You know those helpful newspaper articles on what to cook tonight or this week or the ones about how to tackle a family issue.

Well, on this selected shorts, one story offers a year's worth of pasta and a little self-reflection,

and the other provides a generous helping of love served many ways.

Join me Meg Walitzer along with actors Hope Davis and Michael Imperiali.

And at the end of the show I visit with the members of a lively mother-daughter book club to talk about an Amy Bloom story.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction,

one short story at a time.

We're calling this episode a full plate.

And yes, we know that conjures up that person online in the dining room on the cruise ship

who just can't get enough of the crab leg buffet, or the well-meaning cook in the family

who doesn't believe you when you say no thank you to a third helping.

But a full plate also means abundance and that's how we're thinking about it on this show.

When is a meal not just a meal. When in the hands of good

writers it's also an emotional catalyst, a hitchcockian McGuffin that leads into the

real story and as Marcel Proust has taught us with his famous

Madeleine a gateway to the past. If you're going to fill your plate to

overflowing whether in art or in life what matters as much as quantity is, of course, quality. Those details, all

17 or 850 or 1 million of them, have to count. Otherwise, the person you're serving them to is just going to push the plate away.

On today's show, you'll hear two favorite stories from our archives that demonstrate how much

and how differently we can heap our plates. In one a man navigates an

existential crisis with help from his pasta pot. In the other a complex family

relationship defies convention and asks for a serving of emotional generosity.

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