dumplings
short notes from a Polish book tour
Currently my office is a room of boxes with a desk in the middle and a good view over the backs of Georgian houses, to the skyscrapers of Vauxhall, and the train line that snakes through them. If you’ve sent me a book in the past few months, this is, regrettably, where it will be. But there are two that are not in boxes, and those are my Polish translations of Hark and Why Women Grow. Hark will be out in Poland next week, while Why Women Grow was released in March and - there’s no non-wanky way to say this, so I am quoting the woman who commissioned it - became a “massive bestseller”.
How funny, I have found myself thinking many, many times over the past few days, that something I made, feeling so alone in the small hours in the room that became the place where my child slept, now exists in languages I don’t understand, on shelves in countries I’ve never been to.
So I went to Poland - Warsaw, specifically - for the first time this week, to talk about the book a lot and meet readers and it was bizarre and heavenly and special and delicious. Some short notes:
doughnuts
There’s going to be a lot of food chat in this post because my god did I eat well. In the days before I went my brother advised me to “save a space for a doughnut from this place. They are incredible. You might want two.” The link was to a maps address and showed a pleasingly understated hole in the wall with a dated orange shop name and I starred it immediately. I went on my second day there, bought a sour cherry one, thought the Cornish pasty size and proportions would necessitate me saving half of it for later, but ate the whole thing on my bed in my underwear (oafish, rather than sexy) in a moment of Not Being On Show and it was unbelievably good. Flakey, light, doughy, sour, sweet. I went back the next day and there were no sour cherry ones, and now I may spend the rest of my life (too dramatic?) looking for another sour cherry doughnut to eat, in indulgent quietude, in my pants.
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