I love eggs. I eat them as often as I can. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, or in between. One reader pointed out that in my stories, my characters are always eating eggs. So it was natural to wonder why the author, Nicole Walker, of the delicious new book, Egg, didn’t consult me about, well, eggs.
She consulted other authors like Margot Singer in one of my favorite pieces, “All the Eggs in Israel.”
“When I see Margot, she always tells me excellent stories about her dad and how he’s not sure why she doesn’t visit him more and why she left her consulting career to become a writer….When I asked Margot for her dad’s egg story, she said, ‘It was like pulling teeth to get these stories. All my dad would say was, I remember my mother taking boiled eggs, taking the yellow yolk out, mixing it together with onion and paprika, and putting it back into the white shell….I think she called them Devil’s eggs’ (56-57).”
This is where most stories end. Cute. Somewhat poignant. But unremarkable . So Walker and Singer go deeper. In a follow-up email, Singer shares a story from her mother, how she had to make breakfast for her little brother when he was eleven or twelve. “I had to beat the eggs with a fork quickly and without spilling. Once I mastered it, I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to be a good cook!’ I felt very proud of myself.”
Obviously, Walker is using eggs to connect seemingly disparate narrative strands, but she doesn’t force the connection; rather she weaves these strands together in a book that feels both whimsical and meaningful. She establishes what we might call a “present narrative,” and then uses that as a framework for examining the narratives that lead to the “present,” a narrative strategy much like the one Tim O’Brien uses in The Things They Carried.
The turn in the Margot Singer story comes next: “My mother doesn’t add that her mother passed away when she was thirteen and presumably very sick at the time” (58). Now we can connect the dots. Singer’s mother has to learn to make eggs because of her mother’s poor health and early death. What begins with a reluctance to share a story–“some people do not want to make stories,”–blossoms into a bevy of stories, and we have a much deeper sense of who these people are. I could go on telling you the rest of the Margot Singer story, but I won’t. Read the book.
Egg is a meditation on stories—how we tell them, what we leave in, and what we leave out. Walker’s prose sparkles, and the seemingly random nature to Egg’s structure, like a Seurat painting, becomes more and more intentional the further away I stand.
