A cuppa with Meredith
Welcome!
Well hello
Okay, I’m just going to come straight out say it. Way too much chocolate. Way too many hot cross buns. Enough said.
To be fair, I needed the fuel. I mean, The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison is in stores in a month and there’s a lot going on behind the scenes as the publicity machine gears up. But I’ve also been getting into some fantastic new releases myself. Not to mention putting the finishing touches to a little festival, of which I am the director, called StoryFest. That is one of those all-consuming passions. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of work, and I mean a LOT, but I am one of those super lucky people whose day job is their passion—writing novels, reading novels, organising a writers festival. As one of my dearest author friends said to me the other day when I was having a whinge about all my looming deadlines, ‘suck it up, princess.’
I’ve also started a sort-of-series called From the Vault. It sprang out of nowhere, to be honest. Author Lisa Ireland had a quote on her Insta feed from the bestselling American author Jennifer Weiner (and if you haven’t read JW’s work, go and do so right now.) I happened to comment how I had once interviewed Jennifer. Lisa wanted to read it but sadly, the digital archives have all disappeared. Soooo, long story short, new blog. From the Vault. More on that below.
I’ve also been making a lot of zucchini cake. No, I’m not obsessive. But my husband, aka Farmer Boy, grows a lot of veggies. There’s been a fair bit of recipe sharing going down on Insta (yes, I’m looking at you, Maya Linnell) and this zucchini cake recipe is my contribution to the squash convo. So simple, so delish. You can thank me later.
Speaking of the farm, we have our first calf! She’s so cute. Named Evie in honour of her being our first. You can name your heifers because they are not destined to become steak. Sorry if that is too much information but here’s a picture to prove she really is cute.
Enough general chit-chat,
Onwards!
The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison
Alrighty. We are one month away from copies being available in your favourite bookstore and things are starting to feel pretty real now. If you are interested in catching up with me, live and in person (I know, right? Once that was such a cliche but now the whole IRL thing is massive) then I have set up a new tab on my website, called…. wait for it…. Events. Original, huh? Top of the list is my Book Launch. If you happen to be free the night of Wednesday May 5 and feel like books, bubbles and hearing me chat with the fabulous Pamela Cook about The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison, then this is the event for you! I can guarantee you’ll have a great time, just as long as you don’t mind schlepping to my neck of the woods
I will be adding all my new events to this page (here’s the link.) If you don’t see a location near you, maybe if you ask your local book shop or library nicely, they might invite me to pay a visit. You know what they say, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
I got me a sticker!!!
Now, the big news is, I got me a sticker. Yup. Here it is, nice and gold and shiny. I’m right back in Mrs Hoskins class getting gold stars on my homework. That’s exactly how it feels.
I don’t know about you but if I go into a bookshop and I’m not sure what I feel like reading, I am always going to pick up a book with a shiny gold sticker in the corner. When I read those words, ‘Guaranteed Great Read: Love it or your money back,’ I figure the publisher is putting their money where their mouth is. But it also kind of feels like a dare. ‘Oh yeah?’ I think to myself. ‘I’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much.’ Which is a pretty dumb thing to think because that is the whole point, isn’t it?
Needless to say, I am rarely disappointed and I’ve never asked for my money back. But here’s the thing. Not every new book has a shiny gold sticker. In fact, publishers only choose a few books a year to wear the shiny gold sticker. Otherwise, we’d all be like, ‘Huh. Gold stickers. Who cares?’ So here I am, right back in Mrs Hoskins’ class feeling rather pleased with myself for earning a gold sticker.
Psst! If you read the fine print, you will see that the money back guarantee only applies to the print version of the book and the offer expires on 1 November 2021. Not that you’ll need it, naturally, but just so you know.
From the Vault
If you go to my website and look under the tab Blog, you will find old interviews from my days as the Books Editor for the online women’s magazine, The Hoopla. I can’t explain to you how formative these years were to my writing life. (Actually, I can but now is not the time.) It was a very steep learning curve but also an immense privilege. Sadly, all The Hoopla interviews have disappeared off the web but fortunately, I still have the audio and written transcripts of many of them. I’ll be sharing one around the beginning of each month. The April interview is with the amazing writer and speaker, Elizabeth Gilbert. And before you tell me how you hated Eat, Pray, Love and will never read anything else she has written, as so many people continue to say to this day, I beg you to reconsider. Maybe this interview will persuade you to pick up one of Gilbert’s works of fiction. I highly recommend The Signature of All Things and her most recent novel, City of Girls.
Zucchini Cake Recipe
We currently have zucchini coming out of our kazzookas. It's an honest-to-goodess glut. This recipe will take care of that because it uses a LOT of zucchini. It's become my go-to recipe if I am making a carrot-cake style of cake. It's super moist and will easily make the base for a beetroot and chocolate cake or a pumpkin and walnut cake. Only put the icing on if you can be bothered and don’t care about the calories. And if you are not a confident baker, don’t fret. This recipe is super easy. Enjoy!
