Michaele Weissman: On Finding the Answers to Bread, Relationships, and Herself
Michaele Weissman is a freelance journalist and author who writes about food, families, and American culture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and dozens of other online and paper publications. She is the co-author with Carol Hymowitz of A History of Women in America, a narrative history that has sold nearly 250,000 copies since its publication in 1980. More recently, she is the author of God in a Cup, a travelogue and exploration of the specialty coffee scene.
She teaches writing and is a member of the steering committee of New Directions, a writing program for scholars and psychotherapists offered by the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. At Politics and Prose, she co-leads sold out workshops helping writers find the imagery–and language–that is uniquely theirs.
The mother and stepmother of three foodies, she has been married for 38 years to her rye bread co-conspirator, John Melngailis, a retired professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. The couple live, cook, and entertain in Chevy Chase, MD. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
Michaele Weissman
Adam B. Auel
In this post, Michaele explains how she discovered the structure of her memoir, what she rediscovered during the writing process, and more.
Name: Michaele Weissman
Literary agent: Eleanor Jackson, DCL
Book title: The Rye Bread Marriage
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Release date: August 15, 2023
Genre/category: Literary Memoir/culinary history
Previous titles: God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee; Deadly Consequences (with Deborah Prothrow Stith); A History of Women in America (with Carol Hymowitz)
Elevator pitch for the book: The Rye Bread Marriage is a memoir that explores the roots of my husband’s obsession with Latvian rye bread; while telling the story of his dramatic wartime childhood; and plumbing the complexities of our marriage with this question in mind: How do partners who are opposites, live together without wringing each other’s necks?
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What prompted you to write this book?
The Rye Bread Marriage found me, as books sometimes do. The title popped into my head one morning as I woke. I didn’t know what it meant. That, after many false starts, I would write a literary memoir exploring the meaning of rye bread and the meaning of marriage, while recounting my husband’s story and my own, was beyond anything I could have imagined when I began.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
John and I traveled to Latvia (with side trips to Estonia and Lithuania) in 2010 and 2012, but it wasn’t till 2013 that I produced a partial, very boring first draft. Only slowly did it dawn on me that I was writing a memoir not a journalistic food narrative.
I wrote many drafts between 2014 and 2018—some of what I wrote (in my opinion) was beautiful, but the whole did not cohere. In 2018, I realized that my problem was structural: My chapters were too long, preventing me from moving nimbly among my three subjects.
Reading Abigail Thomas taught me that when it comes to structure there are no rules. I broke the book down into segments—chapters—of varying length, interweaving longish chapters and very short ones; narrative chapters and chapters in which I commented on my own experience. This enabled me to return time and again to the subject of the bread without getting bogged down.
My agent, the wonderfully patient Eleanor Jackson sent the book out in 2019. It didn’t sell. I rewrote a bit and she sent it out again in 2020, just as the pandemic brought the world to a halt. The book sold in February 2021. Two publishers were interested, and I got a decent deal.
Due to the pandemic and the assiduousness of the Algonquin’s editorial process—the book will be published on August 15, 2023. Happily, this delay meant that I will be able to market the book live, meeting readers in person.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The Rye Bread Marriage is my fourth book, so I had a pretty good sense of the publishing process. I was surprised, however, and delighted by the quality of my editors at Algonquin. The acquiring editor, Abby Muller, was only 26 when she bought this book describing a marriage that has lasted many more years than she has been on this earth.
Despite the differences in our ages, Abby got me and my book. She became its inhouse champion. When Abby was recruited by another publishing house, she made sure that my book, rather than being an orphan, became the property of Algonquin’s brilliant editor in chief, Amy Gash.
Amy was respectful of Abby’s fine editing. I will forever be grateful to Amy, however, for honing in on something I had missed: in several key spots I had glossed over the implication of my own words, my own story, chickening out from fully knowing myself. Amy encouraged me to think again, and I had the brains to take her advice.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Memoir requires a depth of focus, a condensation of language, and a discovery of imagery and structure (the material determines the structure) that go far beyond a simple recounting of facts and a telling of stories. I hadn’t known if I were capable of working at this deep level, until I did it.
The other happy surprise: I rediscovered—and fully owned—my own humor. A million years ago when I was single, I had written humor for Cosmopolitan Magazine: first person humor pieces about my life as a single woman in New York City. Writing funny came naturally, but I felt these magazine pieces only skimmed the surface. I had a sense that someday, when I was a better writer, more able to write in depth, I would return to writing in the first person and writing humor.
And, in fact, that is precisely what happened.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
This is a tough one: Readers get what they get, and I respect that, although sometimes it is a bit surprising. In an ideal universe, I would like readers to come away with a new understanding of and appreciation for the impact of history and of stories on all of our lives. I would like them to understand what it means to be a refugee, a displaced person. I would love it if they were able to view their relationships, all their relationships, with a new understanding of—and tolerance for—psychological complexity. I want them to have a deeper understanding and appreciation of food in general and of bread, this first and most fundamental food, and I would like them to laugh.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Allow yourself to experiment. Allow yourself to play. Understand that overcoming your fear of your own literary insufficiency, is part of the writing process. Work hard, but don’t rush. The book will take as long as it takes.
If you feel stymied. Take writing courses—but only from teachers who know their stuff and are kind. Hang out with other writers when it works for you, but allow yourself to (temporarily) withdraw if that is what you need.
Learn to trust yourself and your own story. Oh and this: Having an agent is great (I am infinitely grateful to Eleanor Jackson), but your agent cannot save your life. By which I mean, you have to find your story by yourself. No one else can do this work for you.
While there’s no shortage of writing advice, it’s often scattered around—a piece of advice here, words of wisdom there. And in the moments when you most need writing advice, what you find might not resonate with you or speak to the issue you’re dealing with. In A Year of Writing Advice, the editors of Writer’s Digest have gathered thoughts, musings, and yes, advice from 365 authors in dozens of genres to help you on your writing journey.