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It was the typo in a blurb on the jacket that made me buy the book, the book I’d avoided for years. It sat on a table in the Strand, a bit tattered, a bit stained, with that typo I’d never noticed before.

“She is, moveover, one of our greatest artists.”

She is—move over…

I played with it. Did the blurb’s writer, one Jeremy Markey, feel crowded by someone? “She is—move over! You’re too close! I can’t breathe!”

My mother was the book’s author. Perhaps, she might have argued, the typo was the flaw in the carpet, deliberately placed by the Persians so the perfection of the rug would not anger the jealous gods. It would be just like my mother to consider herself in competition with the divine.

“Moreover” was the intended word, obviously, as in, “She is an incredible cook and what’s more [moreover] she is also a great artist.” 

This was a cookbook. My mother, Freda Franke, renowned for her talent on the stage, was as famous for her dinner parties. The concentration, the loving care she’d extend to each strand of homemade pasta rivaled the fierceness and devotion she brought to Desdemona, to Hedda, to Lady Macbeth, and to all their famous stage sisters.

An Actor Prepares Dinner was the book’s title.

It came out when I was a young teenager, a self-righteous vegetarian (nothing with a face!), a scowling guard patrolling flimsy battlements. I was certain I was a changeling—and from the look I’d catch on my mother’s face every now and then, in spite of having given birth to me, my mother may have thought so too. It must be said that I was a chubby vegetarian; I could never resist a sweet. Sugar of any kind melting on my tongue created a kind of peace I could find nowhere else. One of the battles my mother chose to wage with me was about my weight, the only battle I had a hope of winning.

We weren’t always at odds. When I was quite young, my mother and I were a team of two. I’d be trotted out at parties wearing a velvet dress and holding her hand, a part of the applause. When strangers stopped her on the street I would be included in their admiration. When I was older I’d play the Freda card, as I called it, just for the look in people’s eyes. She’s gone now and I miss her, the Freda who, when she was in the room obliterated the surrounding scenery and everyone else became extras. 

I still live in the apartment I grew up in. I’m middle-aged now, but sometimes—I know it sounds strange—I’ll go stand in her closet. She always gave me free rein there. I’d dress up in Ophelia’s mauve weeds (my mother pillaged items from every production she was in) and she’d encourage me, pressing me to try on a large green bonnet from The Importance of Being Earnest with a felt bird perched on the side, a colorful spray of feathers sprouting from his head, a dandyish fellow whom we named Miguel. I’d clack around in her high heels and she showed me how to subtly kick a floor-length dress out in front of me as I walked so I wouldn’t trip. “But if you do trip onstage,” she said, “you use it. Trip the way your character would trip.” And she’d show me how Cleopatra would trip.

When I was younger and cuter and by her side constantly I was akin to Miguel the felt bird. That was okay with me. I was content with it, happier to perch on the side, a supernumerary to the star, catching the outer rays of her spotlight.

Now, waiting for checkout in the Strand, I flipped through the pages of the book—there were all her famous recipes: the Kasseler Rippenspeer, the Braised Lamb in Sour Cream, her borscht, and then—ah. This one. Page 203.  

In its headnote Freda explained that this was the most complicated dish she’d ever invented; it required hours of work, of tenderizing and massaging, cajoling, if you will, allowing great swaths of time for it to sit, to breathe, to marinate; it was frustrating, difficult—and furthermore the ingredients were hard to find, and, once you did find them, brutally expensive.

Veal Celia.

I’m Celia.

---

It should be noted that I don’t cook. I live alone and I eat sporadically and mostly unhealthily; it would horrify my mother, although her recipes were a carnivore’s delight, her German heritage leading her to goose fat and schnitzel and heavy cream by the bucketful, not exactly suited to today’s “wellness” agenda.

My relationship to food now is tenuous and wary and sometimes voracious. I am no longer that angry vegetarian but I am not suited to wellness either. For me meals tend to be grazing events (rather like a cow’s or, alas, a calf’s). I try not to think too hard about it. Some hummus with an unpeeled carrot swiped through it eaten absentmindedly in front of an open fridge—I consider this a healthy repast. A block of supermarket extra-sharp cheddar parceled onto the ends of the bread that collect like flotsam in their separate plastic bags on the fridge’s bottom shelf. Then, occasionally, a bag of Doritos, if the spirit moves me and I am passing a deli. And of course, the sweets, always the sweets. I try not to think too hard about them either.

