My friend Lauren’s mom generously mailed me a box of Meyer lemons from the tree at her house. I love Meyer lemons, and I know they can go soft and rot suddenly, so I felt a sense of haste to eat them or do something with them.
But this story starts earlier for me, when my friend Peter, Lauren’s partner, gave me a cookbook his aunt Elizabeth, known as Better, wrote all about marmalade. She’d done her graduate work, maybe even a PhD, on marmalade as a lens to look at colonialism, food trade, and food traditions. Somehow, all that academic research was put into a sausage machine and came out as a very sweet, small cookbook on how to make marmalade. Better died from cancer in the company of her husband, son, Peter, and Lauren. When Peter told me about all the research hidden behind this slim cookbook, I kept wondering about the other book, the one that never got published. “Maybe I should write the book Better never wrote,” I told Peter. I imagined getting my hands on her thesis, then telling a story about it and about her, about lemons and about loss. I would call it The Book Better Never Wrote.
I’ve never entirely given this up—I keep the flame alive, as well as the memory of someone I never met who was so important to two of my dearest friends, by making marmalade from her book every winter.
When the box of lemons arrived, I decided quickly that I would use some to make one of Better’s marmalades. But I was in rush. I’ve been trying to finish the revisions of my book, and I had decided to spend the entire weekend reworking the last chapter. Making this marmalade was something I wanted to fit into the interstices between writing. I read Better’s Meyer Lemon Marmalade recipe hastily, and then when I felt unable to continue writing, I jumped up to slice the lemons thinly, remove the seeds, soak them in water, and then sit back down to write.
Better said to use six lemons or 1-1/2 cups lemon slices or 180 grams lemon slices, but these things didn’t correspond for me, so I went with the weight measurement, which seemed like it had to be the most accurate.
I sat down and kept writing, then an hour later jumped up. It was time to add the sugar and cook it for 15 minutes until it passed the wrinkle test. Marmalade, like other jams but to a more extreme degree, transforms from a liquid to a jam through the magic of pectin, which is in the rind, white pith, and seeds. I set a timer, began preparing my jars and lids, filled a canning crock with water, and when my timer went off, I decided to just skip the wrinkle test—I wanted to get back to writing—and go straight to canning. I assumed it would set.
What emerged from the canner were sealed jars of sunshine yellow liquid syrup. Oh, it will certainly setup by tomorrow, I told myself, and returned to my computer.
The next day, the jars were filled with liquid syrup. They hadn’t set at all. Maybe if I boil them in the jars, I can get the sugar to the candy stage, I surmised, hoping I wouldn’t have to undo all the canning I’d done. I returned the sealed jars to the water bath and boiled them for an hour. They turned a light shade of amber, but the inside was still liquid. At this point, a wave of guilt washed over me. If only I’d done what Better told me to do. If only I’d done the wrinkle test! Or waited for the marmalade to set before I canned!
The next day, determined not to have eight jars of lemon syrup on my hands, I opened up each sealed jar, added the contents back to a pot, sliced more lemons to add more pectin, added another cup of sugar, and cooked it properly. What had initially been a buttercup yellow turned deeply caramel colored. When it was viscose, I pulled out the plate I’d stashed in the freezer, put a spoonful of the marmalade on it, let is sit a minute, and then swiped my finger through. And yes, the marmalade did “wrinkle.” I canned the amber marmalade, which looked nothing like the syrup I’d canned the day before, and had to laugh at myself. I could have saved an entire day of work if I’d been patient the first time. I could have stopped myself from canning unfinished marmalade. I had many opportunities to pause, reflect, and slow down.
This is a long anecdote that probably feels familiar to most of us. What if! What if we’d slowed down. What if we’d been less impatient, less in a rush to finish, more concerned to make something good, delicious even, instead of simply trying to rush something out the door. For me, this applies specifically to writing my book.
I started writing Group Living officially two years ago, when my book deal was finalized. But really, I’d started two years before that, writing a book proposal and drafting essays. This has been a very long and intense process, unlike anything I’ve done before, including starting a business. I work on the book all the time, and no one except my editor and a few close friends and family members has seen any of it or knows with any intimacy what it is. I’ve felt uncomfortably impatient to get through the process—to hold a real book in my hands instead of returning to the editing again, and again. And yet, I swear to god, I know the marmalade hasn’t set. The first draft felt like a first draft. There was fruit and sugar in there but it hadn’t cooked properly. There might not have been enough pectin. Or sugar. Now, I’ve been revising, and only this week did I finally see the syrups become viscose. It’s not time for the wrinkle test yet, so it’s certainly not time to put it in a jar and can it! But it’s much closer. Now, as before, is the time for patience, time to wait and see what sets up and then make decisions. What a torture! What a gift!
Please forgive me for abandoning this newsletter for so long. I won’t make any promises about the future that I don’t know I can keep. But I just wanted you to know that I haven’t quit this newsletter. I’ve just been really busy making marmalade.