“As the summer drew on, we became aware that we were living in a bubble, somehow protected from the disasters that seemed to be striking most parts of the world. Besides the unstoppable…

“Dearest Friends and Rellies, sorry it’s been so long since you last heard from me, but since the lockdown ended on May 14, exactly a month ago as I write this, I’ve had…

“Didi found me a small pension in Calenzana, a nearby village notorious for being a center of the Union Corse and the white slave trade. ‘How can you go there on your own,’…

“I also remember the tales of my mother-in-law, my first husband’s mother. Dora Lada, known to the family as Dodo, was born in 1900. She brought up her two children on her own,…

“Maroussi would be an idyll that lasted almost two decades. I would meet the rest of my neighbors, who included a quintet of wonderfully eccentric older ladies, Greek, English, and Maltese; an academician/professor…

“Then, I might stare at the laptop screen for a few minutes until I remember a phone call that must be made. Today—and this is five days after I started this piece—we have…

“The journey I’m about to describe took place a few years ago, but it could well have happened four or five decades ago. We seemed to travel back in time as we chugged…

“I’d been ferreting out recipes in the medieval inner town, founded by the Venetians in the 13th century and still full of atmosphere. Here, Latin emblems or Ottoman inscriptions crown massive wooden doors…

“The neighborhood around Boulevard Haussman was residential and stuffy, staid apartment houses with few shop windows to peer into. But before long I found myself in front of a façade masked with heavy…

“It all began on a tennis court in the late 1980s. I was co-editing a magazine for a Greek hotel chain and, since we were writing most of the articles ourselves under pseudonyms,…