Pie Talk #44: My Daughter Makes Dinner

Soon after the feature (my first!) on interviewing serial killer John Wayne Gacy ran on the cover of the LA Weekly, I met a writer named Hillary Johnson. We had a mutual friend who’d invited each of us to a monthly all-gal poker game. Hillary and I were the youngest, in a group that included a woman who’d written a book about The Wizard of Oz and another who’d met Chet Baker on the folk scene and, thirty years later, was still mid-swoon, which, I mean, yeah.

Hillary was a published novelist, and a journalist of note in LA. Me, I didn’t have any idea what I was doing and sort of rolled sideways into success. There was a lot of money in journalism in the ‘90s, and almost immediately I was swimming in assignments, for the Los Angeles Times and Sassy and Marie Claire and Us Weekly and a dozen other places. We each had little kids at home (and to support), but nevertheless sprang for a $75/month one-room office in an earthquake-condemned building over the 101 Freeway, an office we named Super Vixens Dymaxicon Lounge, after the weekly Friday cocktail parties we threw, parties that could fit no more than six guests. Other escapades—and a bestselling book—came out of that tiny office, as did a bunch of writing, including Hillary’s essay collection, Super Vixens Dymaxicon Lounge, and many of the stories in my long-gone blog, Leaving Los Angeles, and my 2024 smash-bestseller (Ed: Um…) Forty Bucks and a Dream: Stories from Los Angeles.

What I really wanted to do as a journalist then (and now) was write long, chunky features about stories that look one way but which seem to me to be quite otherwise, which I did, but also? Those stories take a long time, and there was a five-year-old needing shoes. Hillary and I discussed what we should specialize in, for bread-and-butter. I almost went with sports, but decided on nightlife and food, which I have written about intermittently ever since, albeit forcefully shucking off the appellation of “food writer”; this, after my mother ran into a friend who said, “Tell Nancy I saw her article on mushrooms and enjoyed it so much.” She was not talking about the super-cool LA Times Magazine cover story that got me to Alaska to tramp through the bear-laden woods with a bunch of gun-toting morel hunters, but a piffle in some cooking mag. That same day I gave up the food column I was writing for a magazine in Portland and devoted myself full-time to, well, a book about a mother throwing her children off a bridge.

Getting back to the bears, this guy showed up at my mother’s window this week. It’s the first bear to be seen on the property in 20 years, prompting questions between my daughter and me, such as, Why now? And, is it the embodiment of my mother’s late husband Walter? And, shall we name the bear Walt? Also, is he going to get in the hot tub with us?

Share