Laurie Colwin: Novelist and Food Writer

Laurie Colwin is a novelist who liked to cook, and to write about food, which she does even in her novels. She wrote five popular novels, three collections of short stories, and two collections of essays about food and life in the kitchen.

She was born in New York, in 1944, and she lived there through most of her adult life. A fact that is significant to her work because her books are set in New York and often, the city is almost a character in its own right.

She started writing at a young age, and her work first appeared in The New Yorker. She published her first collection of short stories, Passion and Affect in 1974. She was also a regular contributor to Gourmet magazine.

She died in 1992, at the rather young age of 48, and remarkably, her books have never gone out of print. They are still popular and still widely read.

Her two books about food, Home Cooking, and More Home Cooking, are collections of food stories and memories, interspersed with recipes, a celebration of ingredients and dishes, meals planned and accomplished, some magnificent successes, and some disasters.

These books paint the picture of someone who was passionate about food and life. Reading them is like engaging in a conversation with a close friend.

While Laurie Colwin’s food writing often gets the spotlight today, it’s her novels that are at the heart of her literary legacy. She wrote five of them, and each is a variation on her favourite theme: how intellectual, often slightly neurotic people manage to find and hold on to happiness.

Her characters tend to be intelligent and articulate, deeply invested in their domestic lives, and prone to overthinking their relationships in a way that is somehow charming. In Colwin’s world, people aren't usually evil, they are just complicated, stubborn, or afraid.

Her debut novel, Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object, published in 1975, deals with grief. The protagonist is a young woman whose husband dies in a sailing accident. The story follows her journey through mourning and her eventual, complicated attraction to her husband’s brother. This is a novel about healing and moving on from tragedy that is grounded and honest rather than sentimental.

Her second novel, Happy all the Time, published in 1978 is widely considered her masterpiece and the best entry point for new readers of her work. It follows two young men, romantics both, as they navigate their love lives in the New York of the 1970's. The women that they're in love with are interesting and complicated characters who are less trusting of the good things in life than the men who love them.

Family Happiness (1982) is about a woman who seems to have it all, the high achieving husband, the children, the house, the money, and a tight knit family. But she's lonely and sick of being taken for granted. This leads her to have an affair that she finds deeply satisfying. Unlike most novelists of the era, Colwin refuses to punish her protagonist. There is no tragic ending or moralizing lecture in this book. It's an honest look at a woman who is stressed, over-extended and neglected, trying to find a bit of joy in her life...

Goodbye Without Leaving (1990) is about a woman who went from being the only white back-up singer for a predominantly black band, and living a thoroughly exciting life on stage and on the road, to the more sedate life of being a suburban wife and mother, and her attempts to reconcile her identity and sense of self with her new life.

Her final novel, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, was published posthumously in 1993. It tells the story of a woman who comes to marriage a little later in life than she'd expected, and follows her and her best friend as they navigate the transition to motherhood and the impact this has on their relationships with their husbands.

Colwin knew that the secret to a good life was a combination of a few close friends, a stack of good books, and a reliable recipe for potato salad. She tried to capture that in her books along with the inherently messy nature of life, the daily reality of being alive, being hungry, and being in love.

Her narratives tend to centre around the simple pleasures of our lives, cooking a delicious meal, having a cup of tea, taking a walk, having dinner with an old friend… she writes about the importance of female friendship, the beauty that we can create and have in our home lives, and the quiet courage it takes to build a life you actually like.