But cooking? No. Boiling water for tea is the only time the stove might be turned on. And I hate tea.

So can you imagine the hubris, the cheek, nay, the brass balls it took for me to determine to throw a dinner party and to fix on the menu? It could be no other.

---

What possessed me? The recipe was meant for eight or ten people, a real dinner bash. I never gave parties, I couldn’t possibly manage that many people, but there was no way I’d try to tinker with the recipe by halving it, so, by god, we were going to eat veal till the cows came home (it seems I can’t resist).

You don’t just get five pounds of veal at Key Food or Trader Joe’s. Would Whole Foods have it? I heard my mother’s dusky contralto, relishing every syllable: “Ottomanelli’s.” She was always coming home with fat packages wrapped in brown paper. She’d been able to order quail, rabbit, a goose, a partridge, even venison there, pretty much encompassing all the happy woodland creatures I’d see in every Disney movie. Ottomanelli’s. Of course.

The man said, “You want I should roll it for you?”

Roll it? I envisioned a little Victorian girl with a hoop and a stick. I declined politely—but where was the dusky contralto when I needed it? For I got the veal home, laid it out, pink and glistening as a huge lump of Play-Doh, and propped the book open. The recipe read: “Roll the veal into a tight cylinder.” Rule #1: Always read the recipe through before you start. 

At least I remembered I needed to marinate it overnight. This one took days to make, two full days, during which I had to leave the apartment several times, once in search of Madeira, once in search of Gruyère, and once for a package of Hostess Twinkies that called to me, a perverse madeleine…

The first day, vegetables (carrots, onions, mushrooms, thousands upon thousands of each) that had to be sliced, chopped, and drenched with brandy and Madeira, plus scattered with various “pinches” of thyme and rosemary. A pinch: so subjective. My mother’s hands were long and elegant, with tapered fingers. Mine were spatulate, pudgy, my father’s hands, I suppose. She’d left him when I was a baby and moved us to New York. He’d stayed in LA and made a career in the Western shows that were popular at the time. My mother pointed him out with a sniff once, and I’d run into him from time to time as I flipped channels. There he’d be in his sweaty ten-gallon, face creased with sun, wind, and Texas Sta-Dirt, fresh off a day at the TV ranch (perhaps roping calves). Freda wanted nothing to do with him and wouldn’t talk about him, and he kept away. Perhaps my fingers were more suited to the trigger of a prop gun than a pinch of thyme.

The meat had to be massaged. It was flabby and pinkly hideous, sprawling squishily on the counter. A slap on its moist side might well have triggered a baby’s first cry. I poked at it with my forefinger, then let my hand linger on the slick flesh. I found myself falling into a long-forgotten rhythm, stroking and stroking to a gravelly voice in my head saying that’s it, that’s it. I had to quell a wave of nausea.

“Roll the veal. Slice down through it every 1-1/2 inches to 1/2 inch from the bottom. The veal should be in one piece and open up like an accordion or the pages of a book.” 

It wouldn’t stay rolled. Finally, breathing hard, I got it into a loose cylinder and leaned heavily on it with my left forearm (I was certain it would try to wriggle free), subduing it using force. My knife was not sharp. With my right hand I had to saw. And saw. The flesh shredded. In the end it did not look like a book with its pages falling open so much as a carcass a ravenous predator might have torn into.

Here’s where I poured myself a large mug of Madeira and fell upon the Twinkies.

---

Until I was about six I had blond ringlets. Your crowning glory, my mother said. I took that to mean I was a princess (with Freda the queen, of course), and she fostered that notion. Just as the ringlets down my back were straightening themselves out and their gold was starting to turn a beigy verdigris, my mother had me cast in the play she was in, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a tiny role, no lines, but at the very end one of the little fairies—me—was lowered in a basket to present Titania—my mother—with a single perfect rose. I was taken out of school many days, allowed to stay up late. My mother insisted I sleep in curlers to revive the ringlets. I never slept well with them, the hard plastic digging into my scalp; at some point I must have looked sallow, drooping, because Ronni the makeup lady kept adding creme rouge to my cheeks and lips, first Misty Rose, then Cerise, finally upping it to Cinnabar Vermilion. That sweet-acrid smell still brings a sense memory.

