Where the Heart Is

Laura Shaine Cunningham Brings It All Back Home

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, September 25, 2008

No one will ever go hungry at Laura Shaine Cunningham’s table. The author’s summer suppers are the stuff of local legend: cocktails and appetizers by the pool (reclaimed from a 12-foot-deep cistern, its construction hilariously described in her second memoir, A Place in the Country) and entrees on the porch. We’ve been writers group colleagues for over a decade, and while most of us settle for putting out bagels and coffee, a meeting at Cunningham’s house is a three-course affair.

The preternaturally energetic novelist/memoirist/playwright/New York Times columnist divides her time between city and country homes. Her eponymous place in the country is a former inn, tucked away in a quiet corner of Ulster County. A child’s treehouse, a miniature of the original down to its cream-colored paint and black shutters, sits in a maple near the porch, where a black cat sunbathes by a windowbox spilling petunias.

Cunningham makes her entrance in a cloche hat, a white linen jacket and skirt, and jaunty pink sandals. She gives off the warmth of a six-burner cookstove, with an infectious smile and occasional bursts of wild laughter. She’s prepared sole almondine and a Mediterranean tart of feta, heirloom tomatoes, and herbs—an elegant menu from a woman whose childhood meals, detailed in her first memoir, Sleeping Arrangements, included popcorn for breakfast and kosher beef hotdogs kept warm in a thermos.

Sleeping Arrangements has been continuously in print for 19 years, with a host of devoted fans. Their numbers are sure to swell this November, when Cunningham’s memoir takes center stage as the 2008 One Book, One New Paltz reading selection. It’s the first time the One Book committee, which includes representatives from SUNY New Paltz and the community, has picked a book by a local author; previous honorees include Mark Haddon, Edwidge Danticat, and Rudolfo A. Anaya. Committee member Susan Avery, former owner of Ariel Booksellers, says, “I have literally recommended this book to hundreds of people—women, men, girls, boys. There isn’t anyone who can’t find something to relate to and to love.” Planned events reflect this diversity: From November 16 to 23, New Paltz readers will explore Jewish themes, nontraditional families, elders and children, literature, cuisine, theater, and film (see below for details).

Cunningham calls the selection “an honor and a compliment. When I wrote the book, it was ‘One Book, One Apartment,’ so this is bigger than I dreamed. The idea of a whole community reading your book is heady, it’s thrilling. I’d even move to New Paltz, but I like it here.”

The road to her sun-splashed Victorian porch was long and unlikely. Sleeping Arrangements chronicles a nomadic city childhood, made romantic by a loving single mother who could look at the underside of a relative’s dining table, where she and her daughter squeezed in for the night, and convert its dangling tablecloth into a canopy bed. Rosie had an equally fanciful touch with her personal history, giving young “Lily” (Laura’s childhood nickname) a war hero father with his own fighting dog, a boxer named Butch.

“It was a red-white-and-blue story, told to the accompaniment of bugles,” Cunningham writes. “There was only one flaw: While we waited for my hero father to return from battle, this country was not at war.”