An editor told me: It isn’t necessary to reinvent the wheel with each new book.
I found this thought both reassuring and terrifying.
My new novel was about parents and children: as I revised I started to think about the way children teach themselves the things their parents fail to give them. I knew several women with unstable, unavailable mothers, and these daughters had become wonderful cooks, as if to supply themselves with the essential nutrients for living. Was the corollary true, I wondered—if you grew up with an unstable father were you drawn to baking? It seemed to be true in my own family, with its several generations of erratic fathers and daughters who loved to bake. I considered: so much of baking is a meditation: resting, rising, measuring. In the absence of a steady, trustworthy breadwinner, do children learn to make their own bread?
I was skittish when I met Scott. I’d been married and divorced, twice, and at the time I no longer trusted anything or anyone—least of all myself. In the beginning, I thought of our relationship as a kind of play: Even though we were in our thirties, we were still children, the two of us, broke, without houses, cars, or savings. But one day, about a month into our relationship, I woke up and the apartment smelled soft and sweet: he’d made biscuits—pillowy rectangles to eat with jam and butter. These were followed over the next days and weeks by cookies, loaves of whole wheat bread, and a dense chocolate cake dusted with confectioner’s sugar. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Scott made an apple pie. He peeled, sliced, and layered the apples with cinnamon, nutmeg, and butter. He cut lard and butter into the flour and kneaded it just to the point of smoothness. As he slid it from the oven in a plume of fragrance, I noticed the lid of crust was topped with a pastry cut out: a heart-shaped apple sprouting leaves. Wearing two elbow-deep oven mitts, he held it up. I snapped his photograph: he appears to be ducking slightly inhaling the aroma, a trace of a smile on his face, his expression says: come hither.
I loved the measured pace of our courtship, like the waiting patience of baking itself. It seems Penelopean: kneading, braiding, weaving the dough, only to devour it later and begin again in the morning. My husband won me over, in part, through his baking. My grandmother, I think, would have been won over too. When he met my father, of course, Scotty avoided the too-gentle topic of baking; instead they talked about guns and knives, racehorses and whiskey. And cooking. Manly things.
If I were going to write about a baker, I realized, I would be writing very close to the bone. The greatest challenge became one of perception and interpretation: how to avoid the sweetness? The sentimentality of baking, of something drawn straight from childhood? My character would have to be someone who worked with the blackest of chocolate, the kind with the barest traces of sugar. She would work in bitterness. I wanted the desert of dessert. I knew there was plenty of darkness within the glittering whiteness.
Slowly, carefully, I began to research baking in much the same way that I researched the occupations of my other characters: visiting libraries, interviewing professionals, visiting workplaces. I haunted the floury kitchens of bakeries, studied cookbooks, and invited a baker over for dinner. He showed me how to fold butter into puff pastry and talked about the reasons he became a baker:
He liked to get up in the dark.
He hated offices.
He wanted to meet women.
I realized I needed to come closer to my subject, if I could. I’d been a fixture at my grandmother’s side throughout much of my childhood, which meant that I learned how to use a rolling pin, a balloon whisk, a candy thermometer—all without her ever admitting to teaching me. It was just something we did together as we talked. She showed me how to fold melted chocolate into stiff egg whites, to keep every last speck of yolk out of the whites, to invert the angel food pan on to the neck of a bottle so it would hold its loft as it cooled. In this understated way, she showed me the connection between baking and identity: It seemed that our hands were innately shaped to the curve of the dough; the motion of our arms lengthening and folding was the natural movement of kneading.
In my summer before college, Gram took me to Europe. We went, she said, so I could get “culture.” Looking back, it seems the actual purpose of the trip was to investigate French boulangeries and patisseries. We glanced at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower on our way to bake shops. We entered tiny places with polished stone floors and wooden counters where customers lined up for a few simple yet indelibly delicious cakes. We crouched over cases glittering with bright fruit aspics and twirls of meringue like whipped hairdos and mousses shaped like birds and starfish. Both treat and art object, these delicacies seemed to have a presence, an enduring nature that savory food did not.
Now, years later, I started remembering as I began rewriting. And I knew I’d have to go just a little further: I’d have to start baking again. I wanted to feel the dough under my palms, to remember the scent of butter, the taste of a vanilla crumb fresh from the oven. It had been months since the last time I’d poured batter into a pan. I had a baby now; I was teaching as well as writing; it was hard to find the time to bake. Cooking dinner was a necessity but baking had started to seem a luxury.
I decided to return to flour by starting with chocolate gingered cookies. A friend in my writing group had introduced these to me—decorative little disks—pretty, laborious, gingery-hot and wickedly seductive: just the right balance, I thought, of light and dark. As I whipped the butter and egg, I thought about how writing is a bit like baking: assembling the ingredients, mixing them, hoping it will all turn out. With each step of the recipe, a bit more of the main character revealed herself to me: when I grated the hot ginger I sensed her anger, scraping out the vanilla bean I felt her compulsiveness and perfectionism. Once the pan was in the oven I felt her anguish, the loss of something dear, the faithless wait for the impossible. She would be, I knew, the darkest character I’d ever written. I hadn’t known this before I’d turned the oven on.
