Author: Formaggio Bambino

I was recently nominated for a James Beard Award for journalism, and statement which makes as much sense as saying “I was nominated for a Grammy for this cookie that I just ate.” The other nominees in my category are – I kid you not – The New York Times and The Atlantic. I submitted my application on the very last day (a few hours before the deadline), for my Mario Batali cinnamon roll piece, and just found out that the committee had selected it as one of their finalists. To recap, in case you temporarily lost consciousness from how absurd this all is, I was nominated for a James Beard award, and the list of nominees in my category are two legitimate publications, and this blog.

I should know by now that the universe gets drunk. This is a thing that happens. What I didn’t quite understand is how

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I am scheduled to leave for Germany in several days. I have already told my husband that I don’t want to go, in a whining tone that stretches syllables out so far that the words they once formed are barely recognizable. As a woman nearing the aging of forty, this is how I am coping with the  death of my father, who passed away *checks calendar* … a not insignificant amount of time ago.

I never imagined losing a parent would be an easy thing. But I reasoned that the death of my orderly, logical, unsentimental father would be different. I had loved him, and in his own way, he had loved me. And now he was gone. I had felt sadness – both the intense grief of the moment and the lingering aftermath of it. I felt the pang of finding reminders of him (a global stamp meant for

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I am on occasion asked for relationship advice. I often do not know how to reply. The list of things I could tell people is long and winding, may be entirely irrelevant, and varies from season to season and day to day.

In summer, I learn to appreciate freckles and to not mind when the heat is so intense that you can barely touch one another without hearing a sizzling sound. In the spring, I feel like making elaborate tarts might be essential to a good relationship (no, there is no photo, it was gone too soon, leaving only flakes of crust in the bottom of the pan like petals of cherry blossoms). But I can’t say definitively because there is no control group. I’ve never not made tarts in the spring. And now, after so many years, it’s too risky not to.

That is where I am now, making

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Note: this post contains some content that may be upsetting for certain readers – including mention of torture and the Cambodian genocide.

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My trip to Cambodia feels so long ago – more than five years – that I have to remind myself that I was there. I look at the photos, and see myself looking so damn young that it almost startles me. I went to Cambodia with Nicci and we rode bikes to Angkor Wat and she would shout what vehicles were coming upon us and I would caution her about the monkeys that sat on the side of the road and we ate gelatinous fruits in air so damp and hot it felt like we were inside a sauna.

We went to Tuol Sleng prison and we visited the Killing Fields in one day, and it felt like there was nothing left of us after that.

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(Note: this piece does not link to any of the shooter’s video or manifesto directly, but some of the news sites that I link to may do so. A few include screencaps of his 4-chan forum discussions. Please click with caution.)

49 people died yesterday, gunned down in two mosques in coordinated attacks across New Zealand. The intricacies of time zones and the international date line mean the date of their deaths was actually today, Friday the 15th. Waking up on this day here in the states with knowledge of what occurred feels strangely perverse, as though someone should have been able to stop the attacks through some sort of temporal witchcraft.

And in truth, it seems that someone should have been able to stop all of it. The shooter’s plans were laid out specifically on 4-chan. His manifesto (which I am not going to quote from directly, because he

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I’m still weirded out when I’m asked to do interviews. I still feel like, even after all these years, that the blog (and even my book) are sort of a small, insular thing, and when people have heard of them, I find it oddly confusing. It’s like a stranger walking up to you and talking about the tub of hummus at the back of your fridge.

Like, of course I know about the hummus, and it’s not a secret or anything (I mean, it’s right there – in my fridge! For everyone to see!), but how does this random stranger know about it? And more importantly, why do they care about my hummus? HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY BE INTERESTING TO THEM, IT IS SO BEIGE AND GLOOPY.

(Also, oh my god, you guys, this analogy is so, so bad.)

And when I’m asked to do interviews for radio or TV,

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I had not worn the socks in years when I fished them out of the back of the drawer. They had survived the journey to college and six subsequent moves. They were one of the few relics of my past that had not been destroyed in the recent fire that consumed my mother’s home.

They are now so threadbare that I can see the entire pink pad of my heel, cracked with dry fissures, when I put them on. I gasp as I walk across the cold floor of our kitchen. Socks are simple things; they are designed to meet a basic need. These ones no longer do.

We are presently in the midst of a massive national decluttering. Thrift stores across the country have reported a huge surge in donations, which many attribute directly to the release of Netflix’s new show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Kondo, the titular

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Dear Friends,

As you know, Rand and I are social creatures. We thrive on seeing the people we love, on following the winding paths of your lives, on quietly building a history of private jokes and shared experiences together. We aren’t simply growing old with each other, we are growing old with all of you, and this brings my heart a sort of levity that I can scarcely describe. The closest I can come to is this: imagine a nest of baby squirrels inside your chest. It’s both squirmy and warm.

Usually, we host, because we bought this big, old, drafty house last year, and that is what you do with big, old, drafty houses. Our lives have become a pastiche of dinners and brunches characterized by noise and laughter and crumbs on the floor.

I am entirely okay with all of that.

What I am not okay with, my

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Posted on

Dec 31, 2018

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of being on Dan Moyle’s podcast, The Storytellers Network.

I’m always a bit hesitant to go on podcasts. I love chatting with people, but my relationship with the spoken word isn’t quite what it is with the written one. I tend to ramble unless I have a good editor close by. But Dan was a wonderful and engaging interviewer – and his last question stayed with me long after he asked it.

If you had only one story left to tell, what would it be?

Just the notion of being through with storytelling almost made me cry (and in fact, you can hear my voice catching at just the thought). But I had an answer – one I was hesitant to share at first, because it almost felt too personal. (Even though the

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It’s December, which means that you’ve probably read all of the daring thinkpieces about how Love, Actually is the greatest holiday movie, ever, despite its many, many flaws, or the other, more daring thinkpieces about how Love, Actually, is the worst holiday movie, ever, because of the aforementioned flaws. And I shouldn’t be adding gasoline to that already overrun fire. I shouldn’t. But dear ones, I’ve spent the last 11 months thinking about this post. It started haunting me on December 26th of last year, the same way you get an idea for a brilliant Halloween costume on November 1st, or how you start eating sugar cubes whole, like a racehorse, immediately after a dental cleaning.

And I need to exorcise this tiny demon inside of me, lest it start inviting its friends over for the most incoherent Christmas Pageant ever, complete with lobsters. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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