Barbara O'Neal: A Breakfast Story

Barbara O'Neal, today's guest blogger and bestselling author of THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS tells us how she fell in love with breakfast and how that love inspired her latest novel, THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING.

PANCAKE KISSES, BACON HUGS
Why breakfast is the secret of everything
by Barbara O’Neal

I suppose I should confess upfront that I am a morning person. I wake up cheery, chatty and at the very first fingers of sunlight creeping over the horizon. I know you find this annoying. I know you wish I’d stop humming under my breath as I crack eggs and start the coffee, but I can’t help it. I was born this way; a singing lark who simply loves breakfast.

Though I love the morning, my passion for breakfast arrived in a roundabout way, I must admit. My mother, who is a very good cook under many circumstances, was born an owl, who finds early morning painful, especially when her lark child rose well before sunrise and was known to dust siblings with flour or lipstick or explore—well, never mind. It was early, that’s all.

Because she loved us, my mother did manage to get up and fix us breakfast. She believed in a hot breakfast, but cooking anything much would have been dangerous considering her eyes were barely open. So she made hot cereal. Endlessly. Malto-Meal and Ralston, Cream of Wheat and a colorless, gluey oatmeal I loathed with the considerable passion of a toddler foodie. Thankfully, she left us to our own devices once we made it to late grade school and we never had to choke down porridge again.

Not the best circumstances to fall in love with breakfast, I know. The happy accident is that my mother briefly took a job at a manufacturing plant when I was about seven. The other three children went to my grandmother’s house for the day while I stayed home with my father and walked to school on my own.

Once in awhile, my father got dressed and took me to a little café downtown, where there were individual jukeboxes along the counter and at the tables, and we ate pancakes and eggs and tea. We sat at the counter on round stools. I flipped through the jukebox offerings as if I knew what they were while he flirted with the waitresses and they flirted back, and there was usually music playing, and cigarette smoke hanging in the air with heady notes of bacon and coffee and frying onions. I loved the food—little balls of cold butter on top of my French toast, glass pitchers of syrup, tiny tubs of jelly—but mostly I loved the time with my dad, having him all to myself. Afterward, my dad would drop me off at school and I’d head up the stone steps feeling warm and special, a girl who had extraordinary experiences.

I fell in love with breakfast then and there. All good breakfasts, but especially a good café breakfast. And from that love was born a book.

At the heart of my new book, The Secret of Everything, is a restaurant called 100 Breakfasts, where a lark of a woman cooks to heal the hearts and souls of the people in her town.
It is to 100 Breakfasts that the protagonist, Tessa Harlow, comes to explore the questions that have been haunting her. She is heart sore and weary, recovering from a freak accident and trying to find answers to questions that have only just now bobbed to the surface. When she sits down at the long counter at the 100 Breakfasts Café, she unwittingly sets in motion a tangled array of connections and reveals secrets that have been hidden for a long, long time.

It is also at 100 Breakfasts that Tessa gets to know widower Vince Grasso, who is trying to heal his own family, including the troubled Natalie, a 9 year old who takes food very seriously, and is working her way through the entire list of 100 breakfasts on the menu.

The Secret of Everything was born out of my passion for breakfast, for the power it has to heal and renew, to nourish and ground. It’s a book that was born out of those days when I was a child hating oatmeal and loving the French toast at the local café; when I fought with my sisters and the mornings when my father took me out to breakfast, just the two of us, because this is, at the heart of it, a story about fathers and daughters and how that connection can make or break a woman’s spirit. Tessa’s father is nothing like my own, of course, but a father who is devoted to his child gives her permission to be as mighty as she can be.

Ironically, Tessa’s favorite breakfast is oatmeal, because in my adulthood, I learned to love great oatmeal. It is my own breakfast of choice most days. Whole grain oats served with butter and my own spiced apples that are cooked to a deep, dark flavor. Because I am that lark, so smugly and cheerfully alert at the first glimmers of dawn, it falls to me to get up and make the tea and start the coffee so it fills the air with its fragrance. I set the water boiling and set the table with cloth napkins and the good sugar bowl and the milk pitcher. I set the stage for my sleepy headed partner, sometimes a child, to come blinking to the table and fill his belly and drink his coffee.

