A whole new person: the author of acclaimed restaurant memoir Stuffed returns with two fictional sleuths in to My Dearest Friends (Reviews, Jan. 1).(PW Talks to Patricia Volk)(Interview)

Your protagonists are two women, 62 and 59, on the trail of their late mutual friend's secret lover. Is this the first time you've written at length about characters at midlife?

It is. I had something I really, really wanted to say--I wanted to talk about the burden and responsibility of unwanted information. I've been getting it since I was three, and I've never known what to do with it. It's very hard to do nothing. And these two are my generation. We're the generation that thought that we could change things, and now that we're getting older, we're not going to accept the inherited ideas of aging. We're intolerant of being miserable. Nan and Alice have that …