Barbara Samuel O'Neal is the author of more than thirty award-winning novels, including THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS and
The Secret of Everything
A native of Colorado, Barbara loves teaching, travel, reading, writing, yoga, walking, food, cooking, photography and...okay, reality television.
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I’ve said before that my dog Sasha is at the end. It’s not a dire situation by any means—she’s still hanging out in the kitchen with me when she’s awake, hoping to get a treat, as she has done for the last 17 years. She is still very happy to get canned food mixed with the dry at breakfast time, and can toddle around the park nearby my house once or twice a week if I am very patient. She can’t hear a thing and all that’s left of her sight is the left half of the left eye, and even her sense of smell is pretty much gone, meaning I have to put her food right under her face and show it to her or she doesn’t know it’s there. She spends a lot of her waking hours walking in a circle about the size of an exercise ball.
She doesn’t smell very good. She pants more than breathes. She toddles around in her little green fleece with DGG on the back because she’s grown so thin she can’t stay warm, and last week, I had to start giving her regular doses of morphine, at night. A few days later, I had to add daytime doses.
For months I’ve known we (I) would have to let her go soon. But here I am, trying to be present, day by day, happy for each little extra time I can kiss her. Grateful to carry her old-doggy-smelling self up the stairs one more time, carry her down once more. Kiss her nose and rub her haunches when she wakes up whining in the middle of the night. We are both—Christopher Robin and I—in dire need of more sleep because she wakes up every night at least twice and needs to be carried outside, changed, cleaned up, given her medicine.
What I keep thinking of is the end of my grandmother’s life. She spent most of the last six months or so in a nursing home, which she adamantly, tearfully hated. She was frail and had dementia and the plethora of medications she had to take was like the ABCs of pharmaceuticals. It was, for me, quite terrifying in ways. I didn’t know how to do anything. I didn’t know what to do. It was easy to spend an hour then run away, or take her to lunch once a month (less) and tell myself I was participating in her care.
I hadn’t learned then what I am learning now.
One afternoon when my grandmother had begun to fade, she was in a hospital somewhere. I can’t remember. There were windows with pale light, and she was exhausted and fussy and wanted a bath but a nurse didn’t come and didn’t come.
My sister took over. She drew the curtain and undressed the frail, think body of my grandmother, and gave her a sponge bath right there in her bed, washing her limbs and beneath her old breasts, tenderly, competently doing what needed to be done. I knew at the time that I would find it uncomfortable, that I was about 1/6th the person my sister was. I was younger then, and I had not yet repeatedly washed the diarrhea from the fur and legs and belly of an old dog. I had not stayed awake in the middle of the night then, to gently rub the haunches of a dog in pain, waiting for her meds to kick in. I had not learned to laugh at the circling cheerful dementia, to go ahead and let myself kiss her nose and cry over the absurdity and indignities of it all, then blow my nose and get her cleaned up again. I had not learned how to love the end stages of life then. Sasha is teaching me how to show up, how to be present, how to just be the hands that don’t mind getting bitten now and then, to be the voice murmuring close to her ear, how to appreciate the tender, tragic, comic, vibrant stage that comes at the end of life.
I’m grateful. It is one of the most valuable lessons of my life. And I remember, once again—cliched as it may be to say it—that animals teach us how to be human.
What are some lessons you’ve learned from your animals?
Oh, yes–I remember. The book happens as I am writing it. All the thinking, all the planning, all the scene lists and character sketches and theme spiders and metaphorical illuminations are lovely. The brewing time is also good, and I need a lot of it.
But in the end, what I learn over and over and over and over again is that I actually write the book while I’m writing the book. I find out what’s really going to happen when my fingers are on the keyboard and I’m watching the scene unfold. THAT’S where the magic happens, when I finally let go and let the book have its way and I let it unfold as it wishes.
The girls in the basement are rolling their eyes. “Finally,” they’re saying. “She’s finally getting out of our way.”
It was a very good morning. I’m so glad to be back to work. Life always feels slightly off-kilter without my companions.
We’ve been playing again, the Faery Four, and our latest collection of magical stories is out! The book is called THE CHALICE OF THE ROSE novella collection, written by Jo Beverley, Mary Jo Putney, Karen Harbaugh, and Barbara Samuel, and it traces the tale of the Grail through four different time periods. I think you’ll enjoy this quite a bit!
