These women, they adored me.
Your main character, Dana, loves sermons — and I understand you do as well. Why is that?
I was indoctrinated into sermons by this wonderful preacher at a Unitarian church. He didn’t preach from a manuscript. He would just submerge himself all week in what he was preaching about, and then he’d get up there and he’d throw out one idea after another. You would wonder, how was he ever going to pull them all together? There was always a sort of seat-of-the-pants feeling. But he had a really brilliant organizational mind and he would pull it together.
There’s also the idea that the sermon is addressed to the soul. Yeah, I mean, it’s addressed to the intellect as well when you’re a Unitarian, but it’s about spiritual values. A good sermon is about spiritual values, which is, you know, one of the reasons why I ever went to church — there’s an hour a week that privileges the soul and that sort of guides you about the wise way to approach living in this world.
The book includes a number of recipes, and food plays a role in the life of the committee. Could you talk about the connection of food and spirituality?
My husband, who’s Jewish, says, “Where two or more are gathered, food is served.” His synagogue has food after every service, which I think is great because people congregate at the common table and food creates community. It’s something to talk about, it’s something people can bring and feel generous about.
I teach food writing at UCLA and I also teach fiction writing. This is really odd, but community forms so much more quickly in my food writing classes. Because we’re talking about food, we’re swapping ideas about food and recipes and we go on field trips together, we go on a taco crawl. My food writing students are lobbying now for a picnic. You know, my fiction writing students don’t say, “Let’s have a picnic.”
What does this novel reveal about the bigger religious landscape and where we are as people?
Everybody is terrified of change. They think they want it and then when they’re confronted with it, it’s like, oh, no, not that.
Did writing about the novel make you more hopeful or less hopeful about organized religion?
It made me more hopeful in a funny way. My main character starts out kind of cynical, she wants to get a book out of the experience. And then she ends up realizing how deeply committed she is. How much she cares. Churches are funny. You can go to church and think: Well, I don’t know that many people there, or the church is getting old and it’s getting kind of boring.
Then you try to pull away and you realize you miss the people. You’re actually much more deeply connected than you thought. There’s something about going somewhere and sitting next to someone week after week and getting to know them because you’re on the membership committee or you teach a cooking class or whatever. There’s a lot of connectivity that happens at church.
Have you been surprised by the response to the book?
The whole time I was writing the book, people would say, “Well, what’s your book about?” I would say, “It’s about a church search committee.” Then I would laugh and think, who would want to read this book. But it turns out people would say, “Oh, I’d read that book.” People who have been on committees and they’ve been part of group dynamics that have sort of swerved out of their control. I’ve been delighted that people have read it and wanted to talk about it.
Have you had any Unitarians give you feedback about the book?
I was on Scott Simon and I made a little gaffe where I said Unitarians believe anything. I went on to say, you can come from any religious tradition, which is what I meant. They don’t, they can’t believe anything. They do believe in the seven principles. I hope I’m not offending anybody. The really hard thing about the book is that it is a comic novel. And people do make mistakes.
Here’s something funny — I’ve already heard from a couple people on search committees that are now reading the novel as part of the search committee, which I think: It’s life imitating fiction.
I do want to say one more. The book is a little bit satirical, but not too satirical. I hope. One of the things I found very encouraging initially was when my editor first read it, she called the book loving. That relieved all my anxieties when I was writing it.
I really did not want to hurt anybody’s feelings. At the same time, there were just things that were too delicious to leave out.
This article originally appeared here.
