Dear Dinner Party Diary

How I finally resolved to meal plan like Mom.

- Andrew Sean Greer

TWO YEARS AGO my mother turned 70, and, in a mood of giddy nostalgia, she brought out one of the journals in which she has kept a record of all the dinner parties she’s hosted since 1976. Ever my mother’s son, I have a similar journal. But I am a writer, and she is a chemist. Mine features narratives and feelings, whereas hers reads like laboratory notes—just the meal plan and the invite list. No digressions.

“Salmon mousse,” she announced, reading one entry. “My God, I must have made that 100 times. For the Kaufmans and Hurleys; do you remember them?” I did not. But I did remember her salmon mousse. Pink, jiggling, moulded in the curved shape of a fish.