Author and journalist Amy Ettinger never expected to get carjacked in Milwaukee while reporting on frozen custard for her researched memoir about her lifetime love of ice cream. “When I set out to write my book, I imagined a lot of eating and talking,” she says. “That turned out to be the case, but I also had adventures that were both scary and thrilling.”
Ettinger initially planned to write a memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley in the 1980s as the youngest child in a dysfunctional family, a kid who felt like an outcast at school. When she realized she didn’t have enough material to fill a book, she changed her focus. “I noticed all these artisanal ice cream shops opening up,” she says. “I’d read Steve Almond’s Candyfreak – which is a blend of memoir and reporting – and I thought that I wanted to do something similar with ice cream and bring out the rich history of the dessert in this country.”
The result was Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America, a researched memoir that weaves the author’s childhood experiences with ice cream as emotional solace into anecdotes about ice cream truck turf wars and brutal competitions among artisan ice-cream makers and the history behind the country’s adoration of this frozen dessert.
Writer and professor Susan Shapiro has been writing book-length memoir for two decades. She’s the author, most co-written with Kenan Trebinčević, as well as . She tried for 10 years to write the latter book as a memoir about dealing with a bitter personal betrayal by a trusted advisor before realizing she needed to expand the book into an exploration of how to forgive someone who refuses to apologize. She ended up interviewing religious leaders for their views on forgiveness as well as victims of sexual assault and genocide, a Holocaust survivor, a mother who spent eight years apologizing to her son, and a man who lost his family to a drunk driver.
