wondered—but in my response to the wretched rules and regulations that hemmed you in and pushed you down and, it seemed to me, got in the way of doing anything novel or creative. I chafed unbearably against the restrictive syllabus whose principal purpose seemed to be to show plump, unimaginative young women in Alice bands and pearls how to find their way to a suitable young man’s heart through his stomach. After two terms I quit and moved in with Kit and his latest boyfriend, a sharklike bond trader with dead eyes.
“For pity’s sake, what do you really want to do?” Kit demanded one night when the shark was working late and I was driving him potty by whining—yet again—about the curdled mess I seemed to be making of my life.
“You
know
what I want to do,” I said tetchily, “I’ve been telling you since nursery school. Open my own restaurant, of course.”
“You were three. I thought you’d grow up and put away childish things.”
“So were you.
You
didn’t.”
“Acting is different—”
“I don’t see why.”
“Put that bottom lip away and stop being such a spoiled brat. Acting is different, as you well know, because you can still have a life while you do it. Have you any idea what opening your own restaurant would really be like?” Kit demanded. “Three quarters of new restaurants fail within the first year. You’d be working at least eighty hours a week with no evenings off, no holidays, not a minute to call your own, in an industry which has the highest percentage of drug addicts next to dentists—”
“Dentists?”
He waved his hand. “Never mind that now. The other kitchen staff would hate you just for being there. Half the men in the restaurant business still think a woman’s presence in the kitchen curdles the sauce. You’d be eating sexual harassment for breakfast, lunch, and tea—”
“All right, all right,” I interrupted. “I do
know
, Kit. But you did ask—”
“You have a First in English and you cook like an angel. What you should be doing, my love—” Kit said, his eyes alight with an evangelical zeal I knew well enough to fear, “I can’t imagine how we haven’t thought of it before—what you should be doing, Mal darling, is writing cookery books, of course.”
When Kit gets hold of an idea, he’s like a dog with a particularly juicy marrowbone. At his insistence, and more to get him to leave me alone than anything else, I put together a slim folder of my best recipes, illustrated with glossy photographs—shot by the freelancer who succeeded the bond shark in Kit’s revolving-door bedroom—and submittedthem to an agent plucked at random from the
Writer’s Handbook
by Kit, fully expecting rejection with a generous side helping of derision by return of post. But, unbeknownst to either of us, the agent Kit selected just happened to open my submission ten minutes after returning from lunch with a panicked publisher who had been bending her ear for two hours on the subject of the gaping hole in her upcoming list, thanks to their star cookery writer—a household name with his own TV show and flatware line—eloping to Guatemala with his sous-chef and huge advance, and without delivering his much-delayed, and increasingly urgently needed, manuscript.
Serendipity really is very much underrated. My mother always said it was better to be born lucky than clever, “although,” she’d add serenely, “it does help to be both.”
At twenty-two, I had a three-book contract, and then a small guest spot on a brand-new satellite channel followed, and when my first book reached number one on the
Times
best-seller list there was even talk of my own TV show. I was the Hot New Thing and everything was going absolutely swimmingly and then I met Trace and for a while nothing else mattered, it was wonderful, it was beyond imagining; and then of course it all collapsed into the darkest, most dreadful mess. It was Kit who pulled me out and told me I would get over it
“For pity’s sake, what do you really want to do?” Kit demanded one night when the shark was working late and I was driving him potty by whining—yet again—about the curdled mess I seemed to be making of my life.
“You
know
what I want to do,” I said tetchily, “I’ve been telling you since nursery school. Open my own restaurant, of course.”
“You were three. I thought you’d grow up and put away childish things.”
“So were you.
You
didn’t.”
“Acting is different—”
“I don’t see why.”
“Put that bottom lip away and stop being such a spoiled brat. Acting is different, as you well know, because you can still have a life while you do it. Have you any idea what opening your own restaurant would really be like?” Kit demanded. “Three quarters of new restaurants fail within the first year. You’d be working at least eighty hours a week with no evenings off, no holidays, not a minute to call your own, in an industry which has the highest percentage of drug addicts next to dentists—”
“Dentists?”
He waved his hand. “Never mind that now. The other kitchen staff would hate you just for being there. Half the men in the restaurant business still think a woman’s presence in the kitchen curdles the sauce. You’d be eating sexual harassment for breakfast, lunch, and tea—”
“All right, all right,” I interrupted. “I do
know
, Kit. But you did ask—”
“You have a First in English and you cook like an angel. What you should be doing, my love—” Kit said, his eyes alight with an evangelical zeal I knew well enough to fear, “I can’t imagine how we haven’t thought of it before—what you should be doing, Mal darling, is writing cookery books, of course.”
When Kit gets hold of an idea, he’s like a dog with a particularly juicy marrowbone. At his insistence, and more to get him to leave me alone than anything else, I put together a slim folder of my best recipes, illustrated with glossy photographs—shot by the freelancer who succeeded the bond shark in Kit’s revolving-door bedroom—and submittedthem to an agent plucked at random from the
Writer’s Handbook
by Kit, fully expecting rejection with a generous side helping of derision by return of post. But, unbeknownst to either of us, the agent Kit selected just happened to open my submission ten minutes after returning from lunch with a panicked publisher who had been bending her ear for two hours on the subject of the gaping hole in her upcoming list, thanks to their star cookery writer—a household name with his own TV show and flatware line—eloping to Guatemala with his sous-chef and huge advance, and without delivering his much-delayed, and increasingly urgently needed, manuscript.
Serendipity really is very much underrated. My mother always said it was better to be born lucky than clever, “although,” she’d add serenely, “it does help to be both.”
At twenty-two, I had a three-book contract, and then a small guest spot on a brand-new satellite channel followed, and when my first book reached number one on the
Times
best-seller list there was even talk of my own TV show. I was the Hot New Thing and everything was going absolutely swimmingly and then I met Trace and for a while nothing else mattered, it was wonderful, it was beyond imagining; and then of course it all collapsed into the darkest, most dreadful mess. It was Kit who pulled me out and told me I would get over it
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