Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Morag Prunty is second-generation Irish. For two decades, she was a magazine editor in London and Dublin before leaving the media to write full-time. She lives on the west coast of Ireland with her husband and son. This is her fifth novel.

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Recipes for a Perfect Marriage

Hyperion Books

Chapter One

If the heat is not right to start with, the thickening process will never kick off. If it overboils, the jam becomes cloying and too thick. And sometimes you can have the best quality ingredients, apply just the right amount of heat, and, for some reason, the chemistry just never kicks in at all.

Sound familiar?

Dan is an ordinary guy. I don't mean that badly; being an ordinary guy is a good thing. What I really mean is that he is ordinary to me, and that is the problem.

Was I ever in love with him? I just don't know anymore. I made the ultimate declaration of love on our wedding day and somehow, in the hugeness of the gesture, I lost the clarity of what love was. Lost faith in the feeling that made me say "yes" to him in the first place.

Dan is great. Really. Just not for me.

I met him about a year and a half ago (if I loved him, I would be able to remember exactly when), although I guess, in a weird way, he had been knocking about on the edge of my life before then. He was the superintendent in my apartment building. "Don't sleep with your building super!" I hear you cry. Basic rule of being a single woman in Manhattan. If things don't work out and your water pipe bursts, who are you going to call? You stay friendly with the super, you flirt with him when you have to, and you tip him at Christmas. It is one relationship you don't mess with.

Unless you are so sad and desperate that you are afraid of turning into one of life's conspicuously lonely: the lingering huggers, the abandoned wives who book a lot of aromatherapy and have begun to actively crave a human touch.

The New York singles scene was tough.

There were the players: high maintenance, competitive husband-hunters: manicured, buffed, styled-up peak-performers. Then there were the rest of us just bumbling through the bars, forgetting to change out of our work shoes, borrowing a friend's lipstick as an afterthought, knowing that we were never going to meet a man if we didn't start making an effort. All of us were trying to look as if we didn't care, pretending that what really mattered to us was our friends. Maybe I'm cynical, but behind the glimmering cosmetics and the carefully poised insouciance, I always saw just a lot of brave faces. In the eyes of my closest girlfriends, I knew that, ultimately, I was just an emotional stand-in for the man they hadn't met yet. We were co-commentators in one another's lives, important to one another's emotional survival, but not integral. Men, marriage, children; as we buffed and polished and shone through our thirties, this life cycle was turning from a birthright to a dream.

I was bad at pretending.

Reared by a single mother, who swore it was by choice but was never entirely convincing, I held up my maternal grandparents as my role models in love. James, my grandfather, was the local schoolteacher in their small village and my grandmother Bernadine was a wonderful housekeeper and cook. I visited them for at least two summer months each year as a child and benefited from the warmth they so clearly felt toward me, and each other. Their marriage provided my childhood with a structured, traditional environment so different from the permissive, unpredictable upbringing I had with my bohemian artist mother, Niamh. The long summer days spent with my grandparents were taken up entirely with simple household chores. James tending to his vegetable garden; Bernadine baking bread and allowing me to dust her kitchen in flour. My grandparents were not physically demonstrative, but their love was obvious in all the little things they did for each other.

Bernadine and James were married for fifty years, and I remember as a teenager wondering at the miracle of love that would keep two people together for almost three of my lifetimes. My grandmother outlived my grandfather by eight years. The legacy they left in my heart was an ambition to find a man with whom to have a relationship like theirs. A romance so strong that it could last out half a century.

I always knew that I wanted to be married. I dated losers and bastards and nice-but-not-right guys, but marriage was too important a stake to compromise on. I knew that much. Once or twice I fell in love and had to pull myself back from the brink of a big mistake. Although, looking back now, I realize that in love it is always better to follow your heart than your head.

In the end I married one of the nice-but-not-right ones because my head told my heart that this could be my last chance. Biology and opportunity conspired and conned me into a feeling like love. With Dan, it was never "The Real Thing," and it needs to be. Fake love won't last the course. It's naive to believe you can make it otherwise by wishing it so.

I was having one of those indulgent afternoons that you can have when you live alone. And I don't mean the pampering "home spa" type that you see in the magazines. I mean the phone-off-the-hook, feeling-sorry-for-yourself kind. It didn't happen very often, but maybe once a year (often around my birthday), I'd take the day off work and stay in bed feeling miserable. It was nothing as serious as depression-just my twisted version of "me" time. Other girls did meditation and yoga. I took to my bed with a quart of Jack Daniel's and a six-pack of chocolate muffins. After twenty-four hours of watching off-peak TV, I would always emerge longing to see my friends and generally more content with my lot in life.

Being self-employed meant that sometimes I could indulge myself this way, without a boss to worry about. After a lucky break early on, I had worked my way up the food-magazine ladder: from kitchen assistant to recipe tester and food stylist's assistant to senior food writer and stylist. Somewhere around five years ago, I became tired with the politics of publishing: the suits and the schmoozing and the drill of having to go into an office every day. I took a chance that I would get freelance work and on my thirty-third birthday resigned my post as senior food editor at America's top food magazine. Within days I was approached by an agent and have since published three moderately successful cookbooks. I also design and test recipes for food manufacturers and enjoy a peculiar but nonetheless lucrative sideline as a kitchen design consultant for wealthy housewives. Tressa Nolan has always had a good reputation in the food industry, and there's even been some interest in me from the Food Network.

So I was the archetypal child of the baby-boomer generation. Brilliant career, brimful of confidence, loads to offer-love life an unmitigated disaster. My decision to hibernate the day I met Dan had been triggered by the tail end of a hurt perpetrated by yet another jerk. After fifteen years as a food writer, you would think I might have learned about "up-and-coming chefs and photographers syndrome." Those men whose delicate egos lead them to want to reveal any female colleague as flawed and weak. The only comfort to be had from being shit upon by male food "talent" was that there were so damn many of them they weren't as unique or individual as they believed. Oh-and very few of them had talent. Except at getting unmarried...