when you want, where you want.
Author Andrew Lipstein Believes There Are Two Kinds of Bagel Shops
Photo-Illustration: Ryan Inzana
Andrew Lipstein lives a double life. In one, he’s a novelist whose books often reflect on contracts of power and the ways people fall prey to their own insecurities. In another, he’s a tech guy. That’s not to say that the two don’t inform each other: Lipstein’s second book, The Vegan, follows a partner at a hedge fund seeking moral salvation. His latest, Something Rotten, touches on similar themes, this time tracking a journalist couple as they escape to Denmark, eager to leave their fraught New York life behind. Lipstein’s wife, Mette, is Danish, so he’s familiar with the culture — as are his three toddlers. Liver pate, a Scandinavian staple, has become a fairly regular part of their diet. “It smells identical to their diapers, which is a very confusing thing for me,” he says. “I begged my wife to stop feeding it to them, but I understand it’s very healthy.”
Friday, January 17
Every morning for the past decade, I’ve basically had the same thing for breakfast: A Quest bar, or a similarly high-protein, high-fiber, low-carb substitute. These days I microwave it in a bowl with raisins until the raisins are just about burnt, eating the mixture hot while drinking a glass of cold coffee — whole milk, three Equals — kept in the fridge from yesterday’s fresh brew. While today’s batch drips I make ten scrambled eggs for my wife Mette and our three sons. I try to accommodate their preferences — they each take their eggs in slightly different ways. Earlier this year Mette gave me some hard but constructive feedback about how she likes them and I’m still working through it.
Something funny or devastating about parenthood is that basically every thought you have about it has been thought millions of times before. Whenever I find myself muttering, “So many mouths to feed,” I feel like I’m in a commercial for something dumb and obvious. But we do have so many fucking mouths to feed.
For this reason I often bring Tupperware to the office (I have to go in three days a week) and take home leftover lunch to serve the boys for dinner, alongside accoutrements we keep on hand. For our toddler, that’s usually havregryn, the Danish word for oatmeal. (Mette is Danish, and to make language as confusing as possible for our sons we just inject Danish nouns and verbs into otherwise English sentences.) The twins (fraternal one-year-olds) down roasted sweet potatoes like it’s their job — and in many ways it is. It’s fun to watch them eat the same food in their different, nonidentical ways, and project those distinctions onto their entire personalities. For this reason I suspect one will become a sort of rural do-gooder, while the other is destined to be a ruthless magnate — a captain of industry, even. We’ll see.
Mette and I are able to get a last-minute babysitter for a party, hosted by the filmmaking duo Niclas Larsson and Carla Luffe. Their apartment is beautiful, what a magazine writer might call “quite well-appointed.” They’re also incredibly gracious hosts, the type to refill your wine glass without you even noticing. The wine is outrageously good — creamy, with a high salinity. It’s only fitting I don’t know what it was and I’ll never find out. Niclas has procured 300 fresh oysters, which are shucked on the spot. Then, as if that weren’t enough, they order pizza and cover it with lox and caviar — truly depraved, Trump 2.0 shit. I’m a vegetarian so I mostly just cherry-pick from the olive medley and pull on my Juul, a little indulgence I allow myself for a few weeks every time I publish a book.
The crowd is mostly film and fashion folks, and I love talking to nearly all of them. I love parties — too much, I think. Mette does a good, sort of abstract impression of me meeting new people; it involves juggling.
Saturday, January 18
We’re both intensely hungover. After our normal breakfast routine — Quest bar, coffee, eggs — Mette meets a friend and takes our toddler, giving me time with the twins. When we just had one kid, we could each have some hours to ourselves on weekends. Now, taking the twins is the new time alone. They’re pretty easy, spending most of their waking hours in a playpen, where they explore objects with their fingers, clap at each other, and ruminate on what it means to be one but also two.
For lunch I have Greek yogurt, peanut butter, and various jams. This is what I eat when I’m trying to be healthy. I believe with all of my heart in a high-protein, low-carb diet. It’s a no-brainer. I think nutritionists don’t want you to know it’s that simple or else they’d be out of work.
It’s a nothing day. I don’t even leave the house. In the afternoon, Mette works out and I watch all three kids. This can be a lot of fun, but it also involves continually trying to convince our toddler not to make decisions that will lead to harm for himself or others. Before having kids I didn’t realize how many things there are that people are conditioned not to do. I’d just never imagined someone might want to throw their glasses on the floor or rip things off the wall or wear pants as a shirt. It’s a bit of a trope, but I do believe kids are geniuses and adult geniuses are just people who never lost that aspect of themselves.
For dinner we have a frozen pizza from Trader Joe’s. As usual, we adorn it with more cheese and serve it with a teacup full of minced garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. It is impossible for me to finish dinner without consuming mass quantities of something sweet, or, as I call it, “happy tum-tum time.” This is a tradition I inherited from my father, and I wish unto my boys and their boys to continue it forevermore.
