When the Spirit Moves You. Or Not.

This is the one where Lisa Donovan gets over herself. Thank you.

I’m supposed to write about new traditions this week. And, eventually cookies. I regret assigning my future potential feelings on any given week within the scope of this newsletter. I can barely keep a consistent mood over the course of an hour these days. Why did I think I could commit to a month of potential topics and interests? Laughable! But, god. What isn’t completely laughable these days?

What I really, really, wanted to do was to post a different essay that I’ve been working on for a week. But, look. None of us are ready for that. Plus, when I told my friend Ann that likelihood she shouted “COOKIES!” to me via text and she is a very smart woman who confuses me but also helps me simplify things. Supposedly, I complicate things. According to everyone. Well, la-ti-da EVERYONE.

So. Cookies. It’s gonna take a second for me.

When my memoir came out, I gave myself so much permission to be in that process, to not pressure myself into jumping right into the next project. Anyone who has ever published a book can tell you, after your book is put out into the world you are not the same person you were before. This goes double for a memoirist. It is an insufferably self-involved process. You keep a stiff upper-lip to the negatives. You embrace the positives. You hope for the best. You prepare for the worst. The worst is worse than you ever imagined. The best is better than you ever dreamed. You keep going. You become an author in public, which is very different than becoming an author in private - but god almighty is it just as messy. And, you live with those choices. It is a daily grind to not be the absolute worst version of yourself in a public arena, riddled with self-doubt and a crippling amount of fear that you’ll never be allowed to write for a living again. You put in a funambulist’s effort to honor your work but to not be completely defined by it. You try daily to be present in your real life when, truthfully, you are simply working very hard at undoing the years of being wholly consumed by that one thing, that one project that is finally done - as if you can just start anew after being utterly immersed by the details and the territory of it all every second of your life, for days, for weeks, for years. And then, one day if you’re lucky or smart, you realize that at some point the best conscience decision that you can make is to insist upon getting the fuck over yourself as quickly as possible. Getting on with life beyond The Book becomes the unbearably crushing weight you have to somehow figure out how to deadlift with totally flaccid muscles that haven’t been used for anything for years.

Which, friends, is where we find ourselves.

It is likely you did not sign on for any of this. Well. Tough titties and I love ya. There simply is nothing cut and dry about this year. Friday, we will find ourselves in cookie bliss and I will thrust forward like the industrious baker that I am. We all have to work hard at joy right now. For some godforsaken reason I have chosen to figure out how to access that joy in front of you all on this newsletter. Hi!

What I am interested in, before we go on our cookie journey on Friday - is to talk a little about our personal expectations and traditions. See. I eventually got there.

Part of my exercise to lift this weight is to be Here, in December of 2020 as a human, a friend, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a neighbor. To set some of my own expectations for myself, even though the “wellness” and self-care regime tells us we should not do that this year. I’m a list-maker. This is the part of my brain that works on overdrive even if I don’t make the effort. So. In times like these, I rely heavily on that little glitch of my person. I will always be the daughter of an overachieving Army soldier who is the most productive and self-made man I’ll ever know. For him, there was never a problem a very well thought out Pros & Cons list couldn’t sort out. So. I present to you, not a Pros & Cons list, but more of a Holiday Check List for myself (and you if you want it) about our cookie exploration this week - an Anti-Productivity List, if you will:

Holiday Cookies and Me: A List by Lisa Marie Donovan

• Make cookies.

• Enjoy the process of making cookies.

• Do not decide you are going to mail everyone you have ever met or walked by on the street a carefully curated box of cookies this year.

• Stop worrying about how well they ship. The furthest journey they are destined for is the twelve steps between your oven and your couch. Which is also the furthest journey you are destined for.

• Be sad about travel for a moment while you cream the butter.

• Pour a cold glass of Frizante into a wine glass. Help yourself to a “Pensacola Pour” (what we Donovans call an indecently full wine glass, nearly topped to the rim - the kind John’s mom always receives, indubitably, at their yacht club in Pensacola when she orders her Chablis).

• Be in your fullest Pandemic Glory and put some ice in that wine.

• Decide, forever and ever amen, to not go to Micheal’s and purchase great ribbons and card stock and boxes and other bullshit. You are not that woman, never have been, and this is the year to admit it wholly and entirely.

• Bake off cookies.

• Eat warm cookies under several blankets on your couch, in stretchy clothes, with all your cats, a dog, a sweet sixteen year old named Maggie Donovan and decide to watch Babette’s Feast because you’ve never seen it.

• Also queue up Rear Window or Vertigo. You never get past how much you love Vertigo but you always pretend to give Rear Window a shot. It will always be Vertigo, so just start there.

• Watch Vertigo and eat a cookie each time you force yourself to try and find any fault whatsoever in Jimmy Stewart.

• Get around to your annual admission that he is, in fact, a perfect human as he staggers away from the light tower in the final scene.

• Get around to your other admission, as you turn the movie off, that in a Kim Novack world, you are Midge, forever and wholly.

• Keep pretending you want to watch Babette’s Feast and think about it as you take more cookies out of the freezer to bake.

• Admit Vertigo is your favorite Jimmy Stewart movie ever as you bake off the second batch of cookies.

• Decide to rewatch Vertigo.

• Get back under blankets with freshly baked cookies. Push play.

• Repeat until 2021.

So. As this has gloriously fleshed itself out to be my list for this week, join me on Friday for part one of this list. We don’t have much. But we have cookies. I’m going to choose my three favorite cookie recipes to share with you. This year, they will be decidedly festive, but in ways that might not be necessarily traditional for Americans.

This year, I want to create a new tradition and make the cookies that comfort me the most. I want cookies from my German childhood. I want a stodgy Lebkuchen so I can dunk it in hot coffee for breakfast. I want pfeffernusse that is Appalachian peppery. I want the spiciest gingerbread I can make, full of molasses and bite. I want flavor, which I find so often absent from holiday cookies.

And, we’ll talk about alternative flours to use this week. Because these cookies are for me, and I can’t eat wheat. These are my transition cookies - these are my end of year fortifiers. So, I need to be able to actually eat them. This is the best self-care I can imagine. Let all the goops tell you something different. This is the way I do it. With cookies and Jimmy Stewart. I am certain it is the right way.

See you Friday for some baking. (And, upon a request from last week, next Wednesday I will include an end of year reading/book list in addition to the regular post.)

Love, L

OH! One last thing: you might have noticed this got bumped to “everyone” and not just paid subscribers. As I find my way on this Newsletter journey, I might be making some changes here and there, while still honoring those of you who are paying subscribers (thank you team!). And, for now, it makes sense to keep Wednesday wide open and free for all. It also might not be reasonable, given the times, to host the interview portion every week. That was the mania talking. There will definitely be at least one, but maybe occasionally two a month.

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