Library Journal said:
“Based on legends surrounding the mystical Holy Grail, this quartet sweeps readers across time periods with emotionally compelling, often lyrically written tales of courage, sacrifice, love—and roses. A young woman of ancient lineage is destined to bring peace to 12th-century England when she finds her protector, and together they call forth the chalice in Beverley’s “The Raven and the Rose”; a Guardian must use her powers to keep the Grail safe during World War II in Mary Jo Putney’s “The White Rose of Scotland”; a debutante is charged with keeping the Grail out of Napoleon’s grasp in Karen Harbaugh’s charming “The English Rose: Miss Templar and the Holy Grail”; and an American grad student studying in England becomes involved in a strange fey tale involving the Grail in Barbara Samuel’s “Eternal Rose.” VERDICT: This beautifully crafted anthology by some of the genre’s best is graced with flawless writing, touches of humor, and magical, creative plots.”
excerpt from
THE ETERNAL ROSE, by Barbara Samuel
CHAPTER ONE
“It’s haunted, you know.”
Alice Magill peered into the pearl gray fog that swirled around the garden of her freshly rented flat in an English village. Over the ancient wall bounding the property was an old woman, stout and bespectacled. She wore a dark blue sweater and a rain hat.
“The house?” Alice asked.
“Well, yes, that too, but the garden is what I meant. All manner of things come and go through there. I reckon you’ll want to be careful at dusk, miss.”
“Ah.” Alice carefully tucked her skepticism beneath a polite smile. “What kind of things?”
“Cats for one thing.” The woman caught sight of something behind Alice. With a wave of her hand, she said, “Shoo!”
Alice turned to see a big black and white cat, very well-tended, sitting on a stone bench, his long fluffy tail curling and uncurling in typical cat boredom. He did not seem to mind the old woman’s dislike. As if he were raising a brow in silent complicity with Alice, his left whiskers twitched ever-so-slightly.
“He looks harmless enough.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” She tossed a twig toward the cat, and he dashed into the bushes. “They’re not harmless, Miss, and I’d watch them if I were you.”
Wrinkling her brow quizzically, Alice said, “Thanks.”
“American, then, are you?” The woman leaned in more curiously. “What brings you here? Are you studying at the Foundation? That’s what usually rents those flats, students and teachers.”
“Guilty.” Alice tugged off her thin gloves and walked over to the wall. The old woman was probably lonely, looking for a little conversation. Nothing wrong with that. “My name is Alice Magill. I’m here to do some graduate work in literature.”
“Oh, all of that nonsense is over my head, but welcome anyway.”
“Thank you….er?”
The woman gave a lighthearted, almost girlish laugh. “Silly me. I’m Mrs. Leigh.”
“Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs. Leigh?”
“Oh, no, my dear. I have to get my garden to bed before the freeze.”
“All right. Thanks for the warning. About ghosts and cats. And things.” Alice turned back toward the old manor house where she had rented a flat only two days before. The 14th century building came complete with mullioned windows, a pelt of thick green ivy and climbing roses, and a moat. A moat with actual water in it, which alone would have cinched her selection.
Under the current light conditions, the possibility of a haunting seemed not only possible, but likely. Fog drifted in clouds of mysteriousness, showing a clump of white asters nearby a stone bench, then parting to illuminate a single yellow rose on the vine climbing around her bedroom window. So beautiful!
Gratitude rushed into her chest. As long as she could remember, Alice had dreamed of traveling to England. Born to a sprawling Irish-American family in Chicago with more love than money, she had put herself through college, then graduate school, and now had saved enough to come to this little village and its Foundation for the Study of English and Scottish Ballads, to study the link between the legend of the Holy Grail, the famous lyric poem, the Romance of the Rose and a ballad said to have been written in the pub on the high street.
And from the moment she’d spied the rolling green land beneath the plane, her heart had been singing. England! She was here, she was here, she was here. Even better, now she was wandering around the garden of an ancient manor house that boasted a moat. A moat!
As if that were not enough, she was studying and teaching her favorite legends, all rooted right in these green lands. Life, she thought with a happy sigh, didn’t get any better than this. Some—her extremely superstitious Irish grandmother among them–might say she ought to be watching for the other shoe to fall out of the sky and give her a black eye, but Alice ascribed to a cheerier superstition: if you listened to your heart, it would lead you where you were meant to go.
Some said that made her naïve. But they were stuck back in the sharp winds of the Midwest while here she was collecting flowers from a centuries-old garden for her kitchen table. With a pair of heavy-handled scissors she’d found in the kitchen drawer, Alice clipped a fistful of blue asters and pale chrysanthemums, and then headed toward the back door. Up the back of the house climbed the rose bush, glossy dark green against the soft gray day. The roses were nearly spent, but a few still bloomed bright yellow. She reached for one, a little bit over her head—
Movement at the edge of her peripheral vision caught her attention. Alice turned in time to see…something…distinctly skitter through the trees. She caught a flash of scarlet, the impression of long black hair, and then the fog closed around her so completely that she felt as if it were a blanket, smothering and too close.
