smoked butterfish from Barney Green-
grass on the Upper West Side, and took
Laurie and her sister crabbing at Blue
Point, Long Island. Her mother taught
her to make comforting staples like
potato pancakes, and may also have
taught her to form and follow strong
opinions about food; every year, Lau-
rie’s birthday cake was “decorated with
sugar roses, not buttercream, because
my mother believes that buttercream
turns in the hot weather.”
During high school, Colwin trans-
formed her bedroom into a salon, host-
ing friends and smoking plenty of cig-
arettes. She went to Bard College for
a while, and then to Columbia, but
she hated school and never graduated.
Before she dropped out, she found
herself involved in the 1968 campus
uprising, less as a protester than as a
hostess, bringing giant trays of peanut-
butter and tuna-fish sandwiches to
students on the front lines. To anyone
who complained about the selection,
she had a ready retort: “You’re sup-
posed to be eating paving stones like
your comrades in Paris.” Someone
slapped a piece of masking tape on her
sweatshirt that said “Kitchen/Colwin.”
“This, I feel, marked me for life,” she
later wrote.
Colwin, a committed New Yorker
for her entire adulthood, started learn-
ing how to churn out gourmet meals
in her twenties, but she didn’t begin
writing food essays for a decade. She
wanted to be a novelist, and published
her first short story in this magazine,
in 1969, when she was twenty-five years
old. (That story, “The Man Who
Jumped Into the Water,” follows a teen-
age girl grappling with the suicide of a
beloved neighbor.) Her fiction tends to
be about well-off, well-educated white
Manhattanites, who, despite leading
mostly charming, puff-pastry lives, are
filled with dread that their luck could
one day disappear. Colwin, who wrote
many of her novels while living in then
grimy Chelsea, rarely ventured above
midtown, but her protagonists—most
of them women—typically orbit in up-
town crowds (and trot about the city at
night, even during its grittiest years).
These women are searchers, restless
and often underpaid, and chronic in-
terrogators of their own romantic and
domestic instincts. Should they marry?
Have children? Move to the country?
Colwin’s abiding love of party-giving
manifests in many of her characters as
a kind of aesthetic tyranny, and her fic-
tion shares the rarefied ambience of the
nineteenth-century English novelists
(Austen, Thackeray, Eliot) she admired.
Her protagonists may not know how
to live their lives, but they certainly
know how to furnish them. They’re sur-
rounded by silver coffee-service sets,
mismatched porcelain, solid-oak desks,
elegant floral arrangements, and dishes
of imported olives.
“Happy All the Time” (1978), Col-
win’s second novel, follows two couples
living in New York City as they fall in
love and move into ever-larger apart-
ments. If Holly Sturgis is unsure about“That might be how you do things in Canada, but...”committing to her beau, she is resolute
in her decorative decisions: “She de-
canted everything into glass and on her
long kitchen shelves were row upon row
of jars containing soap, pencils, cookies,
salt, tea, paper clips, and dried beans.
She could tell if one of her arrangements
was off by so much as a sixteenth of an
inch and she corrected it.” What gives
Colwin’s work electric tension is that
she cannot quite decide where to place
her sympathies. She, too, loves beauti-
ful things; one imagines that, like Holly,
she has felt “the urge to straighten paint-
ings in others people’s houses”—and
may not always have restrained herself.
Yet she also seems to understand that
these frivolous concerns are covering up
a void. Everything is in the right place,
except the characters themselves, stuck
between their wants and their needs.
Nowhere is this disjuncture more
evident than in love and marriage. Col-
win, who married the book editor Juris
Jurjevics when she was thirty-nine (later
than when most of her characters set-
tle down), and stayed married until her
death, could not stop writing about
adultery. Her characters have stylish,
cosmopolitan affairs, meeting for clan-
destine walks through art museums.
But infidelity, in her work, is almost
never a life-ruining or cataclysmic event.
It is a way of gently testing the strength
or the weakness of an existing relation-
ship, of fine-tuning your domestic de-
sires by venturing out.
Colwin’s characters are strivers—
women who pride themselves on try-
ing as hard as they can, while still wor-
rying that they’re trying too hard. In
“Happy All The Time,” Misty Berko-
witz (whose husband describes her as
having “the only Jew at the dinner table
look”) can’t help but compare herself
to the perky Gem Jaspar: “Gem stood
for something—something effortless.
Something that did not have to invent
a personality in order to get by.... A
million silkworms would lay down their
lives so that Gem might have a shirt.
Grooms went home to small, mort-
gaged homes so that Gem might stable
her horse, and horses would be broken
so that Gem might ride. Innumerable
workers slaved anonymously so that
Gem might be properly equipped. All
Gem had to do was be.”
If, when it comes to romance, Col-