Lifestyle
In 'Fire Exit,' a father grapples with connection and the meaning of belonging
Tin House Books
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Tin House Books
There is a strange kind of novel that, more than a central plot, revolves around life itself. These novels are hard to pull off because they often deal with ineffable feelings — loneliness, love, guilt, grief, heritage, family — as well as everyday events presented under a new light.
Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit is one of these rare novels, and it works wonderfully well. At once a touching narrative about family and a gritty story about alcoholism, dementia, and longing, Fire Exit is a novel in which past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man’s life — while it also entertains what that life could have been.
Charles Lamosway is always looking across the river that divides Maine’s Penobscot reservation. On the bank across from the small house he built with his stepfather lives Elizabeth, the mother of Charles’ daughter Mary, with whom he doesn’t have contact. No one in the reservation knows about this, but the lack of contact has done nothing to mitigate Charles’ attention or the love he has for Mary. But now Charles hasn’t seen Elizabeth in weeks, and he’s worried.
Charles has enough going on — he’s struggling to take care of his mother Louise, whose dementia is getting worse, and he’s also trying to care of his alcoholic friend Bobby. But worrying about Elizabeth and Mary is constantly making him think about the past: his time as an alcoholic and the damage he did to himself and others during that time, the death of his beloved stepfather in a hunting accident with a moose and the ensuing guilt that has haunted him for years, and the way he has always been in the reservation but also an outsider. Even more than all those, Charles is haunted by questions about his daughter, and he’s no longer sure that keeping everything a secret is the best thing to do.
Fire Exit is a novel about many things. Right at the surface are three big elements. The first is Charles and the relationship he has always craved, but has never had, with his daughter. He tried to talk to her once when she was a toddler. It was fast and it didn’t end well. He kept the stuffed elephant he tried to give her for years, and eventually gave it to his mother hoping that having something to take care of would help with her dementia.
The second element is belonging. Charles has always been an outsider: “My mother and I were not Penobscot.” But he has always felt connected to the reservation and its people, and he knows that place or having two parents who are Native isn’t what makes or breaks an identity: “To think that the reservation is what makes an Indian an Indian is to massacre all over again the Natives who do not populate it.” There are many indigenous people who don’t live on reservations, and it’s great to see fiction that deals with life in a reservation give those indigenous people the recognition they deserve.
Lastly, this is a novel about familial drama that explores how the death of Charles’ stepfather fractured his relationship with his mother and how staying away from Mary didn’t make him forget he had a daughter.
Right underneath those three elements are many more — alcoholism, the way loneliness can shape a life, the need to escape, how not accepting homosexuality can destroy a childhood, and more. Talty weaves all these things together into a poignant tapestry that feels unique while dealing with universal topics. In less capable hands, this novel could have been a mess, but Talty’s voice is always clear and direct, and that makes the story flow.
Some writers speak about writing while not speaking about writing, and Talty does that beautifully in this novel. “Maybe all we are is creation’s translators,” thinks Charles early in the novel, “putting things like granite or oak or elephant or corn in a language they want to be put in, to give them bodies made of sound so they’re measurable.” Fire Exit is about being and not being, about messing up and dealing with the ghosts of the past. None of those things are measurable, but the author finds a way to take measure with his words, and that makes this a remarkable narrative.
“We can complicate things, offer explanations that are as grand as sculpted marble, but sometimes simplicity is best and truest.” This line from the novel describes what Talty’s prose accomplishes in Fire Exit. This is a story about very complicated things that is very easy to read. That beautiful simplicity is no easy task, and the fact that Talty pulled it off in his debut novel undoubtedly backs the statement he made with his superb short story collection, Night of the Living Rez: Talty is an outstanding new voice with a lot to say.
Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @Gabino_Iglesias.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
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NPR
On-air challenge
Today’s theme is “hot.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase in which the first word starts HO- and the second word starts with T-.
