Bear with me here…

Do you remember when Carrie Fisher died? I do. Vividly. The fact that a huge celebrity’s death is well-remembered should be unremarkable except for the fact that I was pretty much drunk and spiraling throughout the entire multiday period between her heart attack and eventual death.

For those that need a reminder, it was in that maudlin and surreal week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 2016. The Election had just happened. My mother had died in February 2014 after an excruciating strike of glioblastoma. I had just come off opening my tenth restaurant in two years. The accumulation of unresolved grief and trauma and stress caught up with me and broke me. (As a preview, I had completely lost my sense of smell from November 2014 to February 2015 for no obvious physical reason.)

After the election I was literally catatonic for days before my husband dragged me to a psychiatrist and I started treatment. But by the end of the year I somehow got it together to host an elaborate sit-down Christmas dinner for 14 people in our not-tiny-but-not-huge-either Lower East Side apartment. And as is one’s wont during the run-up and execution of holiday festivities, I had been mild-to-heavily drinking for days.

Another fun fact about the holidays is that my dead mother’s birthday is December 26th and used to be such a wonderful coda to the Christmas holiday that my family had once celebrated so thoroughly. As I laid in bed on 12/26/16, hungover and still drunk, exhausted from effort and agonizing over the possible discontinued existence of a famous woman whom I had never met but who uncannily reminded me of my mother in a small but not insignificant way, I fell out of bed.

I’m still not clear what happened but my left foot got tangled up in the sheets and the fall twisted my ankle. I was limping for days. I still feel a rosy discomfort and think of that day and those two women when I find my foot at certain angle. Will that feeling ever go away? I have to say: grief is my body’s most mysterious inhabitant.

It’s not all sad

After my mother died, the generously-proportioned house in Greenwich, CT that I grew up in became too generous and too full of her absence, and my dad downsized, bestowing a lot of…stuff on me and Michael. And a lot of that stuff was Christmas decorations! Every year Michael goes all the way the fuck out when decorating our home, and this year we had the good fortune of Food52 sending a camera crew to document it while I explained my latest recipe for them, the L.E.S. Glogg, which you can read about HERE, and watch HERE.