Sandwiches from the Garage

Olivia Laing on the right to eat badly. Illustration by Antoine Cossé.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! This Monday’s newsletter, by Olivia Laing, is about the right to eat badly when writing.

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Sandwiches from the Garage

Olivia Laing on the right to eat badly. Illustration by Antoine Cossé

I once became friends with someone who had been struggling for years to write a book. I did a lot of nagging and needling and when the book eventually appeared I felt quite proud. My bubble was burst by a mutual friend, who told me that what the blocked writer had really been inspired by was that I didn’t waste time cooking lunch. She loved the way, the mutual friend said, that I bought my sandwiches from the garage.

This exchange has stuck in my head for almost a decade. I didn’t buy sandwiches from the garage! I didn’t even live near a garage! But it did get at something accurate about the way I use food for writing, as a very specific, deliberately no-frills fuel.

The extent of this attitude to eating-while-writing didn’t really become clear to me until last November, when I went to the British School at Rome to finish a book. The school provides meals at a reasonable cost, and there is a supermarket nearby if you prefer to cook for yourself. I only took a tiny case, but in it I found room for a packet of Waitrose tortellini. Talk about coals to Newcastle, my friend Luke crowed. But I didn’t want to waste a minute, either talking over dinner or walking to the Carrefour in Parioli, when I could be writing. 

I’m a greedy person, and most of the time I like to eat well. But when I’m writing, and particularly when I’m in the late stages of a book – the pure slog, climbing-a-mountain, one-foot-after-another heft of getting to a finished first draft – what I really need are very boring, extremely repetitive meals. Food as ritual, as fuel, but also ballast, to temper the rare highs as well as the lows.

When I write I can’t listen to music except a very few, very minimal, repetitive things. Mostly, this boils down to Music for Airports by Brian Eno or Screws by Nils Frahm. They don’t get in the way of my rhythm, which I build up by muttering the words aloud as I type. When I get to the end of the music I start it again. What I want from food when I’m writing is exactly the same.

Looking back, I can see this pattern right from the beginning of my career as a writer. When I started my first book I lived alone in a rented flat at the top of a hill in Brighton. I’d collaged the fridge with pictures of Ted Hughes and the little girl from Wim Wenders’s Alice in the Cities. At the beginning, I drank Pernod for breakfast, with an ice cube and water. I’d just lost a job I liked and the Pernod was strangely stabilising. I was trying to figure out what being a writer required. I’d never written anything longer than a few thousand words and the tricky thing was keeping going, seducing my fingers into a rhythm that wouldn’t gutter out at the end of the page. Maybe the Pernod helped with that.

Later, when I was so deep in the book that I remember coming home from parties charged with a sense of excitement about swimming back into the solitary world I’d made, I ate muesli for dinner for weeks. Dorset Cereals Simply Nutty Muesli, in its cheerful orange packet, with semi-skimmed milk, possibly embellished with raspberries or blueberries. A bowl of muesli was a way to stay pragmatic, at ease, to be earthed and energised all at once. I didn’t want to waste time fussing around in the kitchen. I had something to do.

I started my second book in the considerably more rarefied surrounds of an artists’ colony in New Hampshire. You ate breakfast and dinner communally, but lunch came in an old-fashioned wooden box, left at the door of your cottage by a driver. My cottage was deep in the woods; the woods were many feet deep in snow. It was -11°C, colder than I’d ever been. I took dressing for the walk to the main house extremely seriously. But while I couldn’t tell you one thing I ate there, whereas the lunches are preserved in aspic in my memory. Sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. A cookie, an apple, a thermos of soup and another of coffee. One day we had what someone described as a real New York lunch: egg salad on rye and a black and white cookie. It was like I was eating America! I’d never been to New York. Write a bit, read a bit, snack a bit, pour out a coffee, wash up the cup. I was starting to get the hang of the rhythm, how to divide and syncopate the day so that the energy didn’t droop or flag.

The next book I wrote in multiple sub-lets in New York City, first in Brooklyn and then Manhattan. The one I lived in longest was on East Second Street. It was above an Italian restaurant called Supper, and I could ring downstairs and ask them to bring me up a plate of spaghetti pomodoro or ragu. Like living in a movie. For lunch I could have báhn mì from the place one door down or walk onto Avenue A and go to Gracefully, where I bought sushi and pot stickers, the most undemanding food I could find.

I really liked the book I was writing. It was set in New York and the food I was eating was a way into it, in both good and bad ways. It’s a book that attends to awkward and alienating social experience, and one of the major spaces in which those happened were cafes, eating breakfast or drinking coffee. What I kept trying to find were neutral places that wouldn’t make me feel bad for being alone. They couldn’t be too glamorous or too much of a destination. Diners were ideal, but there weren’t any real diners nearby. I went to Cornerstone for ham and eggs and home fries, Ninth Street Espresso for coffee, and both these places could be either exactly right or weirdly unpleasant and embarrassing, depending on random circumstances I could never quite determine, though weekends were definitely worse.

Later in that period, I started going to a cafe that did avocado on challah toast with very sweet mint tea. I was really sad when that cafe closed. It also sold babka, which I liked as a treat; a big improvement on the Minstrels I’d buy from the Co-op at Seven Dials back in Brighton. Those meals were very comforting. The food was both made and arranged (on a little gilt tray) with a care that made me feel cosseted and safe.

Everything changed after that. I came back to England and stopped living alone. The person I moved in with is an extremely accomplished cook, and many of our biggest fights have been around me insisting on the right to eat badly or in my own way, with extremes of both simplicity and repetition. I can see that this is troubling to someone skilled at cooking or interested in food, but I don’t think the importance I place on eating is any less. What’s different is what I’m looking for my meals to do. Their primary function isn’t taste.

When I am writing intensely, I want to give minimum energy to the food and I want the food to give maximum energy to me. I don’t want it to be exciting. I don’t want it to distract my focus, which would include it tasting bad. It has to taste okay. But not so good I get interested in it. Not to drag Winnicott into everything, but the point of the good-enough mother is that it’s actually better than the too-good mother, and in this situation Waitrose pumpkin and pine nut tortellini is the good-enough mother. Three minutes in boiling water, stretch my legs, eat it on the sofa, get back to my laptop. I want to say again that this is only at the end of a book, or maybe at the beginning, when I’m deep in it, when I’m pulling something very heavy up from a lake, when it is very important that there is no distraction, no diminishment in the level of alertness. 

Here’s a thing it’s like. I was reading Dirk Bogarde’s biography and an actress said that what he taught her was how to manage on a film set, when you spend whole days waiting around, and then have to do very precise, emotionally demanding work at a moment’s notice. You can’t go to pieces with nerves and you can’t get slack either. You have to manage your energy, marshal your resources. Sandwiches from the garage, at least on a metaphorical level, are exactly what’s needed.

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Credits

Olivia Laing is a writer. They are the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and The Garden Against Time.

Antoine Cossé is a French illustrator and cartoonist living in London. He regularly contributes to The New York Times and the New Yorker, and his graphic novels are published internationally.

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