How Eating Brownies Helped Me Become a Writer

Who knew there was such a thing as marijuana brownies in 1975?

I was at a party, and a cute, long-haired boy from my statistics class offered a tray of freshly baked brownies with crispy edges and soft, gooey filling. I took two, which might have been too much of a good thing even had those brownies not been filled with pot.

I didn’t know about Alice B. Toklas until long afterwards. It was 1975, and I should have been more careful, but I hadn’t yet smoked or tasted marijuana back then.

This was two decades after Gertrude Stein’s partner published the memoir/cookbook that included her famous “hash brownies.” Even if I’d found the book at our local library, I wouldn’t have seen the recipe because the American publisher deleted it to protect our delicate American sensibilities! I knew nothing about pot or its culinary possibilities.

I spent weeks turning the incident into a story about a girl who gets her hands on a chewy tray of velvety chocolate. Unlike me, Eloise, as I named her, didn’t have to get her mom’s car back by eleven and didn’t jump up to leave the party just before the tall, long-haired boy who gave her the brownies was about to lock the bedroom door. Eloise, unlike me, did not get away.

In the story that later morphed into my first very-convoluted manuscript (the one I subsequently threw away), the long-haired boy turned out to be nothing like Eloise first thought. Their statistics class at the university we used to call “Circle,” had just ended. It’s now a full university with dorms and event centers, but back then it was all concrete and surrounded by gangs roaming the streets, occasionally bursting out into a sort of Jets v Sharks conflagration that did not involve dancing.

In my story, the boy locks the bedroom door and morphs into the kind of person who would behave inappropriately with a young girl, doing something that until then, both Eloise and I had only heard about in health class. They’d shown us movies about what boys want from girls, and it all seemed farfetched to Eloise and me at seventeen.

Eloise barely gets herself home, and all kinds of bad things (which are probably tame for today’s standards but seemed like the height of wickedness to me back then) happen to her before she turns her life around several years later. At this point, we’re probably about three hundred pages into the never-going-to-succeed book that I thought I was writing.

The boy (I’m pretty sure that I named him Andrew) does terrible things to more people and doesn’t stop until he loses everything and everyone he ever cared about. Then he does a 12-step program to find his way back, and one of the steps is apologizing to the people he hurt in the past.

He seeks out Eloise, who got pregnant (remember the locked bedroom door?), turned to drugs, busked on the street, sold her body to make ends meet, and finally managed to become a famous singer (yes, that was one of my dreams). In my manuscript, I glossed over her abortion in a sentence or two because I didn’t know enough about it to say anything coherent.

Fast forward twenty years, and Eloise is in a loving relationship with a man who does the dishes and goes shopping for shoes with her (my idea of the dream husband I was going to have). She has three adorable children and looks back on that night of brownie excess as the catalyst for her career. When Andrew suddenly reaches her in the late 1990s to apologize in a long apologetic letter sent to her parents’ address, she pretends that she doesn’t remember him. He’s devastated because he’s in a 12-step program and how can he apologize for something that she doesn’t acknowledge as having happened?

The manuscript was long and ridiculous, but it inspired me to try again. First, I threw that giant brick of paper out and started over with a completely new story that had nothing to do with laced brownies, parties, young women getting taken advantage of, or 12-step programs.

Many years later, I started writing a culinary mystery, and desserts again played a big role. The third one in the series, Charred: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery, was published in February 2023, and I’m working on a fourth.

I sometimes think of that night back in 1975 because after I left the party, managed to find my mom’s car, and started driving, I got terribly confused by the signs. Canal Street? Is it the Panama Canal, I wondered in a daze. Nope, I was still in Chicago, suddenly getting off the ramp to take a quick look in case we had a canal, but I couldn’t see any water at all.

Back on the expressway, I worried because I had to get home before curfew if I wanted to use the car again over the weekend, so I hit the pedal. Then I thought I better slow down. I oscillated between going fast and slow for miles, probably irritating everyone on the Kennedy Expressway. Sorry, fellow drivers.

It was all weird because I couldn’t see anything to the side. I’d lost my peripheral vision.

It’s a funny word, “peripheral,” and I repeated it a bunch of times until it made no sense. What if I was going blind? I started crying, which made everything even more blurry.

Luckily, I remembered that the perfect antidote to feeling blurry is to start singing. Show tunes work best. “I’ve got the horse right here, his name is Paul Revere, and there’s a guy who says if the weather’s clear…”

I got through some of Guys and Dolls, tapped into Oklahoma, tried to remember words from Pippin, which I’d just seen on Broadway, and ended with Fiddler on the Roof. I didn’t understand the loss of peripheral vision or the loopy sense that I’d stepped into a different time dimension, but I remember relief as I pulled into my parents’ driveway singing Far from the Home I Love.

It was just minutes from curfew, and I jumped into the shower because those brownies smelled like manure. I put on my nightgown and went to bed. At least, I thought to myself as I drifted off to sleep, I’ve finally got a story to tell.

But the thing I learned all those years ago was that one brownie would have been more than sufficient.

Many thanks to fellow author Kathleen Kaska (whose Sydney Lockhart mysteries are a lovely trip back to the 1950s) for publishing this essay on her website! G.P. Gottlieb is the author of Charred: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery (D.X. Varos Publishing 2023), the third in her culinary mystery series. She has interviewed nearly 200 authors as host for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. See more at gpgottlieb.com.