I was backstage through the whole play until the end, free to wander around all I wanted. I’d snitch the donuts left in the Green Room and then one night I took a liking to a Twinkie I found there. After that one of the stagehands brought in a pack of Twinkies for me every night. That was Rocky.

The play ran for three months. By the end of that time my costume had to be let out twice. The basket I was lowered in began to tilt precariously. In one of the final week’s performances I dropped the rose I was holding to grab onto the basket’s sides as it tipped over with a clunk—I was only just able to save myself from plopping onto the stage (rather like a large, rolled piece of veal). It flashed through my mind that if I fell I would have to fall as a fairy might fall, just the way my mother had taught me. Cleopatra tripped in her own way, and I’d…waft. But I held on. The rose hit Puck in the head. There were gasps, then laughs, from the audience, laughs where there were supposed to be oooohs. I will never forget the look on Freda’s face. You do not upstage Titania.

The play closed (I was sure because of me). At six I was placed on a strict diet, which I broke every chance I could, digging my fingers into my mother’s homemade peach ice cream when her back was turned. My hair was cut in a cute bob. The princess my mother had tried to set the stage for was gone.

---

Rocky and the Twinkies—it sounds like a fifties-era bubblegum band. While Titania and Bottom canoodled, while the lovers ran through the magic forest, while Oberon and Puck hatched their trickery, backstage Rocky introduced me to all the secret hiding places you could find in a theater. There were the “legs,” thick, black, musty velvet curtains hanging on either side of the proscenium, blocking the wings, where Rocky and I could stand close together and not be seen by the audience, nor the actors onstage, nor even the stage manager behind the scenes—only the sharpest eyes would ever find us there. Rocky and I visited the well at the front of the stage, a sequestered place that was no longer used. We had to clamber around a forest of pipes in the basement to reach it, a dark sliver of a space with a shelf to stand on to see through a small window to the stage, where in the old days a prompter would perch to hiss forgotten lines. There I heard my mother’s voice so close she could have turned her head and seen what we were up to. But it was only Rocky and me and my sagging ringlets in the well.

Rocky was head of the stage crew. Without him, there was no magic forest, no bank where the wild thyme grows, no fairy ex machina. Yet somehow he found time for the black velvet legs and the well, and for me.

I’d get my Twinkie just before I was to climb into the basket from the catwalk high above the stage, where I could see Oberon’s bald spot through his hollow crown. Up there Rocky would feed it to me: “Sweets for my sweet,” he would say every night and tenderly wipe the white cream off my lips and cheeks, erasing the rouge.

The last several nights of the show—after the basket incident—I didn’t get the Twinkie. Rocky had disappeared. The sets didn’t quite come together. A lone tree was left standing center stage. He had run things and now he was gone. When I asked, the stage manager said vaguely, “I don’t know, I think a family emergency.”

After Midsummer my pressing need for sugar began, even on that strict diet. Here’s where “move over” comes in: now, now she was paying attention. She’d cook and bake and grill and watch me like a hawk, slapping my hand when I reached for the Schaumtorte.

---

The veal was to nestle into the marinade all night in a big pot taking up most of a shelf in the refrigerator. I’d read through the recipe again and seen I’d forgotten kitchen twine, which I would need the next day. Evidently you had to truss the thing up tightly, after adding thin slices of Gruyère and boiled ham between the open book’s pages. 

I hustled out into the night in search of the twine. Did you get it at a grocery store? A hardware store? Both? Finally I found it on a peg in the 99 Cents store some blocks away, where it cost $2.99. What made this “kitchen” twine? What was wrong with regular string? Was this coated with asbestos so it wouldn’t catch fire? Why did she leave me alone at age six to roam backstage on my own? Why didn’t she watch me like a hawk then, when she could so easily have glanced through the prompter’s window? These were unanswerable questions.

---

I patted the rolled meat dry with a paper towel—I had drained it in a colander and carefully saved the marinade—feeling more in control now. The Gruyère, then the boiled ham, then another slice of the cheese—I shoved them between the book’s ragged leaves. The string lay on the counter waiting to lasso the veal.

