Lesley Crewe dishes out the ‘Recipe for a Good Life’: Get a Walrus to light your fire
From Atlantic Books Today #98, fall 2023
On the day before the official launch of her new novel, Recipe for a Good Life, Lesley Crewe has already received messages from readers saying, “OMG, I just finished it, when is the next one?”
“I feel like saying, you nutbars!” cries Crewe, “Stop reading the books in two days!”
But Crewe is already hard at work on her next novel, writing furiously and for many hours at a stretch. Crewe says that she wrote her bestselling Nosy Parker in thirty days and her fans, affected by the energy and momentum in her novels, read in the same manner.
I started my Crewe addiction with her most recent novel, Recipe for a Good Life, and now I am scooping up past novels and reading them one after another. The characters are always on a journey, and a recognizable one, with the comedy and tragedy of life represented on every page.
Crewe creates cozy homes and characters that you wish would invite you in for tea. She says that describing her characters’ homes is important. “I always thought of the home as the soul of your life,” says Crewe, gesturing to her home office, “it’s right here, you do all your breathing, in and out, right here.”
Brought up in Montreal, Crewe spent her summers in Cape Breton and then moved to Cape Breton as a young mother and has lived there since. In Recipe for a Good Life, Crewe returns to both locations and brings them to life with loving detail.
Crewe’s new novel follows the path of a prolific, popular crime writer named Kitty, who is living in Montreal in the 1950s. Unhappily married to a successful actor and suffering from writer’s block, Kitty is sent to Cape Breton for a rest by her devoted editor, Gaynor Ledbetter.
Kitty is healed by the love and chaos of rural Cape Bretoners and starts to write again, but not right away. At first, she is alarmed to find herself alone in a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere, her only connection to Montreal a party-line phone with a lurking gossiper listening in to every conversation.
But soon Kitty discovers that Bertha, a warm-hearted woman with an open kitchen and scores of cheerful children and grandchildren, lives just down the road. And extra good luck, Bertha shares her home with one of her adult children, a handsome grown man nicknamed Walrus.
Walrus, or Wallace, happens to be a thoughtful, local fix-it man, a great baker, good with children, and single. Walrus mends Kitty’s roof and teaches Kitty how to light a fire in the woodstove (literally and metaphorically).
When I asked the delightful Crewe what had drawn her to set the novel in the 1950s, she replied with enthusiasm, “I love writing about the fifties because everyone smoked! There’s nothing better than having a cigarette in your hand and making a point with it or blowing smoke into the air!”
I instantly pictured Kitty’s editor Gaynor, with her polished beehive hairdo and hard-bitten manner, pointing a cigarette in Kitty’s direction and blowing smoke out the side of her lipsticked mouth.
Crewe’s novels do seem ripe for screen adaptation and in fact, her first novel, Relative Happiness (which Crewe still privately refers to as The Big Girl, her original title) was made into a feature film in 2014.
Fortunately, Crewe, unlike Kitty, does not seem to be heading towards any writer’s block. Crewe writes for the joy of the process and because it helps her “figure out her life.”
She also enjoys spending time with her characters and, like her own readers, she misses them when she finishes a novel. “I wish there was a Bertha just down the road where I could drop in for a cup of tea.”
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