Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

PREFACE

It’s a sunny cold December morning, and I’m sitting at a small table in the corner of the Sullivan Street Bakery on 9th Avenue in New York City. These days, Aaron and I and our sons, Mac and Henry, live in Manhattan, a world away from Grand Rapids, where we lived when I wrote Cold Tangerines in 2007. Reflecting on the intervening twelve years has filled me with gratitude for that place and that season, and also for how life changes and what it teaches us along the way.

Years ago, when I wanted to learn to bake bread, Jim Lahey’s no-knead recipe became my go-to recipe—I baked dozens of loaves of that perfect crusty bread. One of the first loaves, I seem to remember, was just coming out of the oven when my editor and dear friend Carolyn came over—it was late-ish, so I imagine she was coming from an event.

I remember bringing a big cutting board over to the coffee table—the cutting board crowded with a butter dish, jars of Dijon mustard and fig jam, and slices of sharp cheddar. We dove into that hot bread, and I made it over and over after that, skeptical of my ability every time, amazed at this beautiful bread every time.

And then all these years later, our little family moved to Chelsea and found ourselves two blocks from Jim Lahey’s bakery. Every time I’m here, I feel grateful for that tiny connection, and for so many connections and reference points that were here waiting for us, waiting to welcome us to this amazing city.

It’s a fascinating exercise to look back on my first book while I’m writing a new book—simultaneously looking backward and forward. In some ways, I’m the same as I ever was: bookish, passionate, a little dramatic. Deep-feeling, with an insatiable appetite for almost everything—a quality that makes life a lot of fun but also means I’m always in jeopardy of missing my deadlines.

A million lifetimes ago, it seems, I wrote a book about the extraordinary nature of everyday life. I wrote about fighting for hope when people and institutions fail you, about fighting for your faith when life changes a thousand times over in an instant. I wrote about how searching for goodness and beauty is the best way to live, and how connection and love really do transform us.

And here I am, all these years later, mostly writing about the same things: connection, loss, heartbreak, joy, faith, what breaks us and what repairs us.

Over the years, I’ve lost so much more than that young writer could have imagined at the time. I’ve suffered more, cried more, mourned more. But there have also been moments of happiness I could never have imagined, joys I couldn’t even have dreamed up.

Our marriage was young then, and now it’s approaching something like old, in the best possible way. My life as a parent was just getting started then, and now our boys are thirteen and eight.

My life as a writer then was new and sparkly and now it resembles, it seems, the rest of me: no longer young but not yet old. The years show on my face, and that’s okay, because all the best things leave their mark, and I’m thankful for the years and also for the marks they’ve left.

And my heart has been battered in ways I couldn’t have imagined, but it’s still beating. It’s still beating, still falling in love, still tender and open—that may have been the hardest work of all over the years: staying tender and openhearted when it was so tempting to snap shut.

Here’s what I know, all these years later: I still believe it, all of it. I still believe we’ve been created by a God of love, and that this God is still working and guiding and whispering. I still believe that the world he created is impossibly beautiful, even in its brokenness. I still believe that people have the capacity for incredible goodness, and also that we’ll hurt each other in shocking ways.

I learned through the writing process that you show up anyway. You tell your story anyway. You don’t do it for you, but for that puff of breath that comes out of your mouth and hovers in the air just before it hits someone else’s ears—that’s the moment, when you’ve told your story and it’s about to become someone else’s (that’s the hope, anyway) but for a minute it’s just a story about all of us, about life and love and loss and hunger. It’s invisible, hanging there in the air just for a moment. It’s the thing that matters most: the story offered as connection, as gift, as breath. Someone else breathes it in and stays alive a little longer—that’s how it works.

As I wrote Cold Tangerines, I learned to pay attention to beauty and goodness in every form—in art and babies and red trees and weddings and songs. I offered every story I knew that articulated how good life really is, how good God is, how deep and wide his love is, how vast and varied our experiences are, but how similar our longings are: love, connection, art.

Cold Tangerines was published in early October 2007. It was coming up on Henry’s first birthday, and it was the same week my brother left to sail around the world—we were embarking on passages of many kinds that week. But before all that, there was a man named Tom and a woman named Angela, and more than anyone else, they’re responsible for the existence of this book.

Tom and I went to church together, and sometimes he and his wife and Aaron and I went out for dinner, for tapas or Indian food. Tom invited me to work on a creative project with his team, and so for months, on my days off, I’d go in to their offices and read them what I’d written. After many years of working in churches, it felt good to be writing again.

