Laura Dave
The "Divorce Party" author continues her search for the perfect red velvet cupcake at the South End Buttery
On a bright, sunny June day, the petite writer Laura Dave ("I'm 5-foot-10 in my head," she says), clad in a diaphanous white top, tucks into a red velvet cupcake from the South End Buttery. "It really does not look red," she says, noting the cupcake's devil's-food-like coloring and artfully sculpted frosting.
"So much cake is so, so sweet," says the 30-year-old author of the charming coming-of-age novel, "London Is the Best City in America" and the recently released and just as insightful "The Divorce Party" - both of which have been optioned by Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, respectively. The trip to Boston was supposed to be part of her book tour, but the event fell through - leaving her more time to visit friends and sample sweets.
Cupcakes have become a "Sex and the City"-approved trend, and terrible versions of red velvet cake have spread far and wide. But this Buttery cupcake, with vinegar to cut the sweetness, gets it right, Dave declares.
Red velvet cake has an important role in "The Divorce Party," a wry and observant novel about the relationship between an engaged woman and a woman-on-the-verge of divorce, and the latter woman's divorce party (a real, nascent trend). In the novel, as a character whips up a special recipe for red velvet cake, Dave writes about the food's origins: The Southern cake originates from the grand tradition of using symbolism and myth to create food. The white-and-red cake is a simple story of good (the white frosting) vs. evil (the red-colored cake). "It's part of the fun; it's supposed to be about good versus evil," Dave says between bites. "It feels almost scandalous!"
Dave credits her affection for the cake to her Southern mother's old family recipe. "So I'm Southern, even though I'm from New York," she adds. (She now lives in California, where she's working on her third novel and a screenplay. "I'll keep pretending I haven't moved [from New York]," she says. ) Dave does admit, though, that she's a "total traitor" to New York: She's a Red Sox fan. "I'm a Lowell girl. I'll follow him anywhere," she says. She was first introduced to the Red Sox' legendary fan base while she was working for ESPN The Magazine while writing her first book. "They're the best fans ever," she says.
Massachusetts has played a key role in Dave's life, in fact she took her first writing class as a 16-year-old going to Tufts and started her MFA studies at UMass-Amherst. While attending UMass, she lived in an old converted schoolhouse in Northampton downstairs from Kurt Vonnegut, who was teaching at Smith. Every morning as she left the house to go to class, she saw him writing furiously in a notebook. She'd say: "Hi, how are you today?" and Vonnegut would reply: "The polar ice caps are melting."
"He was the greatest," she says, grinning. "I almost couldn't believe he was real, and he was so tall!"
The book tour for "The Divorce Party" has taken Dave all over the country, which has allowed her to scour the land looking for the best red velvet cake. Kentucky has fantastic cake, she says, but there's also Auntie Em's Kitchen in Los Angeles, which "looks like it's in Kentucky."
"I get so many notes in the mail from people with feelings about red velvet cake," says Dave. But it's not just notes about red velvet cake. "A lot of people end up writing to me about losing themselves in a relationship," says Dave, who describes her books and characters as being "confessional in spirit." Some days, she feels like a therapist. One woman wrote that she knew her relationship was ending when she started eating potatoes. It's a strange insight, to be sure - a sad, poetic symbol of the need for comfort food in the midst of strife.
"There seems to be a huge correlation," Dave says, "between food and the end of a relationship."