I’d invited him to come early. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He’d been around a lot when I was young, red-haired and lithe, small-boned, miraculously acrobatic, as though the ground beneath his feet were a trampoline where the rest of us walked on asphalt. He’d been a student of my mother’s; in a triumph of casting she’d got him the role of Puck in our production. His eyes were the most astonishing bright blue behind the thick glasses he needed offstage, the blue always seeming watery, as if he were steadily tearful. As well as being her student, he’d been Freda’s indispensable helper/assistant/acolyte. She always had one, a devoted student-slave eager for her reflected glamour. I loved them all the way I would have loved the cat or dog my mother wouldn’t let me have, but Puck was special.

He’d shown up for the last two performances of Midsummer with a black eye and scary stitches like a centipede up his temple, a puffy split lip and a bad limp. He had fallen down the stairs at the Sheridan Square subway stop, he said. Ronni the makeup lady had a job to turn him into that cocky sprite Robin Goodfellow. He wouldn’t let the understudy go on, of course, but magic Puck, who could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes had turned out to be as mortal and clumsy as the rest of us. When Midsummer was over he too was gone with no explanation and I didn’t see him for years.

The doorbell rang.

---

“Well, Mr. Markey,” I said. But I could think of him only as Puck.

He stepped in, handed me a bottle, and I helped him off with a beautiful British tweed overcoat. The fabric was pleasantly rough under my fingers, but the coat dwarfed him. I’d forgotten what a small man he was. He was in his mid-seventies now and I must have outweighed him by a good forty pounds.

“Just look at you,” he said.

“Don’t look too close.” I was wearing a stained O’Neill Theater Center sweatshirt—I’d meant to change but there hadn’t been time. He peered around and I saw the apartment through his eyes, eyes that still showed a watery blue behind the thick glasses, magnified and exaggerated by the round lenses. Not much about the place had changed in all these years except maybe the paint was a little dimmer, the rugs faded in spots. But the glossy photos still hung in the front hall of my mother in her famous roles. I’d been walking past them unseeing, this parade of maternal shades. Now they seemed to glow in their frames, about to speak.

“It smells the same,” he said. “Cooking. Greasepaint. A hint of Joy.”

He was no longer an actor. After Midsummer, and his bad accident in the subway station, he’d quit the theater and left town. A long time later he reemerged having written a play, One Clover and a Bee, that ran for a year on Broadway and made his name, a play at the forefront of the genre of back-porch dramas wherein young men came out to their conservative families somewhere in Middle America. On the back porch. Wittily. He’d since become an award-winning and often-performed playwright.

“Crap,” I said suddenly. “I’ve forgotten the blanched bacon!”

“Blanche Baker, the actress? Is she coming?”

“Look, would you come out to the kitchen and keep me company? I’m a little behind.”

In addition to the nightmarish layers of meat, Veal Celia called for six strips of blanched bacon to be draped on top of the whole thing before it went into the oven. To blanche, you boiled the raw bacon for ten minutes till it was a pale phantom of its former self. Once draped it was then supposed to melt into an essence on the veal as it roasted. The recipe did not explain blanching, what it was, how to do it, not a word. I’d had to look it up.

“How are you supposed to just know something,” I muttered. “Goddammit.”

“Because she was your mother,” Puck said. “Goddammit.”

“What?”

“What?”

There was challenge in the blue eyes.

Here we were. “How about some wine?” I said.

---

We sat across from each other at the old wooden kitchen table, which was scarred and burned in places, marked by years of homely preparation for feasting, and we drank Puck’s cabernet. As the smell of the meat in the oven grew more and more tantalizing, we opened another bottle. Puck said, “No one else is coming to this big do, are they?”

I’d set the table in the formal dining room with my mother’s vintage linens and slightly tarnished silver but this kitchen was where we would stay. I fetched the candlesticks and left the linen.

“No,” I said. Just you.”

“And the ghosts, eh?” Puck’s pale cheeks were flushed with the hectic glow of the boozy redhead.

---

“‘Sometimes a horse I’ll be, sometimes a hound,’” I said. “‘A hog, a headless bear, sometimes a fire, and neigh and bark and grunt and roar and burn, like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.’”

Backstage there was a PA system that projected the onstage action so the actors could keep track of their cues. Puck said, “You must have memorized the whole play!”

“No,” I said, “not the whole play.”

