ruptures in some of her friendships were legendary and often mysterious. For readers, however, the names of her books, which drove her editor husband crazy—"We almost broke up over one title"—suggested she led a halcyon life. Happy All the Time. Family Happiness. Goodbye Without Leaving. These were not so much fact as aspiration.
She was ahead of her time, or not quite of it. When she began publishing, more than two decades ago, American fiction was in thrall to writers who relied heavily on clinical depression and chemical substances, anomie and ennui. Of all the words associated with Laurie Colwin, ennui would be last on the list. She had wild enthusiasms for everything from Korean pickles to old doilies to brown and white patterned china, and her friends remember her trademark greetings and odd nicknames. For Juliet Annan, who had been her British publicist, it was "Well, look at you my fine friend!"—in, Annan recalls, "the voice she used to talk to the cat—immensely affectionate." Pat Strachan, a book editor who met Laurie at the school both their daughters attended, remembers that Laurie signed herself "old slave," in a show of pretend chagrin at the demands of motherhood. When everyone in New York was wearing black and going to clubs, Laurie was wearing horizontal stripes and going to the farmers market. "Unlike some people who love to go out, I love to stay home," she wrote. Rick Kot says it was difficult to persuade her to tour the country promoting her books because she was wary of elevators and airplanes.
She feared the professional fate of Barbara Pym, the enormously talented English novelist with whom she was sometimes compared, and whose work for a time had vanished into obscurity. She had long been passionate about food, had cooked for the protesters occupying campus buildings at Columbia in the late '60s and for the homeless women at the Olivieri Center, in midtown Manhattan. ("Lunch today, honey. A disaster!" one of them said after she served an Irish dish called colcannon.) When she was given the opportunity to write about food regularly for gourmet, she decided it would be a welcome counterpoint to her other work, offering, her husband recalls, "distraction and safety." The food essays created their own avid audience; today, the two collections of those pieces, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, outsell her other work by more than three to one.
These, too, were ahead of their time. In an era when many people were still writing about cooking as though it were transubstantiation, Laurie produced pieces about dreadful dinner parties and comfy suppers that ended with recipes for things like Sautéed Vegetables and Poached Egg in One Pot. One essay begins, "As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical." As Laurie herself might have written, either you like this sort of thing, or you don't. The voice is almost corporeal, undeniably hers.
Perhaps that explains why her friends find those particular pieces difficult, even impossible, to reread today. Perhaps it explains why her daughter, Rosa, now 17 and a writer herself, reads and rereads them all the time. Laurie Colwin is utterly alive in them. Laurie's novels contained no great tragedies, no wrenching dislocations, but her life, which so many readers mistook for her work, did. One morning in October 1992 she simply failed to wake up. She had high blood pressure and had relied heavily on Chinese herbalists for help, and her heart gave out. She was 48 years old and the author of ten books. When I saw the familiar Nancy Crampton book-jacket photograph—striped shirt, aureole of curly hair—I thought for a moment that some poor guy in the makeup department at The New York Times was going to get the ax for dropping onto the obit page a picture that was supposed to appear in a book review.
She was buried in Connecticut, at the country place where she loved to spend summers and tend a garden. Alice Quinn says that someone saw a fox nearby watching as the simple pine box went into the dark.
There are certain people so flagrantly alive that their deaths seem an affront to nature. Laurie Colwin was one of those people. The essence of her writing lies not so much in those vivid small details—the pecans in the pancakes, the striped wool stockings, the plates painted with cornflowers—but in the eternal notion of pushing on through everyday matters into the light of life. It was the essence of her existence, too.
Her husband is married now to one of her former writing students, a woman to whom Laurie introduced him, in what in her own novels would be seen as a kind and useful act of posthumous matchmaking, albeit one with a poignant edge of irony. "Laurie had this linoleum block she'd made on the shelf in her office, one of those things you carve as a kid and press into ink and stamp things with," Juris remembers. "I found it the other day and I looked at it and it has one word carved into it. Joy. That story's too sentimental to use."
No it's not.
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