She’s doing it to demand praise. She’s doing it to try to out-do her sister, who already wrote the same cookbook for their mother before she died and made a big fuss over HER at her 90th birthday. She’s doing it to try to make me pay homage to her and her imaginery traditions and great cooking that she never did. She’s doing it to shove in my sister’s faces that they never were a gracious hostess like her and they were huge disappointments to her. She’s doing it to rub in her children’s faces how things are not like they were in the old days and the whole family’s turned to shyt in her opinion.

See the many levels of dysfunction all in a cookbook?

She also just wants to commemorate herself and make herself the heroine of something. She has delusions she is writing something readers will love.

And, if she published it, readers probably would love it. And none of them would know how she was really being mean and selfish when she wrote of such family love. Looking back on generations of dysfunction that is glorified in retrospect.