He’d appear suddenly right next to the black velvet legs and behind the sets; offstage his blue eyes even without the glasses could see everything, I thought. I hoped he somehow knew about the well, too.

“‘Jack shall have Jill—’” I said—

“‘—nought shall go ill. The man shall have his mare again and all shall be well,’” Puck finished. “These are my lines.”

“Your exit lines. ‘Fairy king, attend and mark—’”

“‘I do hear the morning lark,’” he said.

I knew when I heard those lines he’d appear backstage. Rocky would step away from me when Puck’s eyes fastened on us. I’d fall into those eyes like sliding into a warm bath. There was a deep sense of comfort, of reprieve. He was magic. But he always had to reenter the forest.

Never did it occur to me to listen for my mother’s exit lines. I was not allowed to approach her backstage but had to shrink into the wall if she passed: nothing must break her concentration. Why Freda chose to bring me into this play, into her theater, her process, I cannot to this day make out. Did she hope that she was paving the way for a new theatrical dynasty like the Barrymores? It was not to be.

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In my early twenties I apprenticed with Ronni the makeup lady. The transformation one could effect with powder and paint appealed to me. The theater is all about transformation, of course, but there was something about the specificity of stage makeup, the names, the names! What they evoked. I could almost taste them: Putty Melt, Color Cake. Mouth Blood Jam was mint-flavored—I know because I tried it, of course. You could get anything, even a special formula for realistic scabs. Ben Nye had a “bruise wheel.” A pretty young woman would morph into one of the weird sisters with the swipe of a dry sponge dipped in Black Forest #8; a zombie emerge from a cheerful visage with the judicious application of Paramount’s Death Green. Eventually it became my career. Makeup was disguise. It was possible to hide people behind it, hide their true natures. I relished turning one person into another, having that control. But contrarian that I was, I myself did not use makeup. My weight was my disguise; behind it I was hidden, untouchable.

Freda did not approve, pooh-poohing my bent. Actors should do their own makeup, she insisted. Only the performer herself knows what is necessary to communicate the character’s inner life, only she knows what clues the visual image needs in order to support the illusion, she alone must have at her own fingertips the knowledge to bring it off. All very well for you, I said, but what of others who don’t have your skill, your genius. Yes, I believe I used that word, intended to flatter, to divert, to appease—and it must have worked. She huffed and answered, “Well, they’re not the real thing,” and left me alone after that.

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When my mother got sick I was still living at home but readying myself to leave, with a job and a life I hoped to step into. Well, I couldn’t leave. No one was allowed to know about her illness, not friends, not even her longtime agent. Far better to let the world think you’re an alcoholic off for a cure or in rehab for drug addiction than admit to illness or debilitation and possibly deprive yourself—and the world— of the next great role. Afterwards many, especially her numerous clamoring suitors, felt betrayed: surely she would have told me, each insisted against all evidence. But not one of those men had ever made it past our front door, beyond the famous dinner parties. She created a false sense of intimacy with everyone she met, as with an audience. 

She died. I never left home. There was money but I continued to work. The characters I would bring into being were my family. The theater is unique in this way, allowing for an instant—and safely temporary—community. 

Then at an opening night party some years later I ran into Puck, now a celebrated playwright. I hadn’t seen him since the closing performance of Midsummer, with his gruesome swollen face and terrifying Frankenstein stitches (that I’d tried to re-create in every monster face I was tasked with making up).

The party was at Sardi’s. We spent the whole evening together in a booth, sharing a plate of their famous cannelloni (which did not approach Freda’s version, we agreed). We got drunk—much the way we were doing now. I remember his intense focus on me that night. He kept asking me how I was, I remember that clearly, and I kept saying fine. Here our dance began: he wanted something from me, was asking me for something I wasn’t at the time willing to face.

Now the overhead captain’s light at my mother’s kitchen table cast deep shadows in the fissures and hollows of his cheeks, the blue eyes were a mottled navy. So much energy is expended on making actors age: the stippling, the wrinkles sketched into smooth skin, the liberal application of Kryolan D-19 to the hair. Less can be done to make an older actor look younger. I wondered how I might bring back the cocky sprite of yore. Foundation, certainly, but his cheeks were as sand-colored under the wine flush as the thinning no-longer-red hair. The overhead light brought into relief the line of old stitches above his eye.