She might as well have been blind. Panic clutched her throat, as she spun around in a circle, seeking a marker of any kind with which to orient herself. Nothing. She made a decision and headed for the back door.
Or at least she thought it was the back door. Instead, she stumbled over a round clump of aromatic lavender and fell, face first, in the wet grass. Flowers went flying from her basket, her teeth clicked together painfully, and she jarred her right elbow. The wind was knocked out of her, adding to her panic, and she felt like she might pass out, right there in the garden.
Maybe she thought, struggling to take a breath, her grandmother was right.
“Breathe!” said a voice.
Alice struggled to obey, but it felt as if two fists were squeezing her lungs tight. The edges of her vision begin to blacken, which sent her spiraling into absolute terror, even though some distant part of her brain knew that passing out would be the end of the whole drama because she’d relax. Her body would take over and do what was required.
“Breathe!” said a man’s voice, and a blow struck her between the shoulder blades, startling enough that Alice sucked in a giant breath. Air filled her lungs, then flowed out, and she coughed.
She sat up, turning to thank her rescuer, but the fog was so thick she still could see nothing. “Thank you,” she said.
No one answered. The cloud shifted ever so slightly, and she thought she saw a foot in a soft leather shoe, but then it was swallowed again.
Uneasy, Alice went to all fours and gathered the flowers that had scattered when she fell. The basket could wait, since she couldn’t see it anyway, and the scissors would likely rust, but she wasn’t going to risk another tumble. Getting to her feet, she stepped carefully. Eventually she would come to the wall, the moat, or the back of the house. All sound was muffled, but she could distantly hear the water in the moat chuckling along its way. It was at least a point of orientation.
Moving cautiously, she peered into the dense air, and finally spied a single gleam of yellow, like a torch in the gloom. It was the rose against her kitchen window, dewy and bright. It led her the last few steps to the door safely.
Only then, with her palm flat against clammy bricks, did she look back into the fog-shrouded garden. Who had helped her?
Maybe the garden was haunted. A cold shiver crossed her shoulders, rushed down her spine.
After her class tomorrow, she would poke around the library for some research on the house. Who knew what dramas and lost loves she might uncover?
Raisin Nut Bread, made from a pate Viennoise starter, a little rye flour, and the liquide levain I’ve been working and working with. I also soaked the raisins in orange juice and a little bit of vanilla. Isn’t it beautiful? I know what I’ll be eating for breakfast tomorrow!
 THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING is out today! To celebrate, a love song to breakfast.
PANCAKE KISSES, BACON HUGS
Why breakfast is the secret of everything
I suppose I should confess upfront that I am a morning person. I wake up cheery, chatty and at the very first fingers of sunlight creeping over the horizon. I know you find this annoying. I know you wish I’d stop humming under my breath as I crack eggs and start the coffee, but I can’t help it. I was born a singing lark. This does, however, offer benefits to all you blinking owls and sleepy headed in-betweens.
Once upon a time, I had a job working the breakfast shift at an upscale diner. It meant getting up at 4:30 am to creep around the dark of my teeny-tiny house so I wouldn’t wake my roommate. I dressed in my uniform with its plunging neckline (an unfortunate feature of many waitress uniforms of the early 80’s), and braided my Rapunzel hair. In the cold dark, I drove to work in my clunker, feeling—yes, I admit it–smug that I was awake before the rest of the world. Here and there, a light clicked on in a kitchen, but mostly, the world slept on. Porch lights glittered against the velvet blackness of mountains on the horizon, the air was fresh. All was newly reinvented, and it was mine.
At work, I dove into the bustle of getting the place ready for the doors to open. It smelled faintly of cleaning supplies from the night crew, of baking biscuits and potatoes grilling. Every morning, I fell in love all over again with the empty stage of tidy, waiting tables, with the clatter of cooks prepping, and the heat of flatware straight out of the dishwasher. We waitresses made pot after pot after pot of coffee, filled cream pitchers; wiped down syrup dispensers and set out glasses of ice to fill quickly with water. We drank coffee by the gallon ourselves, and snitched bacon when we could get away with it. It made me feel important to create a world of efficiency and nourishment for the hungry humans about to stumble in and beg for coffee.
