Michelle Richmond is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Marriage Pact, Golden State, The Year of Fog, No One You Know, Dream of the Blue Room, Hum, and The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Her books have been published in 30 languages. A native of Alabama, she makes her home in Northern California and Paris.
I also recently pondered Marginalia and the Strange Magic of Allée Marcel Proust. It’s not about Proust himself, but about one of my favorite spots in Paris, a bench on a dirt path beside Avenue Gabriel where I spent many hours waiting for a certain someone.
November was a foggy month. It reminded me of this:
“The house was very quiet, and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.” ? E.M. Forster, Howards End
Cafe Kitsune Paris, with book from Librarie Galignani
When I go through a dry spell in my writing, I find it helps to think in fives. Instead of beginning the day with a scene from my novel-in-progress, I begin with a quick exercise: write about five of something. Five books I love, five cities I’ve lived in, five dates, five meals…anything.
In her excellent and esoteric blog Writer’s Notebook, NorCal native and Paris expat Summer Brennan explains the origins of the Five Things post.
“There seems to be something about the number five that helps to give a satisfying structure, at least to the writer, if not to the reader,” Brennan writes.
With that inspiration, I’m sharing my own five things: Five Things I Love and Five I Can Do Without. (I considered calling this post “5 Things I Love and Five I Loathe.” That would have been a catchier title, but a dishonest one. There’s nothing in this list of fives I actually hate. I began with the idea of very strong preferences. Here goes: Five Things I Love, and their less lovable counterparts.
Coffee not Tea
I have a secret bias. If someone reveals that they drink tea instead of coffee, I automatically mistrust them. I don’t think they’re morally corrupt, necessarily, but I question their common sense. Fair or no, I associate tea with china cups and doilies. Ruffled lampshades. Dusty sofas in floral patterns. I secretly suspect that the majority of tea-drinkers can name the lesser royals and perhaps even recall their more questionable moments in haberdashery. (I do have dear friends who drink tea and exhibit none of these characteristics, and I fully admit my bias is not based in fact). By contrast, in my mind, a coffee drinker’s lamps give good light. Their linens are unfussy. They like to get stuff done.
Give me coffee (I wrote a whole book about it)—the stronger the better. Black, not doctored. Give me energy and focus, the noise of the coffee grinder, the oil of the beans, the straight-to-the-brain olfactory joy when you pour the ground beans into the filter basket. Give me the heat, the first bitter taste, the burn in the throat, the electric charge. Give me a really good drip machine.
Best coffeemaker ever: Technivorm MoccamasterDeux Magots coffee in Paris
I should mention my husband drinks neither tea nor coffee. He is strictly a hot chocolate man. Once, when he edited one of my novels, he replaced every mention of the male protagonist drinking coffee with the male protagonist drinking hot chocolate. Despite reservations, I let it stand. Several layperson reviewers objected. “No grown man drinks that much hot chocolate,”they said. For some readers, the prevalence of hot chocolate in the novel created a problem of verisimilitude, a corruption of the fictional dream.
I will quote one of the reviewers, who calls herself muppetbaby99 and who writes a great blog called Doubleplusgood where she does wildly entertaining “live readings” of novels. She posted about The Marriage Pact for several days in July of 2017, right after the book came out. On the matter of hot chocolate, she had this to say:
I think Michelle Richmond must own stock in a bunch of different ‘hot chocolate beverage flavouring chemical’ companies due to sheer number of times she mentions/describes HOT CHOCOLATE in this story. She must be getting a kick-back from Nestle
If I were the type of writer to correct readers on matters of the possible, I would have responded, “But there are men who drink that much hot chocolate. I am married to one of them!” Of course I am not that type of writer. Readers are, after all, entitled to their opinions. May they all be so lucky as fall in love with a man who is man enough to drink hot chocolate instead of coffee or tea.
P.S. I don’t own stock in Nestle BUT we do have an entire cabinet full of Benco, the French equivalent of Nesquik, which my husband buys by the case whenever he goes back to Paris.
Is your book club reading THE WONDER TEST? Here are a few questions to kick off your discussion.
THE WONDER TEST examines the lengths a community will go for excellence. What do you think of the real-life academic pressures kids face? Are the pressures different than when you were growing up? Also, have you noticed any change in the way families in your community, or perhaps your own family, handle stress and pressure—whether it be in academics, sports, career, or simply lifestyle—in the past year and a half?
Lina and Rory are suffering two losses at the book’s opening, the death of two people important to both of them. How realistic is the book’s portrayal of loss and coping? What might you have done differently in Lina’s situation? What might you have done similarly?
Lina Connerly and her husband, Fred, made one choice when they decided to become parents: that they would always answer their child truthfully. What do you think of this approach? Is it sensible? Is it even possible? If you have children or nieces/nephews, how do you handle their difficult questions?
One of the primary themes of THE WONDER TEST is that the correct thing to do is not always the right thing to do. At one point, Lina says of her parenting, “I’m probably doing everything wrong. Still, it seems to work.” What is something you have done “wrong” or against common wisdom that has nonetheless worked for you?
What scene or line in the book resonated most with you? Why?
What character from the book would you least or most want to know in real life? If you had to spend a weekend with either Lina Connerly or George Voss, who would you choose?
Did you attempt to answer any of the test questions posed at the beginning of the chapters? What was your favorite question, or the one most memorable to you, and why?
In July of 2020, we escaped crowded Paris for a remote region of Greece. This audio story, excerpted from my memoir-in-progress about my family’s expat years in Paris, is exclusive to subscribers at The Wandering Writer.
