Before picking up “Search,” Michelle Huneven’s new novel, I would have thought its plot — a church search committee’s efforts to find a new minister — would be about as interesting as watching paint dry. How wrong I would have been. From the title page, when the reader learns that “Search” is actually a novel written as a memoir – with recipes – it’s clear that this book will be full of surprises.
Dana Louise Potowski, the novel’s fictional protagonist, is a full-time food writer and restaurant critic who is in search of an idea for her next literary project. When two members of the Arroyo Universalist Unitarian Community Church, to which she belongs (though she had not been in attendance for several Sundays), recruit Potowski to be a part of the search committee they were forming, a light bulb goes on in her head.
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The Altadena-based Huneven writes without pretension or unnecessary headiness. Her work flows with grace and skill as she mines the mundane, the humdrum, the minutia of tense, too-long meetings with people who aren’t able to come to consensus or who have often-unrealistic expectations of others and themselves. She does this with humor, small-scale culture wars and identity politics, lots of soul-searching, and, as promised, recipes.
I interviewed Michelle Huneven over Zoom and was given a glimpse into the author, her process, and her relationship to the characters she has created.
Q. What inspired you to write this book?
A couple of things inspired me. One was, I was actually on a search committee, but it was a little search committee, and it was just for an assistant minister. In the application, called a ministerial record, there were not only the basic questions or information on a bio or a CV like “experience” or “education”; there were these narrative questions like, “What was a peak experience in your ministry?” or “What was a mistake you made and what did you do about it?” And the answers to these were little stories and so my little novelist nerve began to quiver.
Q. Why this particular structure — a memoir within a novel?
I wanted Dana, my main character, my protagonist — she’s like me, I’ll admit that, but she’s also unlike me. One of the things she does is that she writes these memoirs with recipes. I always sort of wanted to write one, so I decided that this could be a memoir with recipes. In the nonfiction world, there was a spate — and Dana talks about that — where people were writing projects that were a year long. You know, a year of reading only the Bible; a year of having sex every day. There was a whole spate of those. So, she hears that the search committee is a year and she thinks, “that’s a perfect structure” and then it has this internal structure of things that have to be done at certain times. It just appeared to her as a perfect year-long memoir.
Q. You’ve said before that we’re all involved in meetings and organizations that force us to work as a group.
When I started writing this book, I heard so many stories immediately. You know like, “I was on a committee to select a dean and I pushed for this one woman…and we got her and she’s been a total disaster.” Or just the opposite, “I was on a committee for an archdeacon and my candidate wasn’t selected but I have to admit that the one who was has been the right person.” It’s fallible. Human beings are fallible. We’re not really good at knowing what we want. That’s why advertising is so effective.
Q. Are you a Unitarian Universalist?
I am. My mother was Jewish, which technically makes me Jewish; my father was pretty much of an atheist, he came from a Protestant background, but we identified with the Unitarian Universalists and when we went to church, we went to a UU church. We went to Throop Church here in Pasadena while growing up. Later on, as an adult, I started going to a neighborhood church in Altadena as a UU, so I have actually been a lifelong Unitarian Universalist. And when I went to seminary, I also went as a UU. Even though Claremont School of Theology is affiliated with the Methodists, there were 31 different denominations represented in my class, including an African denomination of one.
Q. Everybody seems to be searching for something in this book. I was reminded of the Viktor Frankl quote: “Once man’s search for the meaning of life is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.” Do you believe searching is intrinsic to the human condition?
I love that Viktor Frankl quote, but it intimates that there’s an end point where we stop searching. I think our searches change over time. One of the things that the main character, Dana, is going through is she’s searching for more connection to her church or maybe a new community and always for new friends. When she first came to the church, her mother had just died and she was grieving her mother and she has come to this place where she can sit and weep and feed her soul. What she finds are a bunch of older women who take her in and give her approval and kind of give her the finishing touches to push her into adulthood… I believe in what’s called Process Theology, that we are all part of this ongoing process and that God is part of that process, too, and we are this ever-churning process of becoming, so we are all searching and we are all becoming.
Q. All of your work is set in Southern California. Why?
Because it is so, so rich and because it is an amazing landscape and because it is what I know. You know, this is my land, this is my region. I don’t mind being a regional writer. Altadena contains multitudes. I grew up in Altadena. I was born in Altadena, on the lip of JPL [Jet Propulsion Lab] and I live a mile exactly from where I grew up. I love that it’s familiar to me. Right outside of my office window, there’s an orange tree and when I get hungry, I eat an orange. And there are Eucalyptus trees. It smells like my childhood.
Q. What is the role or importance of food in this novel?
In the ’90s, I won a James Beard award for “feature writing with recipes,” and that always cracked me up because on the one hand, it seemed a diminishment — oh, it’s feature writing but it has recipes so how serious can it be — on the other hand, it seemed like a little bonus, like a little gift — oh, here’s a feature and here are some recipes; and I liked playing with that.
The role that the food plays in the book itself is that from the start the search committee is charged with eating meals together and drinking wine, a lot of wine. And there’s a reason for that, which is that when people are brought around a table, community forms or something like family forms, for good and for ill. People get comfortable with each other and they begin to speak the truth to each other, or their truth, to one another, and I think that’s really important.