This passion for breakfast arrived in a roundabout way, I must admit. My mother, who is a very good cook under many circumstances, was born an owl, and she finds early morning painful, especially when her lark child rose well before sunrise and was known to dust siblings with flour or lipstick or explore—well, never mind. It was early, that’s all.
Because she loved us, my mother did manage to get up and fix us breakfast. She believed in a hot breakfast, but cooking anything much would have been dangerous considering her eyes were barely open. So she made hot cereal. Endlessly. Malto-Meal and Ralston, Cream of Wheat and a colorless, gluey oatmeal I loathed with the considerable passion of a toddler foodie. Thankfully, she left us to our own devices once we made it to late grade school and we never had to choke down porridge again.
Not the best circumstances to fall in love with breakfast, I know. The happy accident is that my mother briefly took a job at a manufacturing plant when I was about seven. The other three children went to my grandmother’s house for the day while I stayed home with my father and walked to school on my own.
Once in awhile, my father got dressed and took me to a little café downtown, where there were individual jukeboxes along the counter and at the tables, and we ate pancakes and eggs and tea. We sat at the counter on round stools. I flipped through the jukebox offerings as if I knew what they were while he flirted with the waitresses and they flirted back, and there was usually music playing, and cigarette smoke hanging in the air with heady notes of bacon and coffee and frying onions. I loved the food—little balls of cold butter on top of my French toast, glass pitchers of syrup, tiny tubs of jelly—but mostly I loved the time with my dad, having him all to myself. Afterward, my dad would drop me off at school and I’d head up the stone steps feeling warm and special, a girl who had extraordinary experiences.
I fell in love with breakfast then and there. All good breakfasts, but especially a good café breakfast. And from that love was born a book.
At the heart of my new book, The Secret of Everything, is a restaurant called 100 Breakfasts, where a lark of a woman cooks to heal the hearts and souls of the people in her town.
It is to 100 Breakfasts that the protagonist, Tessa Harlow, comes to explore the questions that have been haunting her. She is heart sore and weary, recovering from a freak accident and trying to find answers to questions that have only just now bobbed to the surface. When she sits down at the long counter at the 100 Breakfasts Café, she unwittingly sets in motion a tangled array of connections and reveals secrets that have been hidden for a long, long time.
It is also at 100 Breakfasts that Tessa gets to know widower Vince Grasso, who is trying to heal his own family, including the troubled Natalie, a 9 year old who takes food very seriously, and is working her way through the entire list of 100 breakfasts on the menu.
The Secret of Everything was born out of my passion for breakfast, for the power it has to heal and renew, to nourish and ground. It’s a book that was born out of those days when I was a child hating oatmeal and loving the French toast at the local café; when I fought with my sisters and the mornings when my father took me out to breakfast, just the two of us, because this is, at the heart of it, a story about fathers and daughters and how that connection can make or break a woman’s spirit. Tessa’s father is nothing like my own, of course, but a father who is devoted to his child gives her permission to be as mighty as she can be.
Ironically, Tessa’s favorite breakfast is oatmeal, because in my adulthood, I learned to love great oatmeal. It is my own breakfast of choice most days. Whole grain oats served with butter and my own spiced apples that are cooked to a deep, dark flavor. Because I am that lark, so smugly and cheerfully alert at the first glimmers of dawn, it falls to me to get up and make the tea and start the coffee so it fills the air with its fragrance. I set the water boiling and set the table with cloth napkins and the good sugar bowl and the milk pitcher. I set the stage for my sleepy headed partner, sometimes a child, to come blinking to the table and fill his belly and drink his coffee.
In this small act, I am offering the most solid secret I know: breakfast is the secret of everything.
Breakfast is love.
What is your favorite breakfast?
First, before I forget, if you want a chance to win a collection of gourmet salts, go to barbaraoneal.com  and post a favorite food from childhood.
Let’s talk about books one more time before Christmas, shall we? What are you reading and recommending to others this year? What are some of your favorite reads of the year?
This week, I’ve been finishing Eclipse, the third book in the Stephanie Meyers group. I have read the oddest things about this book, feminist rhetoric that makes it plain the readers just didn’t get it. I’m a fan. It’s over-the-top romance, no question, but Meyer gets forbidden love. She gets yearning. She gets the conflicts we all feel at that age. Edward is lovely, but I really, I’m madly in love with Jacob the werewolf. Duh. He’s hot (as in physically) and when he changes, he’s a big furry…dog. Who adores her. Edward is lovely and cool and glittery and also adores her. It doesn’t suck to be Bella.