For a while, I used to eat three bowls of frozen fruit every evening, but then I started having fainting spells in the middle of the night and worried it was nocturnal hypoglycemia (it was most certainly anxiety), so I stopped. Instead, I now have a handful of those nipple-shaped semi-sweet chocolate morsels, which I keep in my pocket and secretly eat while singing my toddler to sleep in the dark.
Two hours before I go to bed I have 0.5 mg of melatonin. (To get such a small dosage I have to buy children’s strength, then cut the gummies in half.) A few months ago, also for the sake of better sleep, I added L-theanine and horse-pill-size magnesium supplements to my evening regimen. I think they work. I like the idea of becoming a Supplements Guy because it dovetails nicely with my ever-growing skepticism of the medical industry.
Sunday, January 19
Quest bar for me. Eggs for the family.
In the morning I go for my weekly run, a two-hour jaunt. This is nice because it is the only thing I do for my mental health. We’re hosting friends, so on the way back I stop at Smith Street Bagels. There are two types of bagel places in Brooklyn: There are those that go out of their way to be rude to you, to hurry you, to try to dominate you, and there are those that want to be dominated, be your little doll, your plaything. Smith Street Bagels is unique because it sits in both camps.
Soon after I get back, our friends arrive: the actor Michael Cera, his wife Nadine, and their kids. It always feels like family time when we see them, the day passing in a haze of screaming children, interrupted conversation, and, occasionally, chess. Mike and I sneak in two games, though we’re relegated to my son’s drawing table, our legs bent like we are in a clown car. We drink the delicious white wine they brought and eat the bagels. I have, as always, an everything with walnut-raisin cream cheese, tomatoes, red onions, and capers.
Once they leave, we’re too tired and lazy to make dinner so we order delivery from Forma Pasta Factory in Fort Greene. It’s no frills and reasonably priced. They also serve a decent rendition of my second-favorite food (after General Tso’s tofu): eggplant parmigiana.
We clean up and put the kids to sleep. I have my handful of chocolate morsels and soon after take my melatonin, L-theanine, and magnesium like a good boy.
Monday, January 20
If you don’t know what my family and I have for breakfast by this point, well, I would find that disappointing.
I’m off work for MLK Day, so we go see my parents in New Jersey. We arrive at 1 p.m. and I’m starving. Before we even have the chance to take off our coats I’ve had many slices of dilled havarti, a couple of bagels, and a glass of grapefruit juice. Then I help usher the same food down the gullets of my children. The kids are good eaters — too good, actually. One of the twins manages to eat soil from a potted plant while no one is looking. (Worrying over the white bits in the dirt, I immediately call poison control. The conversation is oddly passive aggressive.)
Without the aid of a playpen, Mette and I are in a very unique hell. Every minute the twins seem to be on the verge of falling down the stairs, eating a foreign object, pressing their soft, delicate eyes into the sharp angles of my dad’s wheelchair. It’s a very nice time, but once we get in the car and everyone is locked in place by the miracle of seatbelts, I am very, very relieved.
For dinner we have our Forma leftovers along with those accrued from the week, a true hodgepodge of everything and anything that might get us all full enough to sleep. I myself am desperate for a good night’s rest, as Tuesday is my book’s launch event, and to this end I double my usual dose of melatonin.
Tuesday, January 21
Two doses was a mistake. It makes me wake up too early, which puts me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Even as congratulations from friends and strangers roll in, I can’t help but feel like everything is wrong, that my whole life is. Okay, maybe this is more than just the bad sleep. Publishing a book can feel like a lot of highs and lows — with the lows seeming to come whenever there isn’t a high.
Pub day itself is also funny. It’s a very special day, but it’s also a regular day where regular things happen. Even before I’ve wiped the sleep from my eyes, I’ve taken care of two blow-out diapers and cleaned up projectile vomit. I make an omelet for lunch that sucks. For dinner I eat pasta that kind of sucks, too.
After work I go to Fort Greene for my launch, at Greenlight Bookstore. Before the event, in the hopes that it will put me in the right headspace, I sit alone at Fritz, a German cocktail bar, sipping a drink named, unfortunately, the Schnickelfritz Swizzle. Listening to music in my headphones loud enough to drown out the bar’s, I take discreet puffs off my Juul. It’s my last night with her. I’m sad but also relieved. It’s no good thing, vaping.
At the bookstore I meet up with my conversational partner for the night, the novelist Daniel Lefferts. I’ve chosen Daniel because I enjoy talking with him and he’s very smart and confident. Hanging out with him in the back room, I start to feel nervous no one will come. The temperature is in the teens, a bunch of people have texted to say they’re sick — and also occasionally I think I’m a piece of shit and nothing good will come of anything. But when we walk out and I see the place is packed, with my mom and Mette in the front row — well, it’s a fantastic feeling. It’s like all of the day’s discontent melts away in a second. From then on I have a blast. I love reading from the book, I love talking with Daniel, I love answering questions from the audience. After all, what does any writer want, really, but a captive audience?
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