I got up and turned the light off (Freda, with her unerring instincts, never used it). How crucial lighting is when it comes to stage makeup. Perhaps I’d suggest Bastard Amber, flattering to all, if he were onstage instead of here at the kitchen table. But now, in candlelight, I began to see again the boyish face on the old man in front of me.

I started to make a salad. He leafed idly through the cookbook, which was open on the table.

I chose a conversational tone, busying myself with the lettuce: “You hadn’t spoken for years. How did she get you to write the blurb?”

After a pause, he said, “Well, her charm, of course. But your mother understood the value of publicity better than anyone I ever met. I’d just been named a finalist for the Pulitzer.”

“And after that?”

“Back to banishment, but not before she remonstrated with me for failing to write a brilliant role for her.”

He hadn’t noticed the typo. When I pointed it out, he laughed.

---

Evidently when meat comes out of the oven it must “rest.” After the arduous journey from raw to roast, the exhausted beast must catch its breath, juices trickling down its sides from the exertion. This was no longer the huge pink carcass that had so alarmed me but dark brown and crisp at the edges, and oh dear god it smelled so good.

We gazed at it.

“My dear, a triumph,” Puck said.

I maneuvered the roast onto my mother’s Wedgwood platter. “She named it for me but I don’t recall her ever making it,” I said.

“I wonder if she understood the metaphor. The concept of the fatted calf as sacrifice. But no, I don’t think she did. Your mother, despite her artistry, was quite stupid.”

I stared at him. “But you loved her.”

He looked back at me and said nothing. There again was the challenge in his eyes.

“You know,” I said, suddenly defensive to the point of anger, “she and I—you don’t. I mean, it was just the two of us, and we… Cleopatra…you have to see that much of it was—”

“—always about her,” Puck said.

More wine. The salad now abandoned, we set upon the meat. Puck carved, commenting on the dull knife.

I am not a foodie, I don’t have the words. The meat was…ambrosial. Transporting. A sea change had occurred. Somehow that raw, pink, quivering flesh under a searing fire had turned into something rich and strange, a mouthwatering meal, transforming disgust into degustation.

Puck and I toasted her again and again: “To Freda.”

“To Freda.”

---

“I went to her, you know,” he said. “I begged her to do something.”

This was why I’d invited him, what we’d been dancing around that night at Sardis’s. The misbegotten blurb had set me thinking, mulling, poring over the clues. My relief at his appearances backstage, my instinct that he, not my mother, was the one to rescue me from the black legs, from the well.

“But he ran things,” Puck said, “and the show must go on. Her only philosophy.”

“So…it wasn’t the Sheridan Square subway station?”

“Oh, it was. I followed him. I’ve never been so brave before or since. And if I’m honest, I was attracted to him myself. There was something omnisexual about him. I believe he was having it off with one of the mechanicals as well. I despised myself for it, and for waiting too long.”

“You…you confronted him in the subway station?”

“Yes, and after he’d punched me and choked me, he threw me down the stairs. I managed to say that I’d make sure he was arrested if he ever showed his face again, let alone lay a hand on you. He’d be drummed out of the industry. And that was that. I woke up in St. Vincent’s. And the show went on. No, it limped on.”

In the recipe’s headnote, my mother, after listing all the difficulties of it, said Veal Celia was well worth the labor. That the cook and her guests would not be disappointed, that it was the best thing she’d ever created. This dish was special and not to be taken lightly.

I chose to see that as amends of a sort.

Puck laughed at this. “Darling, she served you up on a platter.”

I disagreed. My mother was an artist and there were different rules for her. But I laughed too. It was funny! We were full of wine and Veal Celia and the rest didn’t matter much anymore.

We moved on. Well. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say we moved over.

 

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LYDIA WEAVER is a lifelong reader and writer. She has worked for years as a senior production editor at HarperCollins Publishers with such authors as Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, and others, while rising at 5 a.m. to write her own stories. Of those stories, three won the Symphony Space Selected Shorts Short Story Award three years in a row, and in 2025 she was longlisted for CRAFT’s Short Fiction Prize contest. She has a novel in the works now. Lydia is a native New Yorker and still lives there with her husband where they raised their son.

Featured image by Sergey Kotenev, courtesy of Unsplash.