But even as I write this I feel the ancient fear return, sense the danger in linking writing too closely with anything like “women’s work”—the fear that baking is too sensual and sentimental. Verging, in a literary sense, on the immoral—rather than the immortal. Baking especially can seem reductive, relying on precise formulas and measurements, unlike the artistic flourishes and spontaneity of cooking: baking seems premeditated, calculating. But every character has their own sort of scent and flavor—unless, of course, they taste only of the ink and the paper where they’re written. In which case, I think, there’s a kind of absence or loss—of imagination or courage, perhaps.
What to do? Characters, like living people, also have bodies and appetites. Does it have to matter so much who does the baking? Characters must also want to lift the cookie from its plate, to bite and feel the sweep of mind carrying them far out, beyond the page, into the widening sky, into the broad fields of time and imagination. Let them eat, I think. Let them live. Let them bake.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Avis and Brian show us how the responsibility of children—and in this case, of a runaway child—can transform a marriage. How does the entrance of children change the relationship between parents? How does it change the parents or parent individually?
2. What kind of a mother is Avis? Is it possible to trace her mothering style to the way she herself was mothered? Could she have been a better mother to each of her kids? Is it fair for anyone to judge?
3. What did you think of Brian’s comment about not bargaining “with terrorists” in regards to Felice? Are Felice’s parents too strict or too permissive? Did they let her go too easily?
4. Have you ever witnessed or been in a situation where the behavior of a “problem child” overshadowed the needs of his or her siblings? How might have Avis and Brian better handled their treatment of Stanley in the wake of Felice’s disappearance?
5. Why do you think Stanley grew up to become so principled? What kind of a father do you think he’ll be?
6. Did you feel sorr
y for Felice once you learned why she ran away? How about before? Do you believe that it was entirely out of self-punishment that she left the comforts of her home and family, or was she being selfish?
7. How does a child’s growing up and leaving home affect his or her parents? And what if they face an extreme case of this departure, as with a runaway or a child who chooses to leave home too soon?
8. What do you think is the significance of the novel’s focus on food, in terms of both Felice’s baking and Stanley’s organic market? Is it just representative of today’s foodie obsessions, or is there a deeper meaning?
9. How do you feel about the fact that at least one other street kid in Felice’s crowd comes from a wealthy background? Are these kids just misguided rebels, or did you feel they must have had real reasons for choosing to live on the streets?
10. How does the author’s fascination with Miami come through in the novel? How might the novel have been different if it took place somewhere else?
11. How did you feel about the fact that the real-estate scam was revealed right before Brian invested his money? Why do you think the author gave him a second chance? What does his particular situation say about the real-estate landscape in general?
12. Is there a dark side to America’s reputation as paradise?
13. What do you make of Avis’s friendship with her Haitian neighbor? Are their situations similar or impossible to compare?
14. In what ways does the novel show us how we might be creative? Think of how characters like Avis, Emerson, and Stanley demonstrate creativity in their own ways.
15. Does Felice “grow up” by the end of the novel? What does it mean to grow up, and is one ever finished doing so?
16. Does Felice’s family really come together at the end? Or does it seem as though Felice is just continuing to run away from her problems?
More praise for
Birds of Paradise
“This Jordanian-American author writes about food so enticingly that her books should be published on sheets of phyllo dough. Birds of Paradise contains her most mouthwatering writing ever, but it’s no light after-dinner treat. This is a full-course meal, a rich, complex and memorable story that will leave you lingering gratefully at her table.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Brilliant. . . . Birds of Paradise is likely to add further luster to [Abu-Jaber’s] literary reputation. . . . With her evocative prose and accomplished style, Diana Abu-Jaber’s Birds of Paradise explores with wisdom and insight the emotional fallout of a shattering family crisis. Yet in this profoundly moving novel, she also manages to unearth the inherent, cathartic beauty of family and individual survival in this complex and perilous new century.”
—Cecie O’Bryon England,
Washington Times
“Abu-Jaber makes us wonder about more than what will happen to one girl with a guilty secret. What, after all, does it mean to be a family? Is love really ‘exchangeable, malleable’? We can’t help turning pages full of stunning prose to find out.”
—Sara Nelson, O, The Oprah Magazine
“A beautiful and complex examination of a mother-daughter relationship.”
—Jennifer Haupt, Psychology Today
“Miami comes alive in Birds of Paradise, a lush new novel. . . . From the verdant streets of Coral Gables to the back lots of Little Haiti and the seedy underbelly of Miami Beach, the metropolis is floridly, meticulously detailed.”
—Cristina García
New York Times Book Review
“Abu-Jaber . . . employs her descriptive talents in bringing Miami to steamy, pulsing life, but it is Birds of Paradise’s neither predictable nor merely haphazard momentum and its rich cast of characters that make us feel we’re in deliciously capable hands.”
