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By Lisa Daffy
It’s not surprising that Isabel Vincent chose the Westhampton Free Library to hold a reading of her latest book, “Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship.” After all, that is the spot where she wrote most of the book, and, she says, “a really special place.”
Her reading there, at noon on Friday, June 17, will be a homecoming of sorts.
Those familiar with Ms. Vincent’s earlier books and her reporting for the New York Post will find this fond remembrance of a friendship is a departure from her usual topics. Edward wasn’t a globe-trotting financier of questionable ethics, nor a despot capitalizing on the suffering of his countrymen. Either of those would be more in Ms. Vincent’s wheelhouse.
As an award-winning investigative reporter, and in her four prior books, Ms. Vincent has tackled hard issues: journalistic malpractice, political corruption, banking malfeasance.
She spent five years in Brazil as a foreign correspondent, during which time she wrote “Gilded Lily—Lily Safra: The Making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows.” The book was banned in Brazil, and Ms. Vincent was served with a defamation suit by the subject’s nephew.
“I’ve made enemies my whole life,” she said. “When my first book came out [in 1996], I was totally naive.”
That book, “See No Evil: The Strange Case of Christine Lamont and David Spencer,” explored a kidnapping in Brazil for which two young Canadians had been convicted and imprisoned.
“Canadian media had covered them for five years and said they were innocent dupes. But when I started to look into it, I realized that everybody was wrong. So here I was in my 20s, naively thinking I’m going to set the record straight. I was pilloried in the press.
“I didn’t set out to be bold or controversial. I knew what I was doing was controversial, but I felt it was based on the truth as far as I could find it.” As it turned out, Christine Lamont confessed to the crime shortly after the book’s publication.
In “Dinner with Edward,” she changes literary direction drastically, pausing to reflect on the “extraordinary, ordinary man” who was her best friend for the last four years of his life.
“I never imagined I would write something like this,” she mused. “I’ve always chosen—or they’ve chosen me—difficult subjects. So this is kind of a departure.”
When Ms. Vincent met Edward, an energetic 90-year-old at the time, she was a recent transplant to Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island, her marriage in free-fall. A friend and former editor in Canada suggested she have dinner with her father, who was also struggling through a difficult period after his wife of 69 years, Paula, passed away. That simple first meeting turned into a long series of often-elaborate dinners, during which the two formed a tight bond that helped them both survive a period of loss and loneliness.
A Nashville native who moved to Greenwich Village in 1940 to pursue an acting career, Edward never found success in the theater. But he met Paula, another aspiring actor, on his first audition, setting in motion a relationship that would span seven decades.
Well into his 70s, Edward taught himself to cook. “Paula cooked for 52 years, and one day I just told her she’d done enough work, and now it was my turn,” he told Ms. Vincent.
He became an accomplished and discerning chef, scouring New York’s boroughs for the perfect sheep’s milk cheese or the freshest baby squid for the dinners he lovingly prepared for Paula and their friends. When Paula died, Edward slipped deep into grief, withdrawing from friends and from the cooking he loved.
His friendship with Ms. Vincent helped him find his way back to life. Each chapter of “Dinner with Edward” begins with a menu from one of their meals together—“grilled sirloin steak, sauce Bourguignonne, new potatoes, chocolate soufflé, malbec.”
During one visit, Edward showed Ms. Vincent his cherished scrapbooks, filled with letters, cards, poems, theater programs—essentially a full record of his life with Paula. “He told me, ‘You know, I’ve been collecting these my whole life, and what’s going to happen to them after I go? Who’s going to care about them?’
“I said, ‘I’m going to care about them. I think you’ve had a great life.’ And I think it was then that I decided I would write something about him. He was such a unique person, and I wanted to pay tribute to that. He would encounter ordinary people in these very mundane circumstances, and he always found out the most interesting things about them.”
After she finished the manuscript, Ms. Vincent sent a copy to Edward. “He sent a letter back, asking, ‘Who’s going to read this? I’m not a celebrity, you’re not a celebrity.’ But he was very grateful that somebody took his stories and wrote them down.”
One of most difficult chapters in her journey was sharing the manuscript with her friend Valerie, Edward’s daughter. “I gave her the manuscript about a year ago to read, and her comment was, ‘Oh my God, you’ve taken all these family stories.’ But in the end it made our friendship stronger. Both of his daughters read the book when he was sick, and it was very difficult for them. But now they’re really behind it and so happy to have it.”
“They had this memorial service for him, and all of these people, a lot of neighbors and friends, got up and talked about their dinners with Edward. People couldn’t stop talking about this elderly man who would go all around Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens to get just the right ingredients.
“I’ve been so surprised by people’s reactions. I’ve met so many people who have had an Edward in their own lives. It’s a simple story, a story about a friendship. It wasn’t that we talked about such personal things, but we would talk about the meaning of things. He was all self-taught, but he had a strong view on the meaning of life and love and cooking: ‘If you’re going to do it, you have to do it right.’”
“Dinner with Edward” was chosen by BookPage as its top pick for nonfiction for June, and film rights have been optioned by movie producer Donald Rosenfeld and his producing partner Andreas Roald.
Books & Books in Westhampton Beach will provide copies of “Dinner with Edward” for purchase after the reading, and Ms. Vincent will sign the books.
on Jun 9, 2016