Deborah Madison

Deborah Madison’s An Onion in My Pocket: My Life With Vegetables is a warm, bracingly honest memoir that gives us an insider’s look at the vegetarian movement.

Deborah is the author of 14 cookbooks and countless articles on food, cooking, and farming. She is revered for bringing vegetarian cooking to a wide audience, including non-vegetarians, via Greens restaurant and her cookbooks. A bestselling author, her first cookbook was The Greens Cookbook and her recent books include The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Vegetable Literacy, which was awarded both a James Beard award and an IACP award. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, painter Patrick McFarlin.

Jane Hirshfield‘s recently released collection, Ledger: Poems has been hailed as the most important and masterly work of her career. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the newly released Ledger; The Beauty, long-listed for the National Book Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015; Come, Thief; After, named a Best Book of 2006 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times, and a finalist for England’s prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize; Given Sugar, Given Salt finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; The Lives of the Heart; The October Palace; Of Gravity & Angels, winner of the Poetry Center Book Award; and Alaya.

A personal note from Deborah.

Sent November 24th, following her Conversations with Authors session.

Dear Conversation Watchers,

I so appreciate your watching my conversation with Jane Hirshfield about An Onion in My Pocket and your support of Book Passage. It’s so important to support our wonderful independent book stores!

Books I’ve read and am reading:

• Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Hospitality by Priya Basil
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
• Underland – A Deep Time Journey by Robert MacFarlane
• Perilous Bounty – The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It by Tom Philpott
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• a lot of books on botany and native plants in New Mexico 

Starting last March I was rereading books on my shelf:

• about 6 novels by VS Naipal, whom I love (The Enigma of Arrival, A Bend in the River, A House for Mr. Biswas and more)
• Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Angle of Repose, Wolf Willow)
• Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina) 
• Camus:  (The First Man) especially
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• Suite Francaise by Irene Demirovsk
• The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert McFarlane
• Abalone: The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California’s Iconic Shellfish by Ann Vileisis

And I just want to add that for Thanksgiving, my husband and I will probably enjoy a good lasagna with homemade pasta—his request and my pleasure.

My best to you all,

—Deborah Madison