Peter S. Feibleman

The author first met Hellman when he was 10 and she 35. Here he recounts the evolution of their relationship that lasted until her death.

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a funny, touching memoir of a crummy--and crumby--childhood.Growing up in the 1960s and '70s, Kate Moses was surrounded by sugar: Twinkies in the basement freezer, honey on the fried chicken, Baby Ruth bars in her father's sock drawer. But sweetness of the more intangible variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too preoccupied with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids. A frustrated artist, Kate's beautiful, capricious mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital emergency, enlisting Kate as her confidante--"We're the girls, we have to stick together"--and instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kate's father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who found herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and found refuge in the kitchen, where she taught herself to bake and entered the one realm where she was able to wield control.Telling her own story with the same lyricism, compassion, and eye for lush detail she brings to her fiction, coupled with the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays, Kate Moses leavens each tale of her coming-of-age in Cakewalk with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionary obsession. There is the mysteriously erotic German Chocolate Cake implicated in a birds-and-bees speech when Kate was seven, the gingerbread people her mother baked for Christmas the year Kate officially realized she was fat, the chocolate chip cookies Kate used to curry favor during a hilariously gruesome adolescence, and the brownies she baked for her idol, the legendary M.F.K. Fisher, who pronounced them "delicious."Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kate's youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness.From the Hardcover edition.

Worried that his mother will send his beloved grandfather to a nursing home "for his own good," Jesse and some of his eighth-grade classmates accompany Pappy into the mountains near their small California town to look for the tiger tracks he claims to have seen.

In the New Orleans of the '30s and '40s, things - and people - are supposed to be black and white. Cille and her light-skinned brothers are neither. They are "the color that looks not-quite white next to a white man, and not-quite colored next to a colored man. It was a non-color in a place where you had to be something." The daughter of a dreamy alcoholic father who introduces Cille to "Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley" but who exits her life too soon, and a mother who teaches her children not the love of God but the fear of him, young Cille struggles for balance and identity in a world where race and class define people for life, and where her brothers destroy themselves beating against the bars of the cage of a divided culture.