During her shortened life, Laurie Colwin published five novels, three collections of short stories, and two cookbooks. The major themes of her novels and short stories are love, happiness, and privacy, treated primarily within the contexts of tightly knit family structures. Within these themes, however, she also explores motifs such as the loss of innocence, the relationship between memory and romantic longing, the conflict between order and disorder, the emotional rise and fall of couples from Edenic happiness into emotional wastelands, the necessity of constructing "fictions" within which life can be understood or endured, and finally, the search for metaphors that counteract the ravages of time through art, which permanently preserves experience by making it available to memory.

Laurie Colwin was born in New York City on 14 June 1944 and raised in Chicago and Philadelphia. Her father, Peter Barnett Colwin, was a fundraiser and director of the United Jewish...