Grease and line a 22cm spring-form pan. Heat the oven to 180C.
Dry Ingredients
2 cups plain flour (I use half wholemeal spelt and half regular plain flour)
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bi carb
2 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg (or just use 2 ½ tsp of mixed spice if that’s what you’ve got)
Wet Ingredients
300g caster sugar (or a mix of brown and caster for a richer taste)
A generous dollop of vanilla extract (1 to 2 tsp)
3 eggs
1 cup of oil (Use a good healthy oil e.g. extra virgin olive or canola oil)
300g grated zucchini
1 ½ cups pecans
Icing
1 ½ cups sifted icing sugar
300g sour cream or cream cheese (more or less depending on how firm you like it)
Grated rind of a lemon or lime
Method
Sift and whisk all the dry ingredients into one bowl.
Whisk all the wet ingredients in a separate bowl.
Fold dry into wet, add the zucchini and 1 cup of the pecans
Bake for 1 to 1 ¼ hours depending on your oven
Blend icing and once the cake is cool, slather on top and arrange the extra pecans in a pretty pattern with maybe a little more grated lime/ lemon
This month I've been reading...
Not as much as I normally would, to be honest, but everything I have read has been really good. I really liked The Family Doctor, the new book from Debra Oswald, who is also the brains behind the hit series, Offspring. Jumping into non-fiction, I read Return to Uluru where historian Mark McKenna re-examines the evidence in the cold case of the 1934 shooting at Uluru of Aboriginal man Yokununna by white policeman Bill McKinnon. It’s a fascinating exploration of this history and the dire consequences of attitudes, both personal and political, at the time but it also provides such a profound insight into the significance of this iconic landform in contemporary Australia for both the traditional custodians and the broader community.
Pick of the month...
Forty-five-year-old Nic lives in the house in which she grew up. The house where her niece Lena and nephew Will would often sleep over when they were little. A house stuffed with memories—those of her own and those Nic has collected.
Lena is at University now, studying to be a primary school teacher, ill at ease amongst the affluent privileged students who seem to glide through university life while for her to succeed is an everyday struggle. But she has one friend and there is a boy she likes and every Sunday she meets her aunt for lunch.
Then one Sunday, Nic fails to turn up. Worried, Lena catches the bus to her aunt’s place and what she discovers, sets in motion a chain of events that exposes generations of family trauma.
Emily Maguire is one of those writers who is incredibly grounded yet also works on a higher plane. Her characters are gritty, raw, and unlikely heroes of their own tale. And this earthy, familiar foundation allows Maguire to take the reader with her as she explores the bigger meaning of life.
Love Objects is about things we love, about how we treat people and the consequences of when we get that wrong, and the odd time we get it right. It is about the glue that holds families together and the betrayals that leave deep scars. It is also a novel for its times, exploring the kind of world we currently live in and how much harder it seems to be to make a meaningful connection. The writing is sometimes brutal and confronting but always overflowing with compassion and heart. Like her previous novel, An Isolated Incident, which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Award, Love Objects is a deeply satisfying, thought-provoking read.
What if a virus quickly evolves into a pandemic and kills 90 per cent of the world’s population? Naturally, it would be a disaster, and right now, a threat with which we are all too familiar. But in Christina Sweeney-Baird’s astonishing debut novel, it hasn’t wiped out 90 percent of the entire human race, just the men.
The year is 2025. Men start presenting at the A&E department of a Glasgow hospital where Dr Amanda Maclean works. Men who are asymptomatic one day, horrendously ill by Day 3 and dead by Day 5. It is Maclean who realises this virus has the potential to turn into a pandemic. Soon many bereaved women will have lost colleagues, husbands, brothers, father, and sons.
Given that Sweeney-Baird wrote The End of Men in 2018, this novel is remarkably prescient. However, what makes it such a compelling and provoking read is the fallout not the pandemic itself. Sweeney-Baird proves to be a sharp observer of human frailty. Her imagined future is filled with flawed characters, imperfect solutions, and deep empathy. Sweeny-Baird embraces serious questions about the deeply personal need to find meaning in the face of such devastating personal and societal loss. How does one move beyond overwhelming grief when you are only one of the victims and the world cannot function if the entire population is in mourning. And perhaps the most important question; how to find hope when everything around you is hopeless. The End of Men is the perfect blend of intellectual rigour, overwhelming compassion, balanced by just the right amount of humour.
The end of the cup...
That’s it. It’s a mammoth edition that I suspect might be longer than a single cuppa. Sorry about that. But rest assured, this is because there is a lot going on right now. Calves and cakes and blogs and books. I’ll try not to be so long-winded next time. Promise.
Hopefully, we will be seeing each other soon—live and in person! —as I begin my book tour on 1 May. Remember, dates will be added on the website www.meredithjaffe.com or on socials where you will find me on Instagram or Facebook @meredithjaffeauthor.