In this small act, I am offering the most solid secret I know: breakfast is the secret of everything.

Breakfast is love.

ReadingGroupGuides.com Facebook roundup for November/December

Kudos to this intrepid blogger for compiling an ever-growing list of 'Best Books of 2009' database. We all should thank him.

TIME Magazine recently posted its 'Best of Everything 2009,' including books. See fiction here and nonfiction here. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins is a title we're featuring on ReadingGroupGuides.com this month! There's also loads of other fun lists on there, too.

Two major publishers --- Simon & Schuster and Hachette --- announced a new policy for e-books in 2010. Read about it in this Wall Street Journal article, and weigh-in on this hot -button issue.

Penguin Classics on Air is a new half-hour radio series devoted to some of the more than 1,500 Penguin Classics titles. It debuted on Thursday, December 10 with a show dedicated to the continued fascination, and sales, around Jane Austen. You can listen Mondays at 3 PM ET and Thursdays at 11:30 PM ET on Sirius XM Book Radio (Sirius #117, XM #163).

At the tender age of 90, P.D. James is still cranking out the literary mysteries and seeing her fanbase expand with each release.

We've been closely following the auction for Cormac McCarthy's 40-year-old typewriter, which he used to write NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, THE ROAD, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, and much, more more. McCarthy replaced the typewriter with a similar model for $11 and $19.95 in shipping/handling. And the winning bid was impressive to say the least.

Carol was recently quoted in The Sacramento Bee about book club camaraderie and changes in book club culture.

A rare copy of Edgar Allan Poe's first book went to auction with a big price tag.

The NYT notable 100 books of 2009.
The NYT book critics personal favorites.
Amazon's top editor and customer choices for 2009.

The National Book Award winners were recently announced, and it was also the 60th anniversary of the award.

Deciding What To Read

One of the questions that we are asked most often is, "How does a group decide what to read?" This post from Jennifer Hart, who writes the bookclubgirl.com blog, talks about how her group does this and how they enlist the help of their local independent bookseller in their selection process.

Many people ask me how my book group decides on the books that we read each month. While I had nothing to do with how our group is set up to choose titles, as I joined a few months after it was formed, I have to say that I think we have a system that works pretty well, with a minimum of hurt feelings. In groups I've been in in the past, there was a general free-for-all at each meeting, with every member putting forth titles for us to vote on. Inevitably someone felt that their titles weren't paid attention to.

Here's how we do it in my current group. Whoever's turn it is to host that month puts forth 5 books. If they're not books they have on hand, our local independent, Goldfinch Books, is great about lending out copies for the night. They also give us a discount on the bulk purchase of books and call each and every member when the books come in. If you're not hooked up with a local store to get the books for your group, I highly recommend it. And the staff, of course, can be a great resource in pointing you towards good choices. Find a store near you via the Book Sense website.

So we have our five books. The host presents each one, and we pass them around. If anyone has read one or another book by that author we share those thoughts and impressions. We then hold two rounds of voting. In the first round, you can vote for two books (I guess this is like the presidential primaries --- not in the two votes sense, but in the preliminary sense). In the second round, or general election if you will, only the top two vote getters from the first round are up for election. During this round each member gets one vote and the winner here is the next book group pick.

This system works really well. I like not having to narrow down my choice to one initially, and the discussion we have between rounds helps us to hone in on which books are not only the most appealing but the ones we feel are the most discussable -- which is, of course, the ultimate goal. A newly initiated rule is that we will bring the runner up back to the subsequent meeting as one of the next five candidates. In addition, if we've voted on a book twice and not chosen it, we don't usually allow it into the running again. Though I'm pretty sure we broke this rule with Eat, Pray, Love, which took a few months to get chosen.

My book group met tonight, and our choices were Jodi Picoult's Plain Truth, Katrina Kittle's The Kindness of Strangers, Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World, Geraldine Brooks' March (we previously read and loved Year of Wonders) and Debbie Galant's Fear and Yoga in New Jersey.

The top two picks from the first round were The Kindness of Strangers and The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver won out, I think mostly due to our anticipation of discussing the book's enticing premise --- how one woman's life will change, or not, based on whether or not she kisses a man who is not her husband. I'm very much looking forward to next month's discussion of this book!

------Jennifer Hart , bookclubgirl.com