Writing was my first language, my first love. I wrote stories when I was little, loved learning to write essays in high school, studied English and French literature in college. Writing was what I loved, but I’d never had the bravery or confidence to pursue it full time. Instead, I worked full time—first in one church and then another—and every few months, the desire to write would hit me like a fever or an itch, and I’d pull out my notebooks again, or my laptop. I’d write a little bit, for a few days or a few weeks. Everything was better in my life when I was writing—it connected something inside me, helped me think and feel and live in more whole and healed-up ways. But like almost any good habit—eating vegetables, taking vitamins, working out—I did it in fits and starts and then left it behind completely for months, to my own detriment.

In those days, if pressed, I’d tell you that I loved writing. But I’d also tell you I didn’t really do it very often. I worked long hours in an intense environment, lots of nights and weekends, with a fair amount of chaos and a lot of responsibility. It was easy, increasingly, to leave the writing behind for longer and longer stretches.

But Tom had heard me say I was a writer, and he treated me like one, even though I didn’t really believe that about myself. He treated me like a person who could meet deadlines, develop creative ideas, communicate with a clear voice and identity. I wasn’t at all sure I could do any of those things, but because he assumed I could, I did. And I’m so grateful.

I could feel the rhythms and sentences starting to come back, fingers working more and more easily over the keys. I put in hundreds of hours on this project, and then it all stalled and was never going to see the light of day. Here’s the point though: it got me writing again. And Tom gave my name to an editor, and without those two things—the writing and the recommendation—this book would have never existed.

When I speak to young writers, I always tell that part of the story very much on purpose, because I want to tell them two things: that writing is writing, in whatever form it takes, and that most good stories have at least one very bad plot twist. That project I poured myself into fell apart spectacularly, and there was nothing I could do about it. And if you decide that’s the end of the story, it’s a bad one. But if you take the long view, you see that that project led me to Cold Tangerines, which led to the next book and the next. If you take the long view, you realize it was a speed bump, not a dead end. What life teaches us over time is that if you wait long enough, lots of things that look like dead ends are really just speed bumps.

The project ended, and I was frustrated with all that work for nothing, frustrated with what looked like, from that vantage point, a dead end. What I didn’t know till much later is that Tom believed in the quality of the work I’d done, and so he gave my name to an editor.

Angela was that editor, and still to this day, Angela is the person who has taught me more about the craft of writing than any other person. We’re still friends, and we still work together as often as possible, and I will always be grateful for her particular genius. She helped me discern my own voice and vision—often by pointing out gently when it wasn’t happening. Who’s this? she’d ask kindly. Who are you being now? Because that’s one of the first big challenges as a new writer: Who are you being now? When are you mimicking and when are you aspiring and when are you speaking from your own deep sense of self and how do you know? Angela reflected back to me when I was getting it and when I wasn’t, and she pushed me harder than any editor, before or since, and I’m always thankful for it.

She helped me write that first proposal—and in my experience, proposals are the hardest part of the process. Books are easier to write than proposals, in my view, so if any of you feel foolish for being stuck in the proposal phase, I see you—and you’re not foolish. That stuff is hard. Angela guided me through, and in January 2006, I submitted a proposal.

I don’t do this often, but every once in a while, I get down on my knees when I’m praying—physically, bodily—and I did that on a January Sunday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I knelt on the hard brick of our three-season porch, holding the proposal out like an offering, shivering a little and scared.

Angela warned me it could take months, that I probably wouldn’t hear anything for ages, that pub boards and contracts and offers take so much time. And then she called me the next day at work and asked if we could meet right then. We met at Panera Bread on 44th Street, and she offered me a contract. And even as I write this, all these years later, tears spring to my eyes and my heart is tender with gratitude.

In the deepest way, all I ever wanted to be was a writer—not a ballerina or an astronaut or a teacher. In that booth in Grandville, Michigan, Angela read me a list of numbers about an advance and royalty rates and percentage points, and I don’t remember a single one of them, but I do know that she changed my life that day.

And then two days later, early on Thursday morning, I found out I was pregnant for the first time. Fourteen years ago, save a month, everything turned upside down in the best possible way. And while maybe I wouldn’t recommend it, I learned to write a book and learned to be a mother right at the very same time, and writing and parenting feel twinned inside me still today—the two most fundamental things I do, the two most fundamental things I am.

A million things about the world were different in 2006, when I began writing this book, and in 2007, when it was published. Among them: At that time, Christian publishing was largely the territory of older white male pastors. Blogging existed, but not at all in the way it would in subsequent years. And social media was a fledgling endeavor, one that hadn’t yet permeated our lives or the publishing industry.