Ex. Rowdy bar with country music, in slang –> HONKY TONK
1. Guided walkthrough of a property
2. Any member of the N.H.L.
3. Lone Star State metropolis that’s the fourth-largest city in the U.S.
4. Like an animal with its four legs bound (hyph.)
5. Instruction manual (hyph.)
6. A little pompous and arrogant, informally (hyph.)
7. Punny greeting from a magician
8. Someone who steals animals from a stable
9. Congestion that drivers encounter around July 4th, say
10. Acquisition of a company against its will.
11. Exclamation for “wow!” on TV’s “Batman”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Take the name of a nocturnal creature, in two words. The first word is a spooky sound. Move the last letter of the first word to the start of the second word and you’ll get another spooky, nocturnal sound. What is the creature and what are the sounds?
Answer: Screech owl –> howl
Winner
Dan Sadoff of St. Paul, Minnesota
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
If you’re struggling to use up leftovers like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, turn the assignment into a creative exercise, says chef Margaret Li. It’ll make the cooking process more fun and less guilt-driven.
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On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.
That included takeout that I didn’t find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn’t feel inspired to cook with it.
So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?
Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one.
“It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it,” she says.
There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED. In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.
The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy. Here are a few that I put to the test.
Find your “hero recipes”
Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. Li calls them “hero recipes.”
I tried one of these from her cookbook, called “Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry.” (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like “1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables” or “4 cups leafy greens.”
In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out. The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water. By the time I topped my bowl with chopped scallions, the dish looked like a gourmet meal, not an afterthought.
Other ideas: “You could put anything in a frittata, and it’ll be great,” says Tamar Adler, chef and author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.
Or, if you have day-old rice on hand, cook it alongside other ingredients to make fried rice. “Saute some aromatics — ginger, garlic, onion — in oil,” Adler says. Then add your rice and whatever leftover bits you have, like the rotisserie chicken and older produce I had in my fridge.
“Just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy, and then usually adding a squeeze of lemon,” Adler says.
Label your leftovers
Keep a permanent marker and painter’s tape in your kitchen to label and date your leftovers, Li says. “That is a classic chef’s method for knowing what something is and when it was made. That saves you the guessing game.”
Adler takes the concept a step further and labels her leftovers with their intended use. Leftover blueberries are labeled “muffins-to-be on Tuesday,” she says. “I really like doing that — assigning the destiny of the food.”
So after a night of Ethiopian takeout, when we ended up with an entire container of leftover injera, I followed Adler’s advice and thought about what it might become in the future.
I imagined scrambling the spongy, tangy bread with eggs, akin to scrambling matzo into matzo brei. “Injera for eggs,” I wrote on the container. Sure enough, their destiny was fulfilled the following morning.
Li keeps a dedicated bag in her freezer just for scraps from which to make chicken or vegetable stock. That bag houses carrot peels, the ends of onions, extra garlic cloves and chicken bones.
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Don’t forget your odds and ends
Adler encouraged me to never, ever throw away the stems of herbs. Stems don’t get as much glory as tender, pretty leaves, but they still have the same herby taste.
“I’m going to chop these herbs up or stick them in a blender with a clove of garlic,” she says. Then add olive oil. “And then it’s just gonna be my base sauce for everything.”
So I foraged a few varieties of half-cut herbs from my refrigerator drawers, most of them sad looking and unidentifiable.
I threw out the stems that had turned brown and gooey and put the rest in a blender. I added garlic on Adler’s instructions, nuts and kale for bulk, and plenty of olive oil and salt. Then, on a whim, I added a splash of olive juice for brightness.
The result was somewhere between a pesto and a chimichurri, and it elevated that night’s otherwise routine dinner. And Adler was right: Once the stems were blended, it tasted exactly the same as the leaves. (The same idea applies for broccoli stems in a cheesy broccoli soup, Li says.)
Li likes to keep her odds and ends organized with an “Eat Me First” box in her fridge. That’s where she keeps half-used lemons, leftover coconut milk or produce that’s starting to get wrinkly. “You kind of have an idea for, OK, here’s where you look first,” she says.
