The author Kim Fay has led what her character, Imogen, might describe as an adventurous, cosmopolitan life. The Seattle native lived in Vietnam for four years, still travels often to Southeast Asia, and wrote the award-winning book “Communion: a Culinary Journey Through Vietnam.” Her new novel is “Love and Saffron.” She joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to talk about her latest tale of food and cross-generational friendship in the 1960s.
Interview highlights:
Joan and Imogen, based on actual figures from the author’s life:
“Joan is a young food writer working for the newspapers in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, and she’s based on the pioneering Los Angeles food writer, Barbara Hanson, who in the 1950s and 1960s began writing about different cuisines in Los Angeles at a time when nobody else was, she was writing about foods from around the world,” Fay explained. “Barbara is a woman of incredible culinary curiosity…. She has always inspired me.”
“She writes a fan letter to a woman in her late fifties on Camano Island in the Pacific Northwest, and she sends her a little packet of saffron. And this magazine columnist up in the Northwest is based on my great aunt, Emma, who was not a magazine columnist but was a very strong, incredibly smart Pacific Northwest woman.”
A story told through the art of written correspondence:
“I just love letters. I’m old enough to have spent my entire childhood up through my twenties communicating with people through letters, whether it was pen pals when I was younger, letters to my grandparents when I was older, of course, letters to boyfriends and friends who’d moved far away; but I love the special intimacy of letter writing,” Fay said. “There’s something very intimate about sitting alone with a piece of paper and a pen and the thought of just one other person in mind.”
“There’s a point where one of the women says in the book, ‘Nothing seems real to me until I write it to you,’ and that line came directly out of my friendship and correspondence with [my friend] Janet. I feel the same way – when I get really busy, my life gets a little vague. I need to make sure that I write to Janet… All of those things influenced writing a book in letters, and when I began writing in the letter format, it just felt so natural, and that’s how the book flowed out.”
Fay’s food philosophy:
“I absolutely love what food does. Not the function of, you know, sustaining us physically, but what happens when you put two people together at a table, or whether you put two people together as they talk about their favorite dish, or for me, when I traveled, any time I sat down at a table, no matter where I was, you could find a connection,” Fay reflected. “Food unites us in so many ways beyond just physical sustenance.”
“As I wrote, I didn’t realize what I was doing, but at the end, I looked back and thought, “Huh, I’ve kind of put out my philosophy about what I think food can achieve.’ Because… when we sit down to a meal together, it gives us the opportunity to have slow conversation…. It moves conversations, it launches them, and then they go from there into all sorts of different directions. You know, when you think about the end of a dinner party after four hours at a table, all of the ways in which you’ve gotten to know the people that you’re with, and I just absolutely love that.”
The new novel by Kim Fay, “Love and Saffron,” is out now and available here.