An adult novel that is lyrical and unique is THE LAST WILL OF MOIRA LEAHY by Therese Walsh. Therese is a friend of mine, and I’ve known from the first time I read a page of her work (in one of my classes, not that I had a single thing to do with her success–the book was long written by the time I met her) that she was going to have a long and successful career as a writer. Last Will is the story of two sisters, separated by a tragic accident as teens. As the novel opens, it is years later and one of the sisters finds a mysterious sword that leads to Rome, to secrets long buried, to healing magic…and to love. It’s a hard book to classify–it is part puzzle, part relationship novel, part romance, part adventure; perhaps I could best describe it as a cross between a hip gothic and literary coming of age tale. Whatever you call it, it’s a fast-paced tale that readers here will enjoy.
Others I have mentioned here and wish to remind you: THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN, Garth Stein (my favorite book of the year); FIREFLY LANE, by Kristin Hannah (she has new books coming soon, too); ORANGE MINT AND HONEY, by Carleen Brice, which has been made into a television movie (she also has a new book out, which I have not yet read: CHILDREN OF THE WATERS). I’m sure there are others, including Midnight (below), but I’ll leave some room for other suggestions.
What else should be be on the lookout for this weekend as we rush into the last minute crowds?
 Gritty, heady, erotic, lyrical, romance
I’ve been meaning to review this book for a couple of weeks and finally have some time. This is my review for GoodReads (and if you are not a member, really, it’s lovely!)
I picked up Midnight by Sister Souljah a couple of months ago. Total impulse buy from the center aisle of new trade paperbacks at my local Barnes and Noble. I liked the cover, that beautiful face, and picked it up, and the first page utterly captured me. I started reading that afternoon and it kept me company for the entire next week.
Loved it. Weeks later, I’m still thinking about it now and then. It is a romance, almost classic in its telling, although the milieu is a little different. Midnight is an African-born youth, a devout Muslim, only 14 as the novel opens, and living in the projects in NYC. His voice is mature, thoughtful, and powerfully engaging from the very first word, and while I quarrelled with some of his judgments (is there not a single good black man in all of the projects, aside from Midnight himself? Is there not a single honorable woman aside from his own mother?) but it rang true through his eyes.
I was fascinated by the glimpses into Somali life and African Islam and the entire landscape of the novel. It is adamantly a romance, a love story betwen Midnight and Akemi, a Japanese girl who speaks no English (as a writer, I was amazed at how well I understood her without any words) who is adorably fashionable and talented.
If there were flaws, they were in the slightly slow pace of the narrative, and again, the all-or-nothing view of the projects, and for my romance friends,
SPOILER ALERT
The end is ambivalent and unfinished. I hope there will be a sequel, because I desperately need to know what happened to Midnight and Akemi.
What is something you’ve read lately that we might not have noticed?
I remember standing at a publisher cocktail party years ago, talking with a publicist about electronic books, and she was shaking her head firmly, saying that e-books were still a non-issue. At the time, I was utterly hooked on Mario for GameBoy (the original, clunky, white one) and I made the case for a reader something like that unit, with a bigger screen. Something you could hold and transport easily. Everyone with me just shook their heads. If I stop and think about that fat,  old GameBoy, I can guess this cocktail party was about a decade ago.
We’ve all seen the revolution coming for the past two years. Sony pushed things along, but Kindle set the game afire, and now Barnes and Noble has joined the market with their Nook. My oldest son, who is the kind of reader a writer dreams of, and was the kind of geeky kid who had to have every brand-new version of Zelda the day it came out, obviously has a Kindle. He’s on his second, actually, and it’s a lovely machine. I’ve played with the Sony reader, too, and I like it fine. Now there is Nook, which is pretty, pretty, and not available in any meaningful way until after Christmas. They all have their pros and cons, which you can read about in depth in this article from Wired.com. Since getting my iPhone a few months ago, I find I want that touch screen technology on everything, and at the moment, those e-readers are pricey.
Finally, this morning Christopher Robin sent me a link to an article firming up rumors that the Apple tablet is likely to be available in the spring. These snippets particularly caught my eye: Continue reading The tipping point for e-readers
 THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING will be out in 27 26 days! Reader feedback so far has been extraordinary (check out the comments at GoodReads.com), and I’m very excited for everyone to read Tessa’s story.
To celebrate, I’ll offering a some little contests and giveaways over the next few weeks. This is the first one. I am giving away 4 free ARCs of THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING. As soon as I draw names, I’ll run to the post office and mail them out, so you will have it by next Friday.
To win, just go to barbaraoneal.com and leave your name and email in the comments and I’ll draw 4 names on December 8. You should have it a couple of days later!
Check back next week for another giveaway.
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