Events

   In the literary tradition of M.F.K. Fisher and Ruth Reichl comes Cakewalk, a memoir by a born storyteller and self-taught baker whose insatiable appetite for sugar was the key ingredient to surviving a tumultuous sixties-era childhood. Raised by an emotionally stunted, sometimes cruel father and an erratic, frustrated-artist mother, Moses found solace in books and refuge in the kitchen, the one realm where she could wield control.     However miserable, the family itself was both fascinating and eccentric. One of her grandfathers, a Russian count, was assassinated by the new Bolshevik regime, perhaps because of the trunks filled with Romanov jewels hidden in the family’s basement. In another familial brush with heads of state, many years later Moses’ capricious mother was caught trying to steal a monogrammed guest towel from Pat Nixon’s bathroom while Kate and her brothers frolicked in an Easter egg hunt at the White House; this was but one of many episodes in the slow train-wreck of Moses’ family.     Although the story of her early years is at times heartbreaking, Moses also has a flair for making readers laugh out loud at the absurdities of life and the bunglings we all make as we stagger towards adulthood. In chronicling her own beginnings Moses couples the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays with the compassion, lyricism, and glittering detail that brought her such glowing reviews around the world for Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath.     After enduring the grim humiliations of adolescence and an ugly-duckling-into-swan transformation during her college years, Moses’ untried literary ambitions led her to a job in the editorial department at the esteemed North Point Press in Berkeley, where she met, worked with, and befriended authors such as Evan Connell, James Salter, W.S. Merwin, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Wendell Berry and Anne Lamott. She baked brownies for M.F.K. Fisher, became a surrogate daughter to Kay Boyle, and delivered shoes to the reclusive playwright Samuel Beckett in Paris, who left Moses waiting in the hall with a tepid mug of instant coffee while he tried them on.    When the going gets tough, the tough get baking -- but usually with less eloquent results than those found in the delectable Cakewalk.   Kate Moses is the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, and the coeditor, with Camille Peri, of two popular anthologies of essays on motherhood, the American Book Award-winning Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-life Parenthood and Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write about Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves. As a senior editor and contributing writer for Salon, Kate co-founded Salon's groundbreaking, award-winning Mothers Who Think website. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.