Reconsidering Happiness

Introduction by Nancy Krygowski

For years, I’ve used the phrase a thin layer of white chocolate to refer to Sherrie Flick’s perfectly detailed imagination, a gift that is central to her fiction.  The story goes that on a cold December morning, towards the end of an almost non-stop cross country trip with our then boyfriends, Sherrie and I drove a New England highway, raving about the cheesecake Sherrie’s boyfriend’s mom had served us the night before–its denseness, its not-too-sweet flavor, the buttery crust–when Sherrie mentioned the thin layer of white chocolate.

Huh?  The boys and I were puzzled because, well, it didn’t exist, except in Sherrie’s mind and taste buds.  But the way she talked about it made us wish it had.  It sounded divine, the extra touch that could make a really good cheesecake into something heavenly.

That thin layer of white chocolate is everywhere in Sherrie’s writing.  It’s in her ability to create the perfect—but perfectly strange—metaphor.  It’s in her ability to delve into her characters’ psyches so that you feel like you know these people (or, in some cases, sheep)—or you are these people.  It’s in her ability to evoke an era in such exacting detail that you’re living it again through the characters but also through your own memories.  It’s in her perfect, complex sentences. It’s subtle.  Delicious.  It’s something you want to savor.  Dig in.

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Reprinted from Reconsidering Happiness by Sherrie Flick by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.