Amazing how time flies when you are stuck inside your apartment. I’m writing this as my home, New York City enters “Phase 2”, and all that that will entail. I’m trying to find a new form of zen in this moment. My life has winnowed down to a smaller footprint. I’m homesteading in Manhattan. I cook. In fact now I bake. I spend a great deal of time thinking about the food my boyfriend and I will eat. Then I scout my reserves of food, and usually find I need just one thing or two things. I figure out the best way to get those one or two things and then I go to it.

I cook. Then clean. Then load and unload the dishwasher. There are just two of us, and yet we seem to fill up the dishwasher at least once a day, depending on how ambitious my recipes are.

The dishwasher has become my partner during the quarantining. I bless it. The washer-dryer as well, but I don’t use it as frequently.

I read. I stopped watching much TV. I organize. I’m offloading stuff. That feels really really good.

Host Lisa Birnbach and her guest, author Stephanie Danler

My guest today, Stephanie Danler, rode a giant wave of success with her first novel, Sweetbitter, about a back waiter at an important restaurant in Manhattan. It was turned into a series on STARZ for two seasons. People thought it was a memoir, due to Danler’s past as a back waiter at NY restaurants, such as the Union Square Café. It was not. Her new book, Stray, is her memoir, and whoa! It is intense, it is poetic, and filled with a shocking amount of neglect and bad choices made by her alcoholic parents. If you look at her photograph and biography, you’ll see a beautiful and cool young writer, mother, and wife. But reading Stray, you will see Stephanie as a survivor, and someone who has done an enormous amount of work to get to the place she is now.

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Here are the 5 things that made my life better this week:

1. Once again, my family. Let’s hear it for the kids. They didn’t have the easy childhood my parents gave them; theirs was riven by parents (who wanted different things and eventually had different values) and who blessedly but with difficulty split up. I give my exhibits all the credit in the world for whatever resilience they have. And as ever, I apologize for the unhappy times you guys endured.

2. My family now extends to my partner, his lovely daughter, my wonderful daughter in law, and the baby. It’s wonderful to fall in love as an adult. You know yourself better, and know what matters most.

3. Early Voting. We got our say in the Democratic primary over the weekend at an early voting location. Three of us got to go to a clean and well- monitored polling place in a high school in Harlem. Everyone was so pleasant and eager to help. It is always a privilege to vote; I never felt more so as I did this time. I cannot wait until November 3rd.

4. A kitchen scale. I never knew I would need one, but it does help follow recipes a bit more closely. As a plus it can also weigh small packages!

5. I think I’m cured of my shopping via Instagram disease. Everything takes forever – if it arrives – and then I have to start disputes via PayPal (not fun), and then the item is a cheapened facsimile of what was illustrated. I bought a dress that was supposed to be embroidered, but was printed. Hey guess what? I know the difference. And I’ve quit cold turkey.

STEPHANIE DANLER’S 5 THINGS:

1. Poetry: I’m leaning into the black poets in my library, picking up collections that feel like old friends. Kevin Young, Robin Coste Lewis, Claudia Rankine, Lucille Clifton, Danez Smith, Donika Kelly, Nicole Sealey, Nikki Finney, the list goes on and on. Some of these are overtly about race, violence, oppression (like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen), but others are about black lives: love, family, memory, joy. Kevin Young’s collection Brown has the intimacy and momentum of a memoir, and Donika Kelly’s creature poems in Bestiary are so eloquent and sensual.

2. Meditation: Obviously the world feels extremely uncertain and unstable at the moment. Global events and catastrophes aside, I’ve just released a book and I’m 34 weeks pregnant. I am using every tool available to me to stay grounded and manage anxiety. I use the Headspace app daily. I just took a Meditation Tools for Labor class at the wonderful Loom Education Center (they're doing all their classes on Zoom), and I am checking in with spiritual teacher Jan Birchfield, whom I met on a meditation retreat at the Antara Center in Taos, New Mexico. It seems like a lot, but it’s really about small, consistent increments of time where I’m coming back to my body and my breath.

3. Marcella Hazan: The Italian cookbook author has taken my husband from a decent cook to an excellent chef. Throughout quarantine he’s been making big batches of her five-hour Bolognese and freezing the leftovers. We’ve had her olive oil cake, her asparagus risotto, and her simple tomato sauce for our son. We would not be making it without her.

4. Sequoia National Park: We love to camp (my husband a bit more than me, but still), and I have been craving the quiet of the wilderness. The last time I was pregnant we ran out to Joshua Tree two weeks before my due date. This time we took our 18 month old to Sequoia National Park. There’s nothing like waking up in the giant trees, or the freedom children find in nature. I’m extremely grateful the parks have opened back up.

5. My lemon tree. Outside my bedroom is a Meyer Lemon tree that produces the sweetest lemons I’ve ever encountered. I can’t get enough of them, and neither can my son. He eats them raw, like they’re an apple (including the rind), and I squeeze huge amounts of lemon juice for my water. We put them on Marcella’s olive oil cake, we put them on the grill, in vinaigrettes, next to roasting vegetables. This tree is the reason I will never leave California.