What that means is that the idea of a young woman writing about her life and her faith and her feelings and experiences was not the norm it is now. I grew up hearing sermons punctuated with football references and military imagery—we were on the 10-yard line or in the foxhole, or some such thing. And I wanted to read stories that were also about homes and bodies and poetry. I wanted to know what people ate for breakfast and what they wore to work and what books they read—especially on hard days. I wanted space for tears and food and fashion and travel and friendship and all the things I talked about with my actual friends around the table at San Chez or Marie Catrib. I didn’t want just the ideas, divorced from blood and bones and lives and bodies, and I didn’t want the only references to human experiences to be exclusively male experiences. I was very, very familiar with that way of life, and I wanted another one.

Writing Cold Tangerines changed my life—it made me a published author, but more than that, it taught me how to be brave, how to make something meaningful over a long period of time. It taught me what to share and what to hold back, what I cared about most, what could go unsaid and what absolutely could not.

In some ways, the woman I am now and the life I’m living right now seem so far away from the young woman in Michigan who learned to write and learned to mother at the same time all those years ago. But in so many more ways, I see the similarities, and when I reread these pages, I feel a pang of familiarity.

I still believe that everyday life as it’s unfolding on our plain old streets and sidewalks is the most extraordinary thing most of us will ever experience. I still believe that daily life is where our lives change, where we learn to love, where we learn from our mistakes, where we sense God’s presence, where we learn to tell the truth and make things right, where our hearts are broken and our wounds are laid bare and healed up. So many of the lofty concepts of faith and truth and meaning find their value and grounding not in conceptual spaces but in kitchens and living rooms and subway stations and in the silence between words and while you’re folding the laundry. This is where life is. This is where everything is.

For me, it’s still all about daily, ordinary life. It’s still all about being a noticer, as a spiritual act. I notice as a way of saying thank you, as a sacrament almost, as a way of bearing witness to what’s lovely and good and meaningful in the world.

I love to cook, and there are a few people in my life over the years who’ve been my favorite people to feed, and what I love about feeding those people is how much they notice—they eat with passion, full mouths, full plates, and they notice color and flavor and texture. They ask questions and close their eyes while they’re chewing, trying to taste even more deeply. As a cook, as the person who chose the flavors, who chopped and sautéed and thought about color and texture and scent and plating, I love feeding people who notice.

I want to be a noticer. God made this world, made people, made flowers and honey and the Hudson River. The people he made with great love and in his image have written poetry and built buildings, and they perform surgery and bake bread and play the violin, and one of my most deeply held spiritual practices is noticing it all.

That’s what Cold Tangerines is about. And that’s still, at the end of the day, what matters most to me: bearing witness to the unfolding miracle of everyday life.

Shauna Niequist

New York, New York

December 19, 2019

INTRODUCTION

This book is a shameless appeal for celebration.

I know that the world is several versions of mad right now. I know that pessimism and grimness sometimes seem like the only responsible choices. I wake up at night and think about pesticides and international politics and fundamentalism and disease and roadside bombs and the fact that one day my parents will die. I had a hard year this year, the hardest I’ve yet known. I worry about the world we’re creating for my baby boy. I get the pessimism and the grimness.

And that’s why I’m making a shameless appeal for celebration. Because I need to. I need optimism and celebration and hope in the face of violence and despair and anxiety. And because the other road is a dead end. Despair is a slow death, and a lifetime of anger is like a lifetime of hard drinking: it shows in your face and your eyes and your words even when you think it doesn’t.

The only option, as I see it, is this delicate weaving of action and celebration, of intention and expectation. Let’s act, read, protest, protect, picket, learn, advocate for, fight against, but let’s be careful that in the midst of all that accomplishing and organizing, we don’t bulldoze over a world that’s teeming with beauty and hope and redemption all around us and in the meantime. Before the wars are over, before the cures are found, before the wrongs are righted, Today, humble Today, presents itself to us with all the ceremony and bling of a glittering diamond ring: Wear me, it says. Wear me out. Love me, dive into me, discover me, it pleads with us.

The discipline of celebration is changing my life, and it is because of the profound discoveries that this way of living affords me that I invite you into the same practice. This collection is a tap dance on the fresh graves of apathy and cynicism, the creeping belief that this is all there is, and that God is no match for the wreckage of the world we live in. What God does in the tiny corners of our day-to-day lives is stunning and gorgeous and headline-making, but we have a bad habit of