Don’t strive for perfection
Cooking these meals did feel like a game, as Li had suggested. It brought me unexpected joy to use up as many existing ingredients as possible — to the point where I often spent much longer in the kitchen because I kept thinking of new ideas: If I turn these wrinkly sweet potatoes into a soup, then I can caramelize this half-cut onion for a topping, and then I can use the leftover soup as a sauce tomorrow …
Did I cook more often, though? Probably not. My cooking energy burned brighter but fizzled out after a few nights, at which point I ordered takeout.
So I was glad to hear Li’s take: If you’re too hard on yourself, you’re not going to enjoy it at all. “ I try not to be too obsessive about eating absolutely everything,” she says. If my takeout was truly terrible, I’m allowed to toss it or, better yet, compost it.
If you really want to use up everything, you can always chuck ingredients into the freezer. Li has dedicated freezer bags for different dishes, like vegetable scraps for soups or fruit discards for smoothies. (She labels them, of course.)
And how does that smoothie taste? It’s “delicious,” she says, “even if it’s made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past,” she says.
Recipe: Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry
Excerpted from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright ©2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sauce
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon black vinegar, rice vinegar, lime juice, or other acid
- 1 tablespoon neutral oil, or enough to lightly coat the bottom of your wok or skillet
- 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced or minced, or more as desired
- ½-inch piece fresh ginger, minced or grated (optional)
- Pinch chili flakes or 1 small chile pepper, diced (optional)
- 4 cups leafy greens, torn into bite-size pieces, or 1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables, cut into chunks
- Kosher salt
Stir the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl and set by the stove.
Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat until just smoking, then add the neutral oil and tilt to coat the bottom of the pan.
Add the garlic, ginger (if using), and chili flakes (if using) and stir-fry for 10 seconds. Add the greens and/or vegetables, in stages as necessary, and toss in the garlicky oil, then add the sauce and cook to your liking, stirring frequently.
Vegetable chunks may need 4 to 7 minutes — if you want to speed up the process, cover the pot so the vegetables steam for a minute or two, then uncover and toss again. Sturdy greens may need 3 to 5 minutes to get tender (we like to let them sit for a bit and char for extra texture).
Lighter leaves will need less than a minute to wilt down. Stir in a spoonful of any additional sauce you like, season with salt to taste, then sprinkle with your favorite garnishes and a generous drizzle of sesame oil.
A sprinkle of crunch is a great way to finish a stir-fry. Our favorites include crushed cashews or peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, thinly sliced scallions, and fried onions or shallots.
Your turn: What are your favorite go-to leftover recipes?
We’d love to hear from you! Share your recipe with us at lifekit@npr.org with your full name. We may publish it on NPR.org.
The story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks perform onstage during day two of the Boston Calling Music Festival at Boston City Hall Plaza on September 26, 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)
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This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Stephen Malkmus and panelists Emmy Blotnick, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, and Gianmarco Soresi. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
Who’s Alzo This Time
Pool Problems; Don’t Forget to Hydrate; The Rise of Hot Podium Guy
Panel Questions
TSA Gets A Dressing Down
Bluff The Listener
Our panelists tell three stories about game shows in the news, only one of which is true.
Not My Job: Stephen Malmus, lead singer and guitarist for Pavement, answers our questions about road construction
Indie rock legend and founder of Pavement, Stephen Malkmus, joins us to play a game called, “Pavement repairs are underway!” Three questions about road construction.
Panel Questions
The Battle Over A Home Sale; The Best Three Words To Get Over A Loss and Out of a Meeting?; A New Job in the Dating World
Limericks
Alzo Slade reads three news-related limericks: Good News For Gym Slobs; Cruisin’ For A Tattooin’; Fringe Food Benefits
Lightning Fill In The Blank
All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else
Predictions
Our panelists predict what will find after the reflecting pool is emptied
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