Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life. Every week, I start with three things I’ve enjoyed, and then write in more detail about something I’ve been thinking about.
🎶 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Obviously. 1989 was the album that made me a Swiftie, the soundtrack to my study abroad year, the way I put my heartbreaks into words. The Vault tracks alone are bangers, and the perfect fuel for the novel project I’m working on right now…
🍫 Tony’s Chocolonely x Ben & Jerry’s: Dark Milk Brownie . I don’t think this needs any explanation. It’s delicious. Try it.
📕 Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. I think I should get a prize for buying this in hardback and actually reading it rather than just admiring how pretty it is. The first part of the summary of this - a mother tells a story from her youth to her three grown-up daughters, during the early summer of 2020, when they’re all stuck at home - had me halfway hooked. The clincher: the story from her youth revolves around the theatre. I’m a huge fan of books set in theatres (I feel a Book Flight coming on…) and this was excellent. As happens quite often with Big American Fiction, the cultural ‘thing’ the story is wrapped around wasn’t familiar to me. In this case, it’s Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town (I’d never even heard of Thornton Wilder), so alongside reading the book, I had a Wikipedia tab open. This also happened when I read Geraldine Brooks’s March (the American Civil War) and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy (SNL). It struck me that there was more than a passing similarity to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which occupies a similar place in Welsh culture (as far as I know) as Our Town seems to in New Hampshire; this hunch doesn’t appear to have been entirely false. Oh, and Meryl Streep reads the audiobook! (Bookshop.org | Amazon - ad, affiliate links)
I’m specifically - still - not talking about current events this week - they’re really scary for everyone lately and I hope we can see peace soon.
Did you know, marshmallows are punk?
In any assembly of strangers, in-jokes and shibboleths soon emerge, out of a subconscious desire to show that everyone belongs in the new group that it’s forming. On the first morning of the course I did at Ty Newydd last week, Kate and Ella set us an exercise which involved food memories from childhood, and someone invoked marshmallows.
Over the rest of the week, marshmallows came up again, and again, and again, until we were talking about them over dinner, comparing natural mallow flowers to commercial bone-and-sugar sweets (delicious, right…?), discussing the concept of ‘marshmallowy bosoms’, and more.
What stuck with me is how deliciously unnecessary marshmallows are. No-one has ever thought ‘oh, a storm is approaching, I’d better buy some marshmallows, they will come in handy’. And yet they are a permanent occupant of the supermarket’s confectionary aisle. Trends come and go around them, but marshmallows stand their ground, with their buddies chocolate raisins. They’re not compact - marshmallows are big and squashy - or subtle in colour - they make no pretense of being natural - but marshmallows are always there, unashamed in their brightness and the space they take up.
The surface of a marshmallow often feels slightly powdery-soft, more like skin than like a shiny jelly sweet. Below that, you have the mallow-y goodness which, yes, is a bit squashy, but it also has resistance to it. You might have heard that a comparison for how well-cooked a steak should be can be found by pressing the pad of skin at the base of your thumb, with different levels of cooked-ness provided by linking your thumb to one of the opposing fingers. I think the perfect marshmallow’s level of resistance is the same as that pad at the base of your thumb when your hand is completely open and relaxed.
That is to say, it’s fleshy. But in a non-disgusting way.
Sometimes, bodies are described as ‘doughy’ - usually with an implication that this is somehow negative, despite the fact that leavened bread is a staple food in Western culture and that perfectly soft springy dough means you’re only an hour or so away from a perfect loaf. But ‘marshmallowy’ isn’t a term we ever use - but, I ask you, what other word comes to mind when you look at Violet Bridgerton or Lady Featherington’s cleavage hoisted up in a costume claiming to represent Regency dress for the lady of a certain age?
‘Dough’ is necessary; marshmallows are a luxury. They are decorations on a rice krispie cake, campfire bonding, and Rocky Road bars. One of my favourite things to do with them is to make ‘Marshmallow Twizzles’, like they used to have in the cake case at Starbucks.
In a world where we are surrounded with protein bars and macro-counting, with organic vegetables and slow food, choosing to eat something that’s unashamedly processed, unselfconsciously fleshy, frivolously pink and white - that seems pretty punk to me.
Speak soon (more things from my Ty Newydd notebooks to come!),
Lily
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Oh, I love this. Marshmallow is a much underrated luxury in my opinion
I had to stop reading Tom Lake and go read Our Town read quick :) Both were such a delight.