Scribbles in the Margin: A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenburg

I'm a rather faithless blog reader...I'll find a blog, add it to my RSS and follow it. Nine months, a year, maybe longer; eventually it seems like most blogs end off falling off my radar. Maybe the blogger has quit posting, maybe the content has shifted or maybe I'm just not as captured by it as I once was. There are only a handful of blogs/bloggers who I've followed day in and day out, transferring from my bookmarks to my Google Reader or taking the time to go to their sites, through a flurry of posts to hardly any at all.

Orangette was one of the first blogs I ever bookmarked something like four years ago; nearly the Paleozoic Era in internet time, and I still get excited every time she posts. So naturally when the day came that her cookbook / memoir was released I made sure to add it to my "Things to Read List". Then it took an embarrassingly long time for me to actually read it.


The nice thing about Molly Wizenberg's writing - whether it's her blog, her book or even, I suspect, her grocery list - is that it leaves you feeling like the sharp edges of the world have been rounded off. The perspective from her world is so soft and gentle that it's hard to imagine that anything really painful can ever happen. The truth of it though, that whether she's writing about her first trip to Paris, the death of her beloved father or her own love story, she shares the good and the bad equally, always rounding out the difficult spots with a fond memory or a touching lesson well learned. My only real complaint is that the second half of the book, her romance and eventual marriage, gets so soft and gauzy that it gets a bit tedious. Which is hardly a real complaint at all.

The cookbook aspect of her book is lovely and the backbone of the layout. Written as a series of vignettes that capture a memory, each ends with a corresponding recipe. The now famous lemon cake that introduced her to Brandon, her mother's Christmas cookies, her father's potato salad or an uncle's salmon, each recipe is as much a part of the story as the people. While her food has always been a bit more fussy than I care to cook, that's not really the point - I come for the story, which she delivers...softly wrapped in a tidy little package.