RUMFORD — For the launch of her book “Falling,” Julie Cohen baked cupcakes and decorated the tops with colorful paper leaves.
And a short story on her website, “The Sweetest Part,” includes descriptions of flaky croissants, tartlets and macaroons.
She said many of her books and stories include food descriptions because her mother is a good baker.
“So, I think that food is really central to people’s lives and as a novelist, it has a lot of symbolic meaning,” she said. “It has more emotional resonance than just being food.”
When you write about it, it’s research when you eat it, she said.
In her book “Dear Thing,” the heroine bakes a cake “that sort of sums up the heroine’s feelings about everything in her life. The heroine is infertile and is also a very good baker; she’s involved in all these committees and all these things, and she always has to bake for them.”
The woman makes a chocolate fudge cake with espresso ganache and cries while she makes it because she’s miscarried many times. She knows that she can’t eat the cake because her infertility treatment doesn’t allow her to gain weight or have caffeine, Cohen said.
“She’s making this cake that she can’t touch and it sort of symbolizes all the things she can’t have in her life,” she said. “Food is really useful that way.”
Cohen grew up in Rumford and lived at the top of the hill on Franklin Street, within walking distance of the Rumford Public Library. During her childhood, she went to the library at least once a week and worked there from ages 16 to 18.
“I was their first teenage page,” she said. “It was a dream come true because it was just all the books, and I could see them when they came in. If I saw one, I wanted to just grab it and read it.”
She said that she always wanted to be a writer and started to write at the age of 11. Her first stories were mostly copies of other famous writers’ work, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea,” with some added romance. “All novelists start out by copying somebody else and then the more you write the more you get into your own style and what you like to do.”
Her first story was a 100-page novel about a girl wizard who goes to wizard school. She illustrated it and wrote it by hand. “This was before the internet,” she said.” Kids these days put it on a Wattpad. One-hundred pages — that was really, really long.”
During her school years, many Rumford natives inspired and encouraged her, such as teacher Ann Wood and her sister, writer Monica Wood, and Rich Kent, a former high school English teacher who is now a professor at the University of Maine College of Education and Human Development.
Cohen attended Brown University in Rhode Island, where she earned a summa cum laude degree in English. While there, she became a writing tutor and learned about the theory of writing, she said.
At Brown University. she drew a weekly cartoon for the school’s paper and is still the official cartoonist for the Sherlock Holmes Journal in the United Kingdom, where she now lives.
Aside from her novel writing and cartoon drawings, she teaches workshops for creative writing in the United Kingdom, France and the United States. She also is a guest lecturer and runs her own writing retreats for aspiring writers.
She started out as a romance writer for Harlequin but her career has changed.
“It’s more mainstream, stand-alone novels,” she said. “It’s not romance. My books are about love and they are not about romance — they are about different kinds of love.”
To motivate herself to write every day, she keeps a post-it note on her computer which says: “Write crap.” The note serves as a talisman and it frees her to write. “If I do something badly, that’s all right,” she said, because she knows that if she lets fear stop her she will never do anything.
Cohen lives in Berkshire, England, with her husband and son. When she comes back to Rumford every year to visit her family and friends, she brings a copy of her latest book to the Rumford Library.
She “can’t imagine a better pinnacle of an author’s career,” she said.
mhutchinson@sunmediagroup.net
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