Read Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel for Free Online Page A

mother.”
    “Wow,” I say. They all look so happy. I’m not accustomed to seeing my mother look happy.
    “I think you look like your mother here,” my grandmother says.
    “I think I look like you.”
    She pulls me to her for a hug.
    “If that’s what you think,” she whispers into my ear, “then you do.”
    I do not look like my grandmother. I’m nowhere near as pretty. I look just like my mother. Unfortunately, she’s the one person in the world who I don’t want to look like. Don’t want to be like. Growing up, I used to wish that my grandmother was my real mother. I can’t say that much has changed. My grandmother wishes that I could be closer to my mom, not resent her quite as much as I do, but I know that she secretly cherishes our close relationship. I’m not sure we’d have that if my mother was fully in the picture.
    It’s hard to look in the mirror and see my mother staring back at me. I see the parts of her I wish I hadn’t inherited—her inability to stay in one place for too long, her instinct to run at the first sign of a problem. She was always running. And sometimes I feel like I always want to run, too. After all, isn’t that how I got out here this summer? My life in the city got a bit too complicated, so I ran to the one safe place I could go, the one place I knew I would be secure.
    I’d much rather resemble my grandmother. She never judges my life choices. She always lets me be. With my mother, it was always as if I couldn’t live up to some ideal that she had made up in her mind for me. Nothing was ever cool enough or hip enough for her. What I always longed for throughout my entire childhood was to be normal. To be like all the other kids who populated my school. But she lived outside of normal.
    It was a cruel joke, really, to put me in an Upper East Side prep school and then expect me to stand out. To not follow the crowd. I ended up an outcast who was desperate to fit in, and I’m not sure I’ve ever entirely escaped that feeling.
    My grandmother, on the other hand, saw the importance of living a “normal” life. She understood why a little girl needed the jeans everyone else was wearing, or why it was important to be invited to the sleepover party that everyone else was attending. She didn’t see living a normal life as a sin. She thought you could live a normal life and make it extraordinary for yourself. Which I suppose is what she does. She makes a casual lunch at home, just the two of us, into something exciting. Into an event. “Life gives you enough to cry about,” she always tells me, “so you have to celebrate the times when you can be happy.”
    It’s what I would like to do for myself. But I don’t really know how.

 
    Eight
    I never knew my father. Never even met him.
    As my mother explained to me—years before it was actually appropriate to have done so—my father was a man who didn’t want to be a father. He was a friend to my mother, and when she decided that she wanted to have a baby, he agreed to help her under the condition that he would not have a role in my life, that he wouldn’t have to actually be my father.
    The best way to characterize their relationship would be to say they were work colleagues. He was a reporter for the Washington Post, and they often found themselves on assignment together. Through the years, I’d ask my mother to tell me the story of how they met. I was desperate to romanticize it, make it something more than it was, but my mother never let me. “He was a friend, nothing more,” she would say, even though she could tell how badly I wanted to turn it into a fairy tale, to make it something grand.
    I’m not angry about it anymore. At least not like I used to be. As a child, I’d sneak off to the New York Public Library and comb through old issues of the Washington Post on microfiche, looking for my father’s bylines. I’d sit in the stacks and make up elaborate stories about how my father, when I was born,