Margins
The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook book cover
The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook
They Came, They Cooked, They Left
2002
First Published
3.80
Average Rating
192
Number of Pages
Every time we tell someone about this book we get puzzled grins, raised eyebrows, and hilarious guesses as to what on earth The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook might possibly be. Every time we tell a guy about it, he becomes instantly intent on doing pretty much anything if it'll get him into the book. One boy (who swears he only went out with Thisbe in order to get a recipe named after him) found out he'd missed the print deadline by a hair but that the cover wasn't done yet and quickly e-mailed with a list of potential subtitles for the front Men Are from Marzipan, Women Are from Bean Dip; Dear John, I'm Leaving You and Taking the Cuisinart; He Would Eat His Grandmother's Pie All Night While Mine Just Sat There and Got Cold, Love in the Time of Colander... We don't have anyone exactly clamoring to be our boyfriends, yet they're practically lining up to get to be our exes! We swear we didn't conceive of this book as a way to pick up guys. At least it didn't start out that way. One day we were planning a barbecue at the Iowa farmhouse where we lived and Erin said, "Oh, I'll make Davis' spicy BBQ rub!" And we kind of looked at each other and said, "We should write a cookbook of all the recipes we've gotten from ex-boyfriends over the years!" And an idea was born. It was the perfect project for us, too. We're both pack rats, collectors who hold on to every scrap of paper anyone's ever handed us. While all our friends grilled burgers that night and played volleyball on the lawn, the two of us took our beers upstairs and hauled out all of our aging boxes and envelopes full of tear-stained letters, ticket stubs, withered flowers, valentines....We told each other the stories behind every one of those scribbled scraps. "And, god," we'd find ourselves saying, "he made the most incredible vinaigrette...." We never made it outside to our own barbecue. We've pretty much been in our rooms since then, pecking away at this book like crazy people, the floors littered with old letters, our hands covered in rubber cement. We were driven, obsessed, compulsively determined to bring you The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook. And voila! Here it is! Now that the book is out, we're starting to let our imaginations take hold of us again. We've got all sorts of ideas. Like maybe we could spend a year letting a different man cook us dinner every night. We'd bring along cameras, collect artifacts from the evening like budding archaeologists, and select the best dishes for a sequel! But maybe we're getting a little ahead of ourselves....
Avg Rating
3.80
Number of Ratings
83
5 STARS
29%
4 STARS
34%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
12%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Thisbe Nissen
Thisbe Nissen
Author · 7 books

Thisbe Nissen is the author of three novels, Our Lady of the Prairie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), Osprey Island (Knopf, 2004), The Good People of New York (Knopf, 2001), and a story collection, Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night (University of Iowa Press, 1999, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award). She is also the co-author with Erin Ergenbright of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook, a collection of stories, recipes, and art collages. Her fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, Seventeen, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and anthologized in The Iowa Award: The Best Stories 1991-2000 and Best American Mystery Stories. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, Preservation and The Believer, and is featured in several essay anthologies. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the James Michener-Copernicus Society, The University of Iowa, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, and was the 19th Zale Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University. She has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Brandeis University, The New School's Eugene Lang College and in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University. These days, she teaches undergrad, MFA and PhD students at Western Michigan University. She and her husband, Jay Baron Nicorvo, are parents of two rescue cats, many sprightly chickens, and one intriguing human child. They dream, one day, of raising goats.

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