Never in One Place for Long

Genevieve Jenner, the author of a new collection of short stories centred around food, Chocolate Cake for Imaginary Lives, shares her literary inspirations

Recently I made stuffed mushrooms for dinner. I described the dish as having a 1970s continental vibe to it. At dinner I began to make up a story for my family about the mushrooms with some characters in a time and place that was unknown to me. Jokes or stray sentences are where many of my stories begin.

As I ate the mushroom, I saw a vision of them flying and I realized that I knew the place – Babar Learns to Cook. This comforting pink covered book formed my earliest ideas about faraway places and food. Before I could read, I would look obsessively at the illustrations trying to make sense of what things were. I spent many hours living among the elephants; cooking with them, being in their garden tasting the strawberries they picked, and having anxiety when one little elephant had chocolate sauce spilled over him (I was convinced the chef had done that on purpose).

Eventually I learned the story, but I preferred my own version. This is a family trait. My family has many bizarre stories about our ancestors. Some of us have dug deep to find the truth. Some choose not to acknowledge the less fanciful tale. We aren’t in separate sects around our family history; we keep all of the stories together, and offer the option of footnotes.

I have radical views on geographic borders because at heart I have never been able to comprehend them. One foot in sea and one on shore, To one thing constant never…Dislocation is my permanent state. I carry two nationalities, my identity and accent shift with the tide, I class-jumped and feel like a spy. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Time of Gifts feels like a familiar song. He would write about being in Hungary in the 1930s, leap 500 years in the past telling multiple histories, digress about spiritual beliefs, find another point in time, whilst in a schloss, or on the side of the road with a traveller. Pieces of me exist in cities far away, and in spots so rural that weather can cut them off from civilization. 

I grew up incredibly religious, and resided in a bohemian artistic home. It was mostly women, and queer people who taught me to read, write, and littered my path with stories. My mother kept me in the folktales of Baba Yaga, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Madame Pele, and Donkey Skin in between explanations about what to look for when digging clams, and telling me to follow a recipe from Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book (probably one of the funniest and most practical books on cooking when you aren’t romantic about dinner).

Sister Bernard told me astonishing stories about the lives of saints, my ballet teacher Betsy spoke of dancers leaping to freedom, of creatures and girls possessed by sorcerers, and how to cook a prime-rib for Christmas. When I was eight I read Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis (the cover was gaudy and attractive to my eye) and I absorbed a very twentieth century American sense of sophistication and reinvention. As the late André Leon Talley once said, “You can be aristocratic without having been born into an aristocratic family.” 

While I yearned for what lay beyond the evergreen trees of the Pacific Northwest, there were two local authors who made people and writing seem so natural. Betty MacDonald (a semi-notorious figure to some where I grew up because of her book The Egg and I) who I first came to know through her Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books; depicted children and adults who were very real in impatient, and hilarious ways. She knew how to add that touch of the enchanted.

Her essays about growing up in her eccentric family, living in Washington State, and making the ordinary so interesting and funny left a significant mark in how I tell stories of home. Then there was Beverly Cleary who wrote the greatest character in American literature: Ramona Quimby. Cleary wrote with great affection and an honest eye for the enthusiastic messy children who weren’t all good and quiet. My local library took me everywhere. The women who worked there suggested so many books -from the high-brow to the smutty.

That is where I met Dodie Smith, Stella Gibbons, and EM Delafield. I was taken to the land of interwar England where the Arcadian danced with something clever, romantic, ridiculous, and off-beat. Unexpectedly, I met people like me. Never having enough money to pay the bills, with relations seen as strange and charismatic. Possessing opinions about poetry, and a great adoration for clothes. Seeking (not waiting for) the most enthralling adventures. A few decades later, they are still with me wherever I go and whenever I write. 

Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series speaks of people who could bookjump by ‘reading’ into a story. Something I have been doing since I was small. Then one day I was dropped into an out-of-print book like no other. Clarisse or The Old Cook was a translated book of cookery and stories. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was purely fiction or a guide. But my senses were enjoying this place that felt ancient and new. It was the book that pushed me along when all seemed impossible. It was like being among the elephants of Celestville once again. 

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Genevieve Jenner lives near Bude in North Cornwall. Chocolate Cake for Imaginary Lives is available from all good book retailers https://bit.ly/ChocolateCakeGJ https://genevievejenner.medium.com/ Twitter and Instagram: @gfrancie

CHOCOLATE CAKE FOR IMAGINARY LIVES

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing