Girls with feelings does girl dinner

A million years ago, my friend Katie’s grandmother lived alone in an apartment on the Upper East Side. Every night, she made herself a fried egg sandwich for dinner. In fact, she made so many fried egg sandwiches over so many years, the wall behind her range top was black from the grease.

A hundred thousand years ago, Katie and I had small children who needed to be fed on a daily basis. In that era, we would sometimes call each other around dinner time wishing we could just make ourselves a fried egg sandwich and call it a day.

Ten years ago, I wrote an essay about all of this called “Fried Egg Sandwich.” It was the first piece I ever published outside of my blog and appeared on some long defunct parenting website. It was about my friend’s grandmother and fried egg sandwiches but really it was about my complicated relationship with cooking—which wasn’t actually that complicated: I had never learned how to cook and had somehow landed myself in a life where I was required to cook on a daily basis.

In those days, I would often call my father (who is in fact my Jewish mother) and ask him how to make simple things like a baked potato. “A baked potato, Daisy?” he would say. “You don’t know how to make a baked potato?” And the truth was I did not know how to make a baked potato mainly because no one ever taught me. I don’t know what kind of life I was being prepared for, but it was not a life in which I needed to know how to make a baked potato. In any event, I did ultimately learn how to make a potato and other things and while I am not a good cook, I can follow a recipe and make it through the day without burning the house down. Just don’t expect me to invite you over for a dinner party.

Anyway, I was thinking about all of this recently while reading about a phenomenon called “girl dinner,” which is basically what women eat when no one else is around, or I imagine what mothers eat on the rare occasions they have no one to cook for, i.e. a fried egg sandwich. On TikTok the other day, I watched Bethenny Frankel cook a potato in the microwave, top it with cottage cheese and Everything But The Bagel seasoning and call it “ girl dinner.” I may or may not be making that for myself tonight.

@bethennyfrankelCome for me for my appearance. But my potato HITS #girldinner #potato

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I had a fantastic time at East Hampton Library’s Authors’ Night in August, hobnobbing with the likes of Robert Caro, Maggie Haberman, Paulina Porizkova and more. Laura Belgray, author Tough Titties, came with and looked so hot she ended up in New York Magazine! How did I get invited to such a swanky event? Well, I was invited by the lovely and amazing Joan Goldberg who was my third grade teacher at P.S. 6 in Manhattan.

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I loved chatting with Azul Terronez for his Podcast Authors Who Lead. We talked about my winding journey to publication and since we are both former teachers, we also talked a lot about how to teach writing to kids. It was such a lovely and free wheeling conversation—I hope you give it a listen!

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I really loved this thoughtful and nuanced review of My Last Innocent Year in Jewish Women’s Archive.

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In case you missed it, Lena Dunham posted a picture of my book on Instagram last month! It prompted me to go back and rewatch the first season of “Girls.” My two older kids joined me, and we absolutely loved it. It’s as funny and raunchy as I remember it. Fantastic.

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Two book recommendations for you:

• I loved Vanessa Cuti’s wonderfully twisted and twisty psychological thriller The Tip Line, based loosely on the Gilgo Beach murders. Fans of Emma Cline’s The Guest will love this story of a profoundly unreliable narrator who may or may not be involved with a serial killer.

• I also loved Caitlin Shetterly’s gorgeous debut Pete and Alice in Maine about a family that flees to their summer home in Maine at the start of the pandemic while in the midst of a marital crisis. A beautifully complicated portrait of marriage and motherhood and privilege. I loved it.