—Bliss Broyard, Elle
“Few writers entwine food and memory as well as Diana Abu-Jaber.”
—Emily Witt, Marie Claire
“Gorgeous. . . . [Abu-Jaber] writes with a precise, almost poetic distillation of feeling, heightened in contrast to the ripe, exuberant landscape and the unsettled feelings of a family in limbo. . . . To put it in Abu-Jaber’s terms: If the book were a pastry, it would be savory and complex, layered with richness, with a flicker of sweetness that lingers on the tongue.”
—Amy Driscoll, Miami Herald
“A meticulous, deeply moving portrayal of imperfect human beings struggling to do right. . . . Glorious descriptions, both of nature and Avis’s mouthwatering pastry, offset yet intensify the jagged emotions of the Muirs.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Muirs’ absorbing story builds to a thoroughly satisfying climax.”
—Sue Corbett, People magazine (four stars)
“With Birds of Paradise, Abu-Jaber has made an amazing, gigantic leap into rare air, that hazy stratosphere we jokingly call The Big Time. Her novel is that worthy, and that beautiful.”
—Christine Selk, Oregonian
“If such a thing were possible with books, I would have licked the plate.”
—Sarah Norris, Chapter 16
“Abu-Jaber is a brilliant storyteller and this is the kind of novel that appeals on many levels: plot-oriented, well-written, moving, and dealing with a family breakdown that transcends class.”
—Frisbee: A Book Journal
“It’s impossible to read the work of Diana Abu-Jaber without at least an occasional lump in the throat. . . . Abu-Jaber is able to achingly express each family member’s regrets, hopes, and fears.”
—Agnes Torres Al-Shibibi, Seattle Times
“Whether it’s the creation of evanescent confections or the drug-ridden life of the streets, award-winning writer Abu-Jaber (Origin) impressively describes vastly different worlds with equal expertise. . . . A literary family drama with extra appeal to foodies.”
—Joy Humphrey, Library Journal
“Birds of Paradise is that best kind of novel, one that finds a serious writer honing and developing her gift with each new work. It offers new readers an opportunity to catch up with this important American novelist just as she comes into the fullness of her powers.”
—Chauncey Mabe, Open Page
“Abu-Jaber’s effortless prose, fully fleshed characters, and a setting that reflects the adversity in her protagonists’ lives come together in a satisfying and timely story.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Abu-Jaber’s appeal is universal, multi-cultural and joyful, a tangled world experienced through the prism of family, a microcosm of humanity’s most damning flaws and finest moments. Diana Abu-Jaber’s language of the heart transcends borders, a refreshing wash of hope in a time of need.”
—Curled Up with a Good Book
“[Abu-Jaber’s] prose is often lyrical. . . . But Birds of Paradise has satisfying substance, too, for anyone hungry to read about the many ways that modern families lose and love.”
—Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburg Times
“Carefully concocted, Diana Abu-Jaber’s Birds of Paradise is a feast that is easily one of the year’s best novels—food or no.”
—David Chambers, Super Chef
“Diana Abu-Jaber’s fourth novel charms with delectable prose, vividly unique characterizations, and an exquisitely-rendered Miami setting. . . . Our hearts and our appetites are stimulated by this extraordinary quest to the heart of family connections.”
—Glenda Bailey-Mershon,
Women and Books
“The counterpoint of protagonist Avis Muir’s finicky pastries and her Haitian neighbor’s mysterious home remedies bracket the heart of Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel the way outer petals frame its titular blooms.”
—Bethanne Patrick, Star Tribune
“Intimate and evocative. . . . Hungry yet? Read the novel and you will be. Not just for the many fragrant and fragile pastries that float through its pages, but for the landscape of the story as well. . . . What really sets Birds of Paradise apart is Abu-Jaber’s genius for immersing the reade
r in a sense of place. From the manicured Eden of Coral Gables, to the amped-up narcissism of South Beach, to the rough, hot streets of Little Havana, you feel and smell and taste Miami. . . . It’s in Felice’s chapters that Birds of Paradise comes to full and sizzling life.”
—Veronique de Turenne, Chicago Tribune
Copyright © 2011 by Diana Abu-Jaber
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First published as a Norton paperback 2012
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,
please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at
[email protected] or 800-233-4830
Manufacturing by RR Donnelley, Harrisonburg
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman
Production manager: Anna Oler
library of congress
cataloging-in-publication data
Abu-Jaber, Diana.
Birds of paradise : a novel / Diana Abu-Jaber. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-06461-2 (hardcover)
1. Runaway teenagers—Fiction. 2. Teenage girls—Fiction.
3. Families—Fiction. 4. Parent and teenager—Fiction.
5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 6. Miami (Fla.)—Fiction.
7. Domestic fiction. 8. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3551.B895B57 2011
813’.54—dc22
2011014575
ISBN 978-0-393-34259-8 pbk.
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Birds of Paradise Page 39
