As my father had made me his literary executor, I began reading the private notes he’d made over the years. And I discovered that my feelings about him began to change, now that there was no longer a chance to speak frankly to each other. Tad: First, I wrote the version you saw, which was focused on my effort to get to know my father better before he died–to understand who he was and, in so doing, to know myself a little better. Tell us about the manuscript’s evolution. It was quite different from what you just ended up publishing. (Yes, we all get stuck in the music of our youth.)ĭeb: I read a draft of this book in 2020. Sometimes-no, often-with “Tracks of My Tears” playing on a speaker in the background. Really all I remember about that year was sitting at their dinner table either laughing or crying. I just created the Friday morning breakfast club at Xando-RIP-on the Upper West Side, where this plan was hatched.) And then, in 2013, when my own marriage collapsed, Tad and Amanda picked me up off the floor and took me and my then seven-year-old third child into the Hesser/Friend fold. (Our friend Jennifer Steinhauer gets most of that credit. I take partial credit for helping set him up with his wife, Food52 CEO Amanda Hesser, back in 2000. Tad was my Google before Google the silent and selfless editor of every first draft of my books the person I have always turned to in times of sadness, confusion, and need. Even though he hates when I tell the story of our meeting, because he says it makes him sound like a pompous know-it-all (which, he also adds, he probably was), I have loved learning from him from that night forward, and a lifelong friendship had begun: one that has sustained me now for nearly four decades. After some small talk, Tad, realizing just how clueless I was-I’d insisted that “Tracks of My Tears” was sung by the Temptations, not Smokey Robinson-proceeded to delve into the entire arc of Motown history